Comment four on the July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (July is volume 37, number 4).

Recently, I claimed that STHV had produced what I thought was one of the best issues in a while.

I will, in a series of posts over the next month or so, comment on each paper in the special edition on context with comments, criticisms, and occasional tangents.

Fourth paper is “Natures, Contexts, and Natural History” by Brenna.

Original Abstract:

How are contexts made and narrated? This article addresses the question of how to identify relevant contexts for understanding a work of natural history, in this case The First Natural History of Norway, published in two volumes in 1752 and 1753. In addition to offering a rich and complex description of Norwegian nature, this historical work serves as an important source for investigating the ways in which nature was perceived in the kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the middle of the eighteenth century. Nature was manifold, serving as a source of aesthetic pleasure, economic gain, religious reverence, and political power. It is argued that to understand the different natures presented in this book, we need to relate them to more than one context. But how do we determine the relevant contexts? The approach explored in this article is to read the book closely in search of the specific audiences that are addressed. By focusing on the ways audiences are addressed, it is argued, we can make better historical accounts of how natures are conceived and change in relation to different contexts.

Reaction and Commentary:

We get a great piece here about how context matters for historians and for creating historical  explanations, but not without challenging the commonsense ideas about context. In particular, the author states that the historians relationship with context results too easily “a circular logic” wherein the historian is searching for relevant contexts to write about (a precondition to doing history) but also as the outcome of their efforts to provide a historical explanation (thus, context is also the outcome of the contexts we hope to document). Of course, the only way out of this cardboard-box of theorizing is to avoid thinking of context as something “out there” and instead deal with multiplicity and enactment (both from Mol’s writing on the topics). Noting that ethnography is routinely used in ANT to understand these insights — multiplicity and enactment — she tests how they work for historical objects like the Pontoppidan book of Norway/Denmark natural history, which is the centerpiece of the article.

Brenna shows how there is no such thing as nature (as a singularity) in the text (and presummably, outside the text) and instead reveals nature to be plural; and thus, we learn about four natures invoked in the chapter, namely, the king’s nature (nature as asset), God’s nature (depicted as benevolent and orderly), the marketplace’s nature (where nature is bought and sold like so many curiosities to fill our cabinets with), and, finally, the learned community’s nature (as a source of general improvement of knowledge). The author goes onto to hint at the tensions and differences between the only occasionally overlapping contexts of nature (NOTE: for studies of multiplicity, contexts [in the plural] might be a nice way to see the “multiple contexts” of otherwise singular tems like “nature” or “the state” and so on). This part, however, was also somewhat difficult to fully appreciate because the tensions were not particularly tense, and it seemed as though a deeper, more thorough analysis could have been undertaken; however, making it through Pontoppidan’s book might have been analysis enough for one article.

The author concludes on an awesome parallel: trained to some extent in museum studies, Brenna shows us why our historical accounts of the past cannot be similar to a “period room” common to many historical museum collections. A period room tries to typify a particular period of time and pack it into a coherent room for onlookers to observe. As Brenna notes, this is occasionally good practice for the purposes of teaching, the coherent context defies what we now know about the multiplicity of times/contexts. Even if the cost is providing what appear to be less than coherent protrayals of history, we must not write our accounts like period rooms (which also hints that we should not make our period rooms like period rooms). In the final lines, however, the author turns attention to power … and this is difficult to stomach. The claim is that the multiple contexts hint at power relations. From my position, while this may be true, it is hard to say that nature is multiple while then using such a loaded (and multiple) term as power without so much as a basic definition. While ANT served the author well with regard to seeing nature multiple, apparently a few readings about how power is a dirty word among ANTers (and heroically reductive) might have helped the closing lines.

Comment three on the July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (July is volume 37, number 4).

Recently, I claimed that STHV had produced what I thought was one of the best issues in a while.

I will, in a series of posts over the next month or so, comment on each paper in the special edition on context with comments, criticisms, and occasional tangents.

Third paper is “Context and Culling” by Law and Moser.

Original Abstract:

This article asks how contexts are made in science as well as in social science, and how the making of contexts relates to political agency and intervention. To explore these issues, it traces contexting for foot-and-mouth disease and the strategies used to control the epidemic in the United Kingdom in 2001. It argues that to depict the world is to assemble contexts and to hold them together in a mode that may be descriptive, explanatory, or predictive. In developing this argument, it explores how contexts are assembled in a series of different descriptive and explanatory narratives in epidemiology, policy, critical social science, and (feminist) social studies of science

Reaction and Commentary:

This is a good lesson piece in this new irreductive camp; however, some elements of this piece will madden readers. The piece is about the foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK during the early 2000s. Much of the empirical material comes from a government document about the early events and a retrospective account of why the epidemiological predictions were so far off the mark either before, after, or during the events.

The best part of the article will have to wait until the end this review (it is about how epidemiological modelling might need to account for context a bit more, and in new irreductive ways), but some basic points are still worth rehashing. First, the chapter takes for granted this insight: contexts don’t really exist because contexting is done (RE: active). As it happens, contexts are constructed, and they tend to be treated as (unnecessarily) coherent constructions when observed first-hand in the wild, or when crafted second-hand by sociologists or scholars in STS. To show evidence for this, Law and Moser provide a number of accounts (which seem to layer on one another nicely), but which are unfortunately called “contexts” (rather than accounts or explanation generation techniques). These accounts become “contexts”, I will grant them, in that they begin to populate the setting and describe the relationships between relevant actors and entities (keep in mind, this is foot and mouth disease among sheep). They begin with a generically objective account of how epidemiological modelling is imperfect and takes many forms, and then take to comparing the two forms that make their way into the case study. After that context, they layer another context (RE: account) onto it, namely, one that STSers will like: a critical account where political connections among leading scientists leads to a corruption of the policy implications of the otherwise scientific models, which results in a culling of many sheep that otherwise might have lived, but that seem to have fallen under the axe of political interests too powerful and broad to protect them. <lingering pause> Then the authors backpeddle a bit, showing how none of these accounts is sufficient, and find a critical examination of both accounts, similar to accounts by Singleton about policy, where we ask: was any policy towards the culling of sheep with foot and mouth disease ever really enacted in full? (thus, making any explanation quite difficult to support) … the concluding remarks suggest that any policy being enacted is incomplete, the policy itself was different in different locations and differently applied in similar/proximal locations … there was, in fact, no one policy to assess for effectiveness and instead a plexus or cacophony of variations on the recommendations were enacted. The policy was multiple; a differentiated singularity. This is quite important because it is as easy to make errors like this (RE: treat a policy as non-multiple) when telling Whiggish retrospective accounts as it is when trying to establish prospective accounts — and this applies to both scholars as well as those persons in the public that do this sort of contexting (or account-making). In the end, and here is the best part, Law and Moser suggest that this is one way to make epidemiological modelling even more effective; erase our bias for coherent accounts where policy adherence and contextual coherence are assumed.

One serious pick at the piece, though, must be the style of writing; without being too critical or traditional, the conversational tone, which had the cadence of a bright teacher talking down to a dull student, was difficult at times to stomach…

The BBC’c “Click” program has a quite watchable bit on the battle of map services that is increasingly gaining momentum.
The first couple of minutes of this six-minute segment stick to the basics of mapping and the provision of map and navigation services but the last minute or so turns to the Google vs. Apple competition discussed here earlier. More particularly, the clip offers a comparative look at Apple’s map service embedded in iOS 6. It appears that Apple is betting primarily on 3D mapping and crowdsourcing while Google is systematically expanding both its ground-based and airborne forces.
Furthermore, the segment reminds us that Microsoft is also in this market via “bing”. We will see what happens later this year with the release Windows 8 and an expanding fleet of Microsoft-powered mobile devices. It is already hard to imagine the amount of capital these companies are committing to over- and out-map each other.
While Apple’s services are not yet live and Microsoft has yet to become competitive in the mobile market, the arms race in the map wars by now is truly on.

Comment two on the July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (July is volume 37, number 4).

Recently, I claimed that STHV had produced what I thought was one of the best issues in a while.

I will, in a series of posts over the next month or so, comment on each paper in the special edition on context with comments, criticisms, and occasional tangents.

Second paper is “Health Care Standards and the Politics of Singularities: Shifting In and Out of Context” by Moreira.

Original Abstract:

Context is a pivotal concept for social scientists in their attempt to weave singularities or universals to moral codes and political orders. However, in this, social scientists might be neglecting the ways in which individuals or groups who are excluded from the collective production of knowledge want to politicize their concerns also by claiming their uniqueness and singularity. In this article, drawing on the public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) and on the work of pioneering sociologist Helen McGill Hughes on “human interest stories,” the author argues that the “politics of singularities” can be articulated in two related ways within technical controversies. First, it expresses the unraveling of sociotechnical ties caused by institutional failure to take concerns into account. Second, it expresses the concrete uniqueness of persons caught by standardized, “universal” and impersonal implements and/or policies. Both these effects are underpinned by resourcing to allegorical expression, a literary form that while fostering political imagination in technological democracies might weaken Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) ambitions to influence decision making.

Reaction and Commentary:

This is an exceptional paper, but the abstract is a bit misleading, as much of it makes the clearest sense only after you’ve already read the article in its entirity. I’ll help to decode a bit. The real key to appreciating this paper is that it does not have as much to do with context or the irreductionist approach to context so much so as it is a case-in-point about how the “politics of singularity” operates (and, it might be argued, within the broader context of Big Science, in particular, in the pharmaceutical industry and, in this case, access to experimental dementia drugs in the UK).

The “politics of singularity” works like this. Big Science decontextualizes knowledge from its origins, which is a common story that some of us know from experience: considerable effort is made on the part of scientists to disentangle “data” from their messy origins so that they appear clean and universally applicable later on (or elsewhere). The goal, then, is to uncover where and how decontextualization attempts occur. In a Garfinkelian move, the author shows how decontexutalizaiton fails to decontextualize. So, what happens, then, when this model is challenged by outsiders (i.e., non-scientists), what do they use to challenge it, and why might it work? All three of the answers blend “singularities” with “politics”.

What do non-scientists use to challenge scientists conducting large-scale clinical trials? The author draws-up (and shows excellent evidence for this) a model wherein we come to see clinical trials as charateristically “generalizing” and “conclusive” (which are two things, of course, that map onto basic tenants of science quite well). When clinical trials are challenged, citizen non-scientists tend to emphasize just the opposite, their “pleas” (or “human interest stories” RE: Helen McGill Hughes) are “individuating” and “emergent”. Consider their contents, respectively. Scientific accounts of dimentia record verified tests of cognitive scores or memory evaluations, which when combined from many patients over time aids in creating generalized and conclusive knowledge about an intervention for dimentia. In contrast, personal accounts (pleas or “human interest stories”) operate according to an alternative dynamic. They emphasize dimentia as a lived experience at home where loved ones report whether or not the family member (RE: patient) is doing well and is feeling comfortable, which is drawn-up against backdrop of the home where “all this is really happening right now” with the implicit message that some sort of intervention could/should be taken.

Why might it work? According Moreira, individuating pleas have a curious political consequence. While we may assume, and plenty of sociological research about social movements suggests precisely this, that it is through large numbers of people banding together that we should expect politically-based change to, in this case, transform scientific trials. However, we do not see that in the UK dimentia controversy. Instead, the controversy is populated by “human interest stories” (RE: Helen McGill Hughes and the Chicago School analysis of “news”). These highly-individualistic portrayals of human life have a surprisingly hidden-in-plain-sight consequence: we related to them, despite their specificity, and this is a result of their un-fixity (or the quality that they are happening right now and it is not too late to do something about them).

What happens when this model is challenged by outsiders? Moriera encapsulates the answer winningly:

… the politics of singularities works in a dynamic relationship with the politics of generalization. Persons or groups locked out of the collective production of evidence capture the public imagination by shifting the frame of reference. The political imagination of the case is the delicate effect of the displacement that gathers in tension “the most extensive generalization” and “the most precise individuality.” (p.324-5).

The key being to bring the general and singular in tension, and the author means this not only hypothetically, but also in terms of a recipe for citizens that want to challenge “larger issues”. This notion of “bringing into tension” or (more actively) “gathering tension” seems like a fruitful technique for citizens and sensitizing process for scholars to keep in their analytical tool belts.

Comment one on the July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (July is volume 37, number 4).

Recently, I claimed that STHV had produced what I thought was one of the best issues in a while.

I will, in a series of posts over the next month or so, comment on each paper in the special edition on context with comments, criticisms, and occasional tangents.

First paper is “Experiments in Context and Contexting” by Asdal and Moser.

Original Abstract:

What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting.

Reaction and Commentary:

The scope of this opening piece is like any introduction to the the topic, as one would expect in an edited book or special edition. Typically, and this is no exception, it is at once not broad enough or deep enough to adequately do this, but does a fine job of setting up the relevant lines of research, which are developed in papers afterward.

Still, context is not really defined (in the old fashioned, positivistic sense), even though the abstract sort of promises something of a definition. Instead, a bit of a dance is initiated. Context is raised as a hopeless sociological concept, which has traditionally been used to explain all manner of relevant issues for sociologists such as group-level human behavior, social trends, and the like. However, this traditionalist vision of context is challenged by a traditional vision of context, but this time from Science and Technology Studies, namely, the irreductivist camp otherwise commonly known as actor-network theory. From the vantage point of ANT, we can be critical of the reductive potential of “context” (and many other constructs that aid in sociological explanation generation). We see that, while context is useful for sociologists, it is also something we cannot see, that is, we cannot observe it directly; however, so reified in sociological circles, context is something you feel like you might be able to snap a picture of!

The definition of context, then, is exchanged for a ‘balance’ (like in a ledger, but for theory): the authors write:

We suggest  a series of moves [read: assumptions and rules of thumb] that may keep the irreductionist program alive while at the same time acknowledging that context is something we cannot escape (p. 293).

This is an insight drawn largely from Donna Haraway’s commentary on what to do about ‘nature’; a notion that is hopelessly troubled, but something that we nevertheless cannot do away with completely. In this way, they suggest ‘context’ is a similar sort of concept.

Here is where a missed step took place. Context is not a concept (in the singular). Instead, context triggers the same sorts of issues that ‘nature’ does, and ‘the body’, ‘the economy’, or ‘the state’ do … they are ‘differentiated singularities’ (to use a phrase from the special issue) or, to use a phrase I am more familiar with, they are multiple. In this case, hence, my insistence that ‘context’ must strike a balance (of sorts) on a ledger for theory; balancing the traditional ways of using the term with new ways for understanding both the same term and a new version of it. The trick, then, of course, is to determine what links them together or when one version/face of context appears rather than another.

As a closing comment and insight, one of the reasons that context can balance so many seemingly incommensurate definitions is because of its centrality to the social sciences. The upshot: do away with context (context dependence, cultural context, organizational field or environment, and so on) and much of the conceptual infrastructure supporting sociological analysis and explanation generation techniques goes with it. One might say that you cannot have sociology without it. Jens Bartelson once wrote a terrific book, good for students (if read slowly) and advanced colleagues (still, take your time), about ‘the state’ as a multiple concept, which he studies both historically and conceptually as it was born in political philosophy and then as the term was migrated to political science in The Critique of the State. One insight from the book: the state cannot be defined, but instead balances sets of abstractions about itself, sometimes abstractions so contradictory that they appear impossibly incommensurate; however, such (multiple) concepts as the state or the law become the fodder that disciplines are made of, so close to the heart of the discipline as they are buried.

In the New York Times today (August 1, 2012), a headline reads:”2nd Day of Power Failures Cripples Wide Swath of India“.  Key lines read:

On Tuesday, India suffered the largest electrical blackout in history, affecting an area encompassing about 670 million people, or roughly 10 percent of the world’s population. Three of the country’s interconnected northern power grids collapsed for several hours, as blackouts extended almost 2,000 miles, from India’s eastern border with Myanmar to its western border with Pakistan.

… Blackout Tuesday — which came only a day after another major power failure — was an embarrassing reminder of the intractable problems still plaguing India: inadequate infrastructure

Interestingly, the story is backdropped in the newspaper article by invoking both the economy and the state. Regarding the economy, India is presented as many of us think of them, as a rising economic power although one that has experienced some significant stumbling along the way. The state was also criticized for their role in the matter:

India’s coalition government, battered for its stewardship of a wobbling economy, again found itself on the defensive, as top ministers could not definitively explain what had caused the grid failure or why it had happened on consecutive days.

When the train system, which is one of the busiest systems in the world, according to the article, started posting across-the-board delays and cancellations, one citizen remarked:

“Now my pocket is empty,” she said. “I am hungry. I am tired. The government is responsible.”

Incredibly, government officials agreed, citing abuses by … government officials, but, crucially, “other” government officials, here is how:

Surendra Rao, formerly India’s top electricity regulator, said the national grid had a sophisticated system of circuit breakers that should have prevented such a blackout. But he attributed this week’s problems to the bureaucrats who control the system, saying that civil servants are beholden to elected state leaders who demand that more power be diverted to their regions — even if doing so threatens the stability of the national grid.

In the end, and this is an interesting remark for later theorizing; the following comment suggests that infrastructure sits at the boundary or can be positioned at the boundary between international and domestic affairs:

“India needs to stop strutting on the world stage like it’s a great power,” Mr. Guha said, “and focus on its deep problems within.”

The July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values is out (July is volume 37, number 4).

The entire issue is devoted to what the special issue editors Asdal and Moser are calling “contexting”. The basic issue at work is the 1980s actor-network move towards an irreductive position for STS research. Calling into question the influences of something not immediately present (but ever present) and frustratingly beyond the actors that we cannot observe directly, Latour and others in ANT camp sought to establish a sensible alternative to things like “context”.This position was nicely laid out in The Pastuerization of France (in fact, the STHV special editors open the issue with the well-known line by Latour), but I prefer the exposition in Reassembling the Social, which I once reviewed with Jan-H. and even blogged about a bit.

The basic story goes like this: social scientists routinely invoke “other” actors such as context, which help to explain events, transformations, or people’s behavior. However, context, although ever-present, seemingly inescapable, and quiet powerful, cannot be observed directly. The same could go for all manner of “other” actors that influence us but cannot be observed directly such as “the economy”, “the law”, or “the state”, and other stuff like “time“.

The key insight being: these contexts do not exist, but actors do and there material and organizational consequences do too.

Contexting, however, helps to avoid the following trap: if we assume none of these “other” contextual factors exist, then great, for a moment we might feel smarter than a few other people, but this does not solve the basic problem we experience in our everyday lives, that is, that people say context matters all the time, social scientists publish on it, journalists tell us about the collapse of the global economy, and media pundits bemoan the inability of the state to govern its people and induce financial austerity. As Asdal and Moser (2012:302) put it: context is a troubled notion and straightforward contextualizing a problematic assumption, but still something we cannot escape”. Thus, the game is to figure out how context is “tied” to actors (and, of course, avoid treating context as something “out there”), moreover, context is decidedly plural (but not pluralist), which also riffs on the multiplicity notion in ANT (that Mol did so much to develop with The Body Multiple).

So, the July issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values is out (July is volume 37, number 4). Check it out. While it seems to be missing from each of the pieces in this special issue, no doubt, infrastructure might be one of those “missing masses” that ties actors to context…

About a week ago, I wrote about weather reporting infrastructure. In particular, I wrote about a New York Times piece that describes how a major player in the US weather reporting game is about to swallow-up a funky, underground weather reporting group through corporate merger.

One of the complaints about weather.com (the major player) was that too much non-weather was seeping into the reporting of weather, but that this new underground reporting group avoided that and, in some’s opinion, just reported “better” weather.

A colleague and friend, Eric Charles wrote back, in response:

Many many mergers are about infrastructure… I’m not sure how this one would be… unless you consider customers as infrastructure. I guess the website could count as well, but code is cheap, and I don’t know if a url gets the same status as a real storefront. Hmmmm… My very limited understanding is that the vast majority of weather predictors use the same nationally available data.

This does not seem like a merger of cell phone companies, in which the technologies, factories, delivery routes, stores, and especially cell phone towers are a major target of the acquisition.

I was not sure if other readers might have had the same response, so after thinking about it a while over the weekend, I posted this response, which is something of an answer back to Eric, but also seems to have turned into (inadvertently) a defense of an STS perspective on infrastructure.

Eric, I appreciate what you mean when you use the term “infrastructure” as something that must be either fairly physical or explicitly technological. For example, the cell phone tower or satellite become the exciting stuff that corporate mergers are made of.
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I tend to think of infrastructure as far more fluid and emphasize the notion that “infra” implies “support” so that infrastructure has more do to with understanding support structures that facilitate a process, for example, than just explicitly the material elements (like dams or highways). In fact, as someone committed to an STS perspective, seeing any technology as “just a technology” or, for example, weather data as “all the same” misses an important point (which, by the way, is one reason our blog is titled “installing (social) order”) because data are never just data, the facts are never just the facts, machines are never just alone and instead they are “used” or “interpreted” by social actors and are themselves deeply social entities owing much of their “seemingly physical” characteristics to human designs which are often deeply influenced by social effects. In fact, it is sometimes said that when a machine or fact appears most free from social influences (i.e., not tainted by personal values or what have you) that they are in fact the most social. Consider an academic paper that might try to say that it has found something new to report and that the report was published after anonymous peer review (implying that no outside social factors muddied the science), the paper is not full of persuasion or rhetorical techniques employed by politicians, and instead seems once-removed from such things … but it is at this point that it has never been more social, after all, the reference section of any good paper is like the invitation list of individuals enrolled into the paper! The insight: when things seem the least “socially influenced” it is often because they are the most social of all.
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Infrastructure is something of a similar case. Note that the original post was about weather “reporting” infrastructure, and to me this means the social and technical apparatus that, in effect, delivers said news about weather. One might say that a news anchor is “reporting on the news”; however, from my perspective, the news anchor does not, or at least is not much of a driving force behind “the reporting of news” other than the end point of delivery. I am sure that you realize this, but it bears unpacking.
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What made this case interesting is that “weather” (and I mean it in the most basic sense of natural environmental expressions of wind, heat, etc.) is just one reality. It is either 92 degrees or it is not, and this is based, of course, on shared, standardized measures of heat, weight, pressure, etc. In so far as this is concerned, the idea that reporting on said same weather can differ so much as to take notice (and thus be “important” to someone somewhere) is peculiar. This is not just measurement error and really not a matter of achieving scientific consensus about what the weather is so much as two different supporting structures — and all the human and non-human actors there within — for how the “one” weather should be reported to the public. This inevitably means that more, much more than merely the “real” weather influence the support structure through which weather is reported. Moreover, because weather reporting is both about “immediate reports” AND “what we think it will be like tomorrow” the former can be reported with considerably less discretion (and attention, I’d guess) than the latter. As such, and I am not really picking and complaining about the vicissitudes of trying to report on the future (which is very difficult, with even the best data and most reliable entities), so much as I mean that an entire social infrastructure about the psychology of the public, the role of the media, and the consequences of being “wrong” (and so on) seems overlain on otherwise technical infrastructure of Dopler radars and weather towers. Thus, when you mention, “My very limited understanding is that the vast majority of weather predictors use the same nationally available data,” that is precisely what makes it seemingly boring for you, but exciting for me on this blog.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a piece on how the flood of app-based service provision can make you lazy.
There are apps that let you call someone to wash your car just where you parked it; apps to let somebody queue for you; and certain apps like TaskRabbit let you “Get just about anything done by safe, reliable, awesome people”. Or, if you are lucky enough to be living in San Francisco, you may want to use “Get It Now” to “Have the best of San Francisco delivered to you in under one hour”.
Appropriately for the Journal, author Jessica Vascellaro uses the terminology of outsourcing to describe what is happening in the use of these app-based services. As we are outsourcing all kinds of activities to other people via our smartphones, however, the question may not only be whether we become lazier, but also whether we become embedded. Can there be any doubt that we do? The tone of cultural criticism in the WSJ piece suggest that we are losing something here but are we not in fact extending ourselves in truest McLuhan style? In that sense, the work I am outsourcing is still there, and it is still my work – done by others. In outsourcing activities, I am simply using the infrastructure of mobile communication in order to make many things happen simultaneously. Does service provision through infrastructures turn us into small-time Leviathans?

An exceptional case is emerging in the US about weather reporting infrastructure. Today (July 4), according to a New York Times article:

The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and weather.com, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Part of the controversy is about scientific versus non-scientific reporting of the news. The Weather Channel (TWC) is reportedly too personality driven and, in some conceivable way, benefits from odd reporting that over-reports the potential for (typically bad) weather, leaving its viewers in a situation where everyday has a chance of rain. Many, many news stations do exactly this — rather than report “clear skys”, they attempt to “keep watchers poised for the potential for weather” — obviously, as a way to keep people glued to the station. This, in STS, is referred to as “rhetoric” in scientific accounting; Latour and Woolgar write about this a bit where all the seeming “persuasion” interupts a true scientific account where the data speak for themselves.

In contrast, Weather Underground (WU) is more plain, and reveals details about its underlying data. This is a nice example of a different kind of “social” being pulled into scientific reporting — the less social it seems, the more social it is (as Latour and Woolgar told us years ago in Lab Life).

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”

This scientific versus non-scientific case about weather reporting infrastructure is a neat one because of the reversal it affords in understanding how “social” infrastructure can be (and how this happens). Additionally, the idea of “buying up” infrastructure might be an economic facet of infrastructure studies that seems only occasionally present in the STS literature.

Who used the “black box” phrase first? (in press or during a presentation)

Useful, relatively unknown nugget of interest for ethnography of infrastructure, buried deep in a seminal text.

(http://press.princeton.edu/images/k2417.gif)

After re-reading Laboratory Life — the 1986 paperback edition published by Princeton University Press not Sage Publishers, which published the original 1979 hardback — I am struck by a comment made in the postscript, which was published with the paperback 1986 edition only.

The authors respond to a few reviews of the book. For example, Westrum (1982, Knowledge 3(3):437-9) criticizes the format and presentation of the empirical materials; quoting Latour and Woolgar (1986:276),

Westraum speaks of a lack of a sense of unity, the lack of continuous action and the relative incoherence of the narrative. But our aim was precisely to avoid giving the kind of smoothed narrative characteristic of traditional constructions of the “way things are.”

The authors justify this move on the grounds of thier (anthropological) understanding of “ethnography” and the important role of “reflexivity”.

On ethnography, they choose it for the “analytical distance” it affords participant observers and elect “the presentation of preliminary empirical materials” (277) rather than a clean, sanitized research report.

On reflexivity, “Of course,” the authors write,

one interesting aspect of the exploration of reflexivity is that our writing is conventionally constrained by the use of report-like formats. This increases the tendancy of ethnographies to read as straightforwardly reporting on the “actual” state of affairs to be found in the laboratory. This kind of reading is not without use. … But such reading misses the point. We attempted (especially in Chapter 2) to address the issue of reflexivity by placing the burden of observational experiences on the shoulders of a mythical “observer.” We attempted to alert the reader to the nature of his relationship with the text (and by implication to the nature of readers’ relationships with all attempts to constitute objectivities through textual expression).

Now, I am not suggesting that ethnographic accounts of infrastructure — like habors, waterways, or information systems — adopt this second-order ethnographic reflexivity, although doing an ethnography of a sociologist doing an ethnography might be insightful. Instead, I am curious: how much hygiene/polish we should be putting into our research reports, especially ethnographic reports?

Here is why: As Latour enters the Salk lab he swears to report the truth about what happens in the lab, in particular, how scientists transform a series of personal observations into textual accounts called “articles.”

• Being a reflexive ethnographer affords the observer certain advantages, especially in seeing how truths (and non-truths) are constructured and circulate, and they can do this analytically because the truth of the claim is not what self-selects it for construction or distribution.

• Being a reflexive ethnographer also comes with another responsibility, which has, to this point, seemed more like a liability: being a reflexive ethnographer means that one must also be reflexive about one’s own ethnographic account.

As Latour and Woolgar (1986:275-6) put it,

The revision of epistemological preceptions about science raises awkward questions about the nature of its social analysis. Can we go on being instrumentally realist in our own research practices while proclaiming the need to demystify this tendency among natural scientists?

As the authors suggest, the reflexive turn seems to have reflexed only one way in the production of scientific accounts. What would further reflexivity get us in infrastructure studies? Insight into the sociological production of texutal accounts, or an infinite regress of sociolgists studying sociologists studying sociologists (and so on)?

While the corpus of ANT research is full of ethnographic accounts, not all ANT is ethnographic. In fact, foundational work in ANT tends toward socio-historical accounts of science and technology. For example, in Latour’s (1987) work in Science and Action, which stands as the invitation to follow the actors, Latour conducts no firsthand ethnographic fieldwork. Through the lens of ANT, and as a way to hash-out constitutive concepts, he reviews historical portrayals of the genesis of scientific facts, for instance, that DNA is a double-helix, and the spread of engineering artifacts, for instance, the rise of diesel locomotives. Likewise, published shortly after, Latour (1988) presents the STS community with a historical revisionist attempt at re-telling the rise to prominence of Louis Pasteur through the lens of ANT.

(my favorite passage from The Pasteurization of France)

As Hine (2007) suggests, ethnography is also not the way, or even the best way, to conduct ANT accounts of socio-material or historical phenomenon. Law’s (2002) work, especially his early work on aircraft design and related “stories” provides a rich empirical-grounded methodological alternative to ethnographic fieldwork as was his iconic ANT-imbued exploration of Portuguese sailing. Hence, there are many ways to “follow the actors” without following them “on foot” during participant or observation data collection.

(best part of the cover of Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience)

And yet, ethnography appears to be a straightforward technique for understanding one of the latest and most important concepts in ANT, namely, multiplicity. The concept — as an alternative to fragmentation as a conceptualization of a lack of fixity or stability — was implied in early ANT research and, in a number of forms, has occasionally appeared in STS work over the last three decades. However, it was not until Mol’s (2002) The Body Multiple, an unorthodox ethnographic account of atherosclerosis of leg arteries, that a robust and coherent statement was made about how to observe multiplicity in practice. Seeing medicine as a practice rather than a body of knowledge provides the analyst with an important affordance: “what we think of as a single object”, for example, a body or a disease, “may appear to be more than one”, hence, she shows how atherosclerosis is at once a singular, seemingly unified object (i.e., a disease) composed of many things because “plaque cut out of an atherosclerotic artery is not the same entity as the problem a patient with atherosclerosis talks about in the consulting room, even though they are both called by the same name” (Mol 2002:vii). However, these are not merely different social perspectives about the same object (i.e., the disease) dividing doctor and patient because this is not just another pluralist account. In principle, post-ANT studies like Mol’s are post-pluralist, which implies that adding another perspective to a scholarly account will not make the account somehow more truthful, representative, or accurate. However, social scientists, for example, of medicine have often used this trope in their research accounts. They differentiate “disease” from “illness”, the former representing the medical perspective of doctors and the latter accounting for the personal, emotional, and social experience of being a patient living with illness, which they claim doctors tend to miss, ignore, or fail to account for from their medical perspective. Thus, sociologists did not get mixed-up competing with doctors over the truth of the object of biomedicine (i.e., the disease) and instead claimed that the social dimension of disease (i.e., illness) was an added layer of meaning representing the patient’s perspective. In ANT, however, Latour (2005) challenges the idea that a social dimension exists separate from the material world. In a non-trivial challenge to sociologists, Latour demands to know how “the social” can at once be a special dimension of reality, which social scientists have access to thanks to their methodologies, and the broader context that influences the everyday life of individuals and a description of how individuals are linked together through network ties (i.e., associations). Social scientists routinely oscillate between these three registers in their accounts of the social (i.e., dimension, context, and network ties), which, reflexively, appears to be a readymade case study in multiplicity in sociology about sociological practice. Latour suggests that an emphasis on associations is the surest way to return sociology to its roots. For once we shift to the practice lens, the core epistemological concern that truth faithfully represent the nature or reality of an object, human or nonhuman, is no longer sufficient as an endpoint of analysis. How knowledge practices are enacted, overlap, and hang together, therefore, becomes the empirical question and ethnography appears to be the preferred method for scholars to observe multiplicity unfold.

No doubt, Annamarie Mol’sThe Body Multiple (Duke University Press, 2002) helped me to fully comprehend the implications of ontological “multiplicity” (as an alternative to singular epistemological truth), more so, by far, than even Latour’s early (dare I say, seminal) work on what multiplicity would mean for research and theory in science and technology studies.

Two of her key insights:

1. On the concept of entitivity (which she does not really develop, but it is so central to her argument that we see the term “entity” twice in the opening paragraph of the preface), she writes:

This means that the book comes to talk about a series of different practices. These are practices in which some entitity is being slided, colored, probed, talked about, measured, counted, cut out, countered by walking, or prevented. Which entity? A slightly different one each time. Attending to enactment rather than knowledge has an important effect: what we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one (vii).

2. On how entitivity matters for “ontological politics”, she writes:

If the objects of medicine are enacted in a variety of ways, truthfulness is no longer good enough … [thus] I contributed to theorizing medicine’s ontological politics: a politics that has to do with the way in which problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another (viii).

These two points, I contend, cannot be applied to infrastructure so simply, and here is why: “the body”, as a concept or a colloquial phrase, grammatically implies a one-ness or singularity. Therefore, when we see a title like “The Body Multiple” we note (as Mol, of course, details) a singular noun with a pluralizing adjective. Can the same be so easily said about other objects? “The <FILL IN THE BLANK>  Multiple”? I am not certain that a “The Infrastructure Multiple” really works as a sensitizing concept for infrastructure studies, despite the vast utility of multiplicity to aid us in rethinking infrastructure. After all, infrastructure is already a singular noun used to describe multiple things/objects.

According to a fast/dirty Google search:

So, the multiplicity of infrastructure is at once already a part of infrastructure, and yet the vast and multiplicitous network structure of infrastructure occasionally punctuated into a seeming singularity is an idea worth mining.

Call for papers

III 2012 – Innovation in Information Infrastructures Workshop
9th – 11th October 2012

The University of Edinburgh Business School
29 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh, UK

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Eric Monteiro – NTNU
Steve Sawyer – Syracuse University
David Ribes – Georgetown University
Geoff Walsham – University of Cambridge

Rationale:
This workshop will focus on the emergence and continuing evolution of new kinds of information infrastructures (IIs) in business, the corporate world and other settings. By connecting a growing number of systems and data, Information Infrastructures support user work in everyday life, but also bring about increased organizational and technological complexity. As IIs permeate an increasingly broad range of social and institutional contexts, they generate both new kinds of challenges for information systems development, and new social, organizational and market forms as foci for social study.

This is the second Edinburgh workshop on IIs in recent years. The first, in 2006, explored what were then emerging visions of the future1. Some of the computing models set out have subsequently failed to materialise as expected, whilst others not predicted have come into being. Today, we find that the ecology of players, services, software and platforms enabled by network connectivity and modern tools is increasingly complex. Information infrastructure standards and patterns of usage have been established, legitimating a growing set of user strategies, social competences and forms of expertise. In this workshop we ask how information infrastructures and related social, organizational and market forms innovate.

Important Dates:
Deadline for submission of short paper: 30 June 2012
Decision of abstract acceptance: 22 July 2012
Final program available: 25 September 2012

Submission:
If you wish to present a paper at the III 2012 workshop submit a short
paper (3 to 4 pages). Please submit them as email attachments
(Microsoft Word files only) to this email address – i.i.i@ed.ac.uk –
indicating in the e-mail subject the title of the workshop: III2012

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue
of an international rated peer reviewed journal.

Themes:
The workshop will bring together researchers to share empirical studies, analytical approaches and methodological concerns in the understanding of Information Infrastructures innovation, and to explore what the future holds for research in this area. We invite papers on the following themes:

Emerging Information Infrastructures

– Social media applications that enable the sharing and collation of information between peers and across multiple sites
– The further integration and expansion of corporate enterprise systems (e.g. ERP, CRM)
– Patient health record infrastructures that connect up various health providers
– New models for the provision of computing services (such as Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing)
– The Internet of Things
– Data analytics
– New platforms that seek to leverage the time/expertise of globally distributed communities of developers (e.g. FLOSS, the Apple App store).

Analytical approaches

– The Social Shaping of Technology and its extension into the Biography of Artefacts perspective 
– Socio-material understandings of Information Infrastructures
– Approaches influenced by ethnomethodology and micro-sociology
– Science and Technology Studies approaches
– Approaches which appreciate the “long now” and multi-sitedness of Information Infrastructures 

Methodological concerns

– Adequacy of conventional methodologies for understanding the scale, scope and evolution of II
– Questions of fieldwork focus when researching information infrastructures
Submission and Registration Guidelines can be found on the University
of Edinburgh Business School Website:
http://www.business-school.ed.ac.uk/about/school-events?a=44968

Executive Committee:
G. Haywood
H. Mozaffar
A. Eshraghi
V. Wiegel

Scientific Committee:
R. Williams
N. Pollock
S. Anderson
M. Hartswoood
G.M. Campagnolo
I. Graham

As the battle between Apple and Google continues to escalate, the Wall Street Journal features an interesting article about Google Maps, and mobile maps and navigation software and servives more generally, as a crucial stake this conflict. Over the next couple of days, Apple is expected to announce its own mapping service and will subsequently disembed Google Maps from Apple devices. Google Maps was in many ways crucial to the initial succes of the iPhone and both companies cooperated heavily in attracting and redirecting smartphone users to mutual advantage. This cooperation with, basically, Apple selling devices and Google selling ads deteriorated with the advent and increasing market share of Android devices. Now, “Apple is going after the map market to have more control over a key asset in the widening smartphone war”, as WSJ authors Jessica Vascellaro and Amir Efrati comment. Their article has interesting details on both the early days of cooperation, the ensuing suspicions, distrust and secrecy involved in waging the war of the mobile device ecosystems. You can check out the whole article here.

Anybody out there working on this? In terms of shaping technology/building society through infrastructural assemblages, this case is clearly a steal. It encourages, among, I’m sure, many other things, to think about the layering of different kinds of infrastructures – territories, maps, directions, ads, planners, pedestrians, etc. – and the different kinds of circulation these infrastructures attract, moderate, and redirect. What a massive case of heterogenous engineering.

In 1886, the Supreme Court granted corporations personhood, or at least the same rights as were granted to any living person, and justified the decision based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The 1886 legal transformation (or imbuement) now, in retrospect, appears to figure prominently in theoretical models of organizations, corporations, and states, especially, the idea that these entities are straightforward actors, unsurprisingly, able to act. Most obviously this fits into the work of Alexander Wendt who famous (and controversially) claimed “states are people too” in his famous article in Review of International Studies, “The state as person in international theory”.

For some background on corporations and corporate entitivity, I turn to David Korten’s (1995:185-6) well-known book The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, wherein we learn that:

In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court’s taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.

Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court’s findings that

The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.

The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery – a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

Shifting gears back to thinking about states, the language that is used sometimes in International Relations, political sociology, and political science is “entitivity”. This is a description of legal reality, meaning that a corporation (which is really just an idea or organizational form) can be treated as an actor, entity, or, in this case, person. This is also more than a description because it has been so profoundly reified over the last decades, by which I mean to say that the we assume states are in fact the free-standing actors that we assume-them-into-being and this happens to such a great extent that statements like “The US just sent a strong message to China” can actually be comprehended by average people. So reified is the state actor idea during the neo-statist turn in sociology, history, and political science during the 1980s/90s that one got the feeling that you could have actually snapped a picture of the state.

Regarding the action or behavior of “entities” such as states or corporations, there is a rule amongst neo institutional scholars, especially in organizational analysis, to avoid saying, for example, that “Apple just released the iPhone 4S” because the corporation actually did not do that and instead this comment is a shorthand for going to the trouble to say that Apple executives, based on the work of myriad employees, decided to release their product into a particular set of markets. This also explains the massive emphasis on leadership and management in organizational studies because the behavior of leadership is often mistaken for how an organization behaves or how an institution – like a university – thinks (thank you, Mary Douglas).

In this way, group-level behavior is sometimes subsumed in the emphasis on leaders (i.e., the group is spoken for by the management that leads them); other times, group-level and leader behavior (and whatever infinite nuance must go into all that) get subsumed under the seemingly single behavior/activity of the overarching entity (i.e., the entity appears to act/behave/speak for both group and its leadership). In all, there is no easy way to sort out these sorts of issues, at least, to my knowledge, as it is mainly a matter of perspective and whatever the analytical starting point is. Some might say, however, that this whole debate can be explained away because it is merely a case of category error; for example, the student taking a tour of campus during orientation is shown around The Pennsylvania State University, and, at the very end of the tour, says “I’ve seen the buildings, and the faculty and the students, but where is the University?”. The obvious and logical conclusion, therefore, must be that states, organizations, and corporations are simply operating at a different (read: hierarchically superior) level of organization from individual human beings. That might sound reasonable for sociologists from the 1950s (or even some of them now); however, while hierarchy and terms like “power” are useful for understanding such relationships, the two terms are also a shortcut for doing the hard work of describing what happens when, for example, a state appears to act in some fashion. Put another way, and one that I subscribe to: if we assume no hierarchies, and assume whatever appear to be hierarchical power relations are actually people on the ground in various network formations operating on a flat plane of existence, then we have another view (one more akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the world as composed of A Thousand Plateaus).

A final option exists, and that is to treat this entire issue not as a legal reality or scholarly conception, and instead suggest that this is a perception issue, which has the potential to satisfy both camps. This is an argument under development, so forgive its crudeness. Consider social psychologist Jennifer L Welbourne’s very traditional paper “The Impact of Perceived Entitivity on Inconsistency Resolution for Groups and Individuals” published in the conservative psychology journal, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The thrust of her argument is nicely encapsulated in the final line of her abstract:

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that differences in perceived target entitivity influence the degree to which information about a group or individual is processed online. The current set of studies examines whether perceptions of entitivity are also associated with differences in the content of impressions formed of groups and individuals. Specifically, if perceptions of high entitivity motivate perceivers to seek coherence in a target, impressions of individual (high-entitivity) targets should be characterized by greater resolution of behavioral inconsistencies than impressions of group (low-entitivity) targets. Study 1 provided evidence for this hypothesis by demonstrating that perceivers were more likely to apply restrictive diagnosticity schemas to resolve inconsistent behaviors in a predicted direction when the target was an individual than when the target was a group. Two additional studies were conducted to determine the specific aspect of target entitivity that produced these results: perceiver expectations about the similarity and consistency of a target’s behaviors (Study 2) and perceiver expectations about the unity of a target’s intentions and goals (Study 3) were manipulated and the resulting impressions were examined. The results suggest that perceptions of unity in a target’s intentions and goals underlie the assumptions of entitivity and the obtained impression effects.

All we need to do is to uncover a set of cases that allow us to empirically observe instances where the perceived unity of a state’s intentions and goals fuel the underlying assumption that indeed the state is an entity, which produce the impression effects. Now, if we don’t assume states are entities in advance, which we must if we are going to chalk-up their entitivity to impression effects, then we must assume that states are, to some extent, made “anew” each time we invoke them and fortified by routine invocation. So, who does this sort of performative invocation? Finding a few cases like that would make a fine book…

Once, the phrase “politics by other means” was a way to know about technology. The same sh/could be said of infrastructure; so often we conceptualize infrastructural entities by what they are made of, which is legitimate in my mind, but is there room to see infrastructure as made of “other” stuff?

As soon as Jan-Hendrik Passoth and I (Nicholas Rowland) finished writing “Actor-Network State: Integrating Actor-Network Theory and State Theory,”  (International Sociology 2010 25: 818-841 (2010)), I started to wonder with renewed interest “what are states made of?”

(http://go.hrw.com/atlas/norm_htm/world.htm)

One answer might be to accept a line of thinking Jan and I outline in the above paper and suggest that the question has become something irrelevant. As we write:

“This direction for state theory does not ask same old question ‘what a state is’ – it is an actor-network, of course – because that does not say much, and instead asks ‘how states are’.” (Ibid., 826).

However, now I’m thinking there might be something more to it; that is, if the question can be reformulated so that we in political sociology, political science, and international relations and international law stop asking “what are states?” and instead start asking “what are states made of?” Perhaps this new “entry point” will aid us in rethinking states and the role of states.

Larry makes the point that we turn our attention to theories of action (mainly, an actor-network approach to the state) in the above article, which implies (to some extent) that states are what states do. If that’s an accurate and/or legitimate assumption, then the “hollow state” writers might be in some serious trouble, or at least have some serious explaining to do. If states are playing a more and more restricted role in the shape of international affairs as compared to, for example, global credit-rating firms or multi-national corporations (which Larry writes about with great success: Backer, Larry Catá, On the Tension between Public and Private Governance in the Emerging Transnational Legal Order: State Ideology and Corporation in Polycentric Asymmetric Global Orders (April 16, 2012).), then two possibilities exist.

(http://www.get-into-medicalschool.com/high-fructose-corn-syrup-wolf/)

First, if states are what they do, then this could imply that whatever it was that states previously “did” is no longer needed or privileged in international affairs, hence, because states are what they do, they are doing qualitatively less of it and shrink as a result (sometimes this logic seems to underlie the thinking in “governance without government” (Gw/oG) schools of thought, which Larry also writes about with success: Backer, Larry Catá, Governance Without Government: An Overview and Application of Interactions Between Law-State and Governance-Corporate Systems  in  Beyond Territoriality: Transnational Legal Authority in an Age of Globalization (Günther Handl and Joachim Zekoll Editors, Leiden, Netherlands & Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2012). (March 1, 2010). Penn State Legal Studies Research 10-2010.). Thus, whatever it was that states did, we no longer need it. Note: this is a hardcore functionalist argument. Sometimes this sort of an argument is utilized when discussing the reduced role of government not only as a descriptive account of contemporary affairs (usually, documenting liberal bellyachers fondly reminiscing a largely imagined understanding of the role of government, for example, in the US or UK) or a prescriptive account of contemporary affairs (usually, promoting a particular agenda to “save” government from having its power usurped by other actors on the international stage or, in some cases, promoted by government agencies with pro-market solutions to otherwise historically government tasks or duties such as how to “best” (by which, “most efficient” seems to be the placeholder) deliver social provisions to a deserving public (please note: this sort of a dynamic replete with descriptive and prescriptive accounts opens the door to observing “political performativity” where our ideas about the political reality unfolding in front of us is prescribed by its descriptors and described by its prescriptors – as noted in the original post by Larry, this is a potential well-spring for new research).

Second, if states are what they do, then this could imply that whatever it was that states previously “did”, someone/something else is now conducting these actions in international affairs in the stead of states, hence, because states are what they do, when someone/something steps in to assume the role(s) previously monopolized by the state, the state shrinks as a result (this logic is also adopted in “governance without government” schools of thought, although to a much different end).

Another line of reasoning, consistent with the actor-network action orientation avoids either line of reasoning described above (which currently plague the Gw/oG groups), is to see the state as it is made up of “other” stuff. As in the previous post about actor-networks, materiality (or “the physical”) plays a central role and has nearly become synonymous with ANT anytime it is invoked for the purposes of, usually, of criticism. However, this special
attention to the material can result in a fantastic re-understanding of the “state ideology” (the terms Larry sometimes uses to encapsulate the notion that something like a state actually exists and occasionally acts in a concerted way in relation to its public/subjects and/or in relation to other actors like states on the international stage). I like to call this the “state hypothesis”, which explicitly reminds us that when the earliest neostatists started their writing (before full-entitivity was assumed by neostatists carte blanche) that writers like Skocpol required that “the state” was something that unfolded in historical comparative relief and that we, thus, should not simply assume the state exists but that it occasionally appears to exist under a particular set of historical contingencies. Please note: “entitivity” is just something that I pull from organizational analysis in sociology circles, which is a term to describe what is invoked when, for example, journalist say (and can actually be understood by common people) that “Apple Unveils iPhone 4S With Voice-Recognition Features” (NY Times: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/live-blogging-the-apple-iphone-5-announcement/) or that “Goldman-Sachs profits mask revenue decline” (LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-goldman-earns-20120417,0,7737808.story). Somehow in these moments, Apple is a thing and not just the concerted efforts of its managers and board members, hence, the entitivity is a reflection of this “acting thing” called Apple. Keep in mind, that if a state is what it does, then by that same logic Apple is what it does meaning that it is what releases iPhone 4S, that is, Apple is made of iPhone in the same way that states are made of, as a soon to be published example shows, other stuff such as water.

In water infrastructure research (and for those interested in STS and state theory of course), check out Patrick Carroll’s “Water, and Technoscientific State Formation in California” which has just been published as an “online-first” article by STS journal Social Studies of Science.

(http://www.aquafornia.com/where-does-californias-water-come-from)

His abstract offers the thrust of analysis:

“This paper argues that water gradually became, over a period of more than half a century, a critical boundary object between science and governance in California. The paper historicizes ‘water’, and argues that a series of discrete problems that involved water, particularly the reclamation of ‘swampland’ in the Sacramento Valley, gradually came to be viewed as a single ‘water problem’ with many facets. My overarching theoretical aim is to rethink the ontology of the technoscientific state through the tools of actor-network theory. I conclude with the following paradox: the more the technoscientific state forms into a complex gathering – or ‘thing’ – of which humans are part, the more it is represented and perceived as a simplified and singular actor set apart from those same humans” (at:  http://sss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/03/06/0306312712437977.abstract).

Patrick seems to be saying, and this is quite smart, that states are made of non-state stuff, in this case, water; that states can be invoked in relation to other (typically nonhuman) stuff. Although he does not go into great reflection on this matter, the empirical results very much support the position I’m staking-out here. One way to understand what states are is to observe what they do and recognize that they are constituted by this in a double-sense: they are made of their actions and whatever material constitutes their actions.

Please note: this will appear at: http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/ and was featured May 7, 2012 on “Law at the End of the Day.”

Seems as though one of the infrastructrual foundations of science is being challenged, and the call is form some form of process reform.

As you know, only the 8% of the Scientific Research Society’s members agreed that ‘peer review works well as it is'(Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192). Consequently, we invite you to participate in identifying means to improve Peer Review effectiveness.
***********************
Call for Participations through any of the following three ways to contribute in the improvement of Peer Review processes:
•   Research Blogging, and/or
•   Submitting an abstract and CV to a Conference Special Track (submission deadline: May 18, 2012), and/or
•   Submitting an article to the Journal on systemic, Cybernetics and Informatics (JSCI)
***********************
Details at http://www.peer-reviewing.org/pr12 (Where authors and articles referenced in this are included among a larger list of references)
***********************
An exponentially increasing number of studies and experience-based editors’ opinions are clear and explicit about peer review weaknesses and failures. The following affirmations are a very small sample (Many more can be found at the references included in the above mentioned URL)
***********************
“A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research. Far from filtering out junk science, peer review may be blocking the flow of innovation and corrupting public support of science.” (Horrobin,2001) Horrobin concludes that peer review “is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance.”

“If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market” affirmed Drummond Rennie (Smith, 2010, p.1), deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and who intellectually provided support for the international congresses of peer review that have been held, since 1989, every four years. If peer review was a drug, he added, it “would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws.” (Ibid)

Few days ago, Carl Zimmer (2012) reported in the New York Time that, according to a study made by PubMed data base, the number of articles retracted from scientific journals increased from 3 in 2000 to 180 in 2009. 6000% of increment in 10 years! This “Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform.” (Ibid)

But, “Peer Review is one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice” (Goodstein, 2000), it is completely necessary as quality assurance for Scientific/Engineering publications, and “Peer Review is central to the organization of modern science… why not apply scientific [and engineering] methods to the peer review process” (Horrobin, 2001).

This is the purpose of this call for participation via 1) blogging, 2) submitting an article to the Special Track on Peer Reviewing: PR 2012, and/or 3) submitting an article to the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics. More details for each of these three ways of participating can be found at http://www.peer-reviewing.org/pr12.

Sincerely,

PR 2012 Organizing Committee

Jan and I’s paper about the possibility of unlocking the performativity of political science through an actor-network approach to states was just plugged on Larry Backer’s exciting blog on international relations.

Larry’s summary is outstanding, and as good summaries go, it adds to the discussion in the process of reviewing it. Of particular interest to me (and presummably others) is the following point below about using an actor-network approach to understand the relationship between form and function (of presummably any object):

Taken together,  the [actor-network] framework suggests a way of de-centering ideology from the understanding of the state, or for that matter any entity with operational or situational effects.  ‘We know it when we feel it’ is a powerful tool for  examining a thing, especially  dynamic thing that is itself an abstraction.  That applied with equal force to states as it does to multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International. The notion that character is not inherent in organization–a core presumption in the ideological construction of the state–is particularly useful.  Yet it may also be true that particular clusters of actors gathered within a construct that acts may indeed exhibit a proclivity to particular forms of behavior that may well be inherent in the networked relation though it may not be in the organization itself.  As such, ANT may explain that the character of states is not inherent in the form of the state, but it does not explain why peculiarities of action appear to be replicated in states and multinational corporations when they exhibit particular amalgamations that produce effect.  More importantly, the de-privileging of formal consideration s may produce distortion.  It is well understood in law (and customary system) that function may sometimes follow form, or lmore likely, that from may constrain function.  That leads to a further insight–that form itself has function.  ANT tends to avoid those considerations and thus may become overly indifferent to the form of action (law versus norm; consultation versus imposition for legitimacy effects; etc.).  The focus on ex post effects may also make it harder to provide  insights on future actions.  ANYT, in this sense, may be an approach always seeking to catch up to the present.   Yet for all that, the approach is powerfully sensitive to the internal construction of action and the importance of action on those ideological systems (also an effect) that themselves then produce and contain both the reality of the world within which action is deemed possible and impossible and their justification (also an effect designed to produce self restraint in those who are charged with behaving in appropriate ways).

In 2010, Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce edited Material Powers through Routledge. The volume is mainly about bringing power back into cultural studies, especially cultural studies research that attends to issues of state and colonialism, but without losing out on the “material turn” in the anthropology of the state (on that, see a great 2006 reader, The Anthropology of the State). While the chapters are not all of equal quality, a few really stand out, provided you’re willing to swallow the cultural studies pill — there are not bolded concepts and data seems to come in many forms.

Personally, I’ve always been exceptionally tolerant (fond, even) of cultural studies because the entire enterprise is, when done well, like a theory/philosophy incubator, moreover, the writers while sometimes maddeningly opaque, often provide readers with sentizing imagry that is unforgettable (here, I’m thinking of A Thousand Plateaus). Material Powers, so far at least, has not uncovered any masterful metaphors yet, but the authors masterfully tackle a huge issue for researchers who appreciate “the material”, which is: what to do with such a dirty word as “power” without violating basic assumptions in actor-network and foucauldian models of society and governance?

I’ve stumbled across a great case for infrastructure studies: Chicago’s Pedway.

Against the order of the grid city of Chicago, the disorderly pedway was a surprisingly organic and inconsistent “vision” of civil engineering with no grand oversight or centralized control mechanism to insure maintenance, cleanliness, and so on. It was fascinating, and because a number of major metropolitan areas have them, comparisons for sake of research would be plentiful. This is an untapped case with tons of potential.

Pedways are pedestrian walkways and they are both above ground and below; in Chicago’s case, it is a combination of the two. Here’s the upshot for us:

• there is no overarching vision for this walkway infrastructure (and few accurate maps); 
• there is no basic understanding of the total cost of this;
• it is still being developed;
• it is privately produced and owned (in sections) but explicitly designed for the public;
• it is not goverened other than in approximately 30 meter sections (which mirror, often, the building above or below);
• it is sectioned by revolving doors (so that the pedway does not just become a massive wind tunnel);
• it is inconsistently developed over time (some sections are less than a year old while others are decades old);
• nobody owns it, although it is maintained in sections, but this means that there is nobody to “ask” if you want to film it; 
• they connect elevated train stops, but with no apparent logic;
• legal codes within the walkway are not fully deveoped or understood;
• and, despite many more oddities, it is inconsistently available for public use, meaning that two contiguous sections might be open during different periods of the day…

So, you can go on tours, which span from artistic and philosophical in nature to practical and even humorous in nature (I took this tour; Margaret Hicks is an ex-comedian who gives a great tour through “Chicago Elevated”). Here is a description of the “loose infrastructure” in Chicago:

Chicago’s Pedway, a series of heated walkways, passages and tunnels, serve as the backdrop for an amusing and enlightening tour of some of the hot-spots (or a least warm-spots) of downtown Chicago.  The tour focuses on interesting anecdotes and tales about some of the great buildings downtown, but it’s also a study of the city underneath the city. The Pedway is a  strange and wonderful place and adds so much to the city’s personality. These are great tours for Chicagoans who want to learn more about the city and for tourists who want a full Chicago experience without ever going outside.

Here are some pictures from my experience in the “loose infrastructure” of Chicago’s Pedway

By Sara B. Pritchard, Confluence is a terrific book.

The two stylistic issues that stand out to me are the clever blending of historical/empirical material with conceptual/sensitizing meta-commenting as well as effortless shifting between geography, political science, STS, and other disciplines. After all, when the entire enterprise turns on the river Rhône, we cannot help but to see, for example, how hydrological changes to the river become inextricably linked to political and cultural events of the 21st century or how the river was iconic of the French state and re-building efforts after the second world war (and there is much, much more to un-tangle).

This is a rich, historical text that will not upset sociologists whom might be more interested in the generalized patterns at play or the take-away new concept for their toolkits … although, those types of sociologists will have to be patient because conceptual matters are peppered throughout the well-seasoned document. Although, the patience is reward by excellent writing; varied sentence structure, lively telling of the past, occasionally challenging vocubulary, and a deep sensitivity for differences between translated languages so that we often get the original French term alongside the translated English substitute.

My friends in infrastructure, especially water infrastructure like Patrick Carroll and Govind Gopakumar have probably already found this gem, but if they have not — take a look!

Previously I posted about how another edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies is coming out and a new set of editors was about to be named. Now, I own the 2001 “Revised” (or 2nd) edition, and have not closely read the 2007 (or 3rd) edition. Does anyone know what the first edition was called? I can only remember that I used to see The Science Studies Reader on the bookshelf…? Although, the editors of the 2007 edition suggest that a 1970s book titled Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society was the progenitor of the handbook series.

Apparently, the 2013 (or 4th) edition is on the make.

In the 2001 edition, the editors took the role of purported “cartographers” (2001:xi) and chose to map out the contours and meridians of STS (seemed apropos after Tom Gieryn’s Cultural Boundaries of Science in 1999). In the 2007 edition, the editors (2007:3) split the book into sections: theory and method, relations to other fields, public engagement, and something like enduring themes. Of particularly interesting note, as we shall see, is that the original 1970s handbook apparently took 6 years to complete, the 2001 edition (which was originally published in 1995 with 4S) took 7 years to complete, and the 2007 edition (the largest in terms of pages, contributors, and contributions was also published with 4S) took 8 years (2007:2).

The new edition appears to return to the original titling from the 1970s:

… the Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, to be published by Routledge … While there are other handbooks that consider science, technology and society, what we envision is a volume that addresses specific substantive domains, is unified by attention to common themes, and which uses empirical cases to illustrate theoretical claims. 

Instead of drawing a map of STS or cross-cutting into a few categories, this new edition, which is under the perview of 4S too, will be:

… a volume that addresses six substantive domains that shape and are shaped by science and technology:  Digitization, Environments, Technoscience and/ as Work, Technoscience and Bodies, Rules and Standards, and Consuming Technoscience.  Many handbooks seek to capture a field with some comprehensiveness, but without promoting coherence across essays. Instead, we ask each contributor consider one or more of three key processes in their substantive essays:  how and why ideas, artifacts, and practices come to be institutionalized or disrupted; what explains the scale at which technoscience comes to have meaning, is struggled over and travels; and/ or the means by which materiality and cultural value(s) shape science and technology.  We ask each author to read two other chapters in the volume, and to engage them in some way in their own chapter.  While much in STS is richly descriptive, we seek work that is explanatory, and that weaves a clear and cogent argument through an empirical case or cases.

Now, what is also exciting and interesting are the proposed deadlines:

an abstract … [due] by 10 March 2012, … a first draft … [due] by 5 October 2012. … A final draft … due by 5 March 2013.

If the new editors even come close to their target deadlines, this will be the most quickly prepared handbook to date. Should prove to be a most excellent edited volume.

Description

Information systems are researched, published on, and utilized as an extremely broad and vital sector of current technology development, usually studied from the scientific or technological viewpoints therein.

Phenomenology, Organizational Politics, and IT Design: The Social Study of Information Systems offers a new look at the latest research and critical issues within the field of information systems by creating solid theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical findings of social developments. Professionals, academics, and researchers working with information will find this volume a compelling and vital resource for a cross fertilization among different, yet complementary, and strictly connected domains of scientific knowledge, consisting of information systems research, philosophy of social science, and organizational studies.

One example of the heightened institutional appropriation of ethnomethod’s reflexive nature emerges from Nicholas Rowland study of Enterprise Resource Planning software usage in American Universities (Rowland, this volume). His empirical case study demonstrates that the received ethnomethodological transcendental interest that the social order is always a local accomplishment—that is the result of a concerted activity of a community of co-operating fellows—requires some further discussion. Rowland’s paper provides illustrations of how people involved in large-scale information systems implementation do not know what they mean when they produce accounts. He does so by making reference to the ‘fit-gap work’ taking place during ERP implementations, but he also identifies how participants found ways to deal with these uncertainties, to manage the reflexivity of their understandings. In particular, he makes reference to the “prioritizing/de-prioritizing” work. Something that cannot be decided, or evaluated on the basis of a sufficiently accountable manner, gets de-prioritized. The most useful feature of de-prioritization is that issues related to implementation that become de-prioritized are “removed without removing” and remain in the purgatory of prospective possibilities.

The process of natural objectification of practices for organizing the orderliness of events produces tools, instruments, artefacts, benchmarks that become available for future and distant accomplishments. What the illustration deriving from the “fit-gap work” reminds us is that these commodities are certainly re-enacted in each locale, but people do not re-invent the wheel all the same all the time. Prior than the transcendent re-enactment of social order, the chief interest of social researchers in information system is on the layers of customization encrusted in organizing artifacts and ordering systems that protect people from being disbanded every time they encounter even the most routine task. What Nicholas Rowland study suggests is that it is true that people do not know what they mean when they produce accounts, but it is also true that they know that. And by knowing that, people’s major occupation is to produce work-arounds in order to reduce the noise of the reflexivity of understandings (e.g. the ‘fit-gap work’). These accomplishments, that take the form of routines, tools, instruments, artefacts and institutions, are of central interest for a social researcher in Information Infrastructures.

I don’t know how this book was not on my “to read” list until now, but it is a fabously written book: Jo Guldi’s Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State.

Guldi does a first-rate STS analysis; this primarily historical work is peppered with sociological and political insights, none more important, to my mind, than the idea that large-scale infrastructural investments cause conflict (it seems no matter what) and have the potential to transform a nation (ironically, from within). As it happens, Britain was the first nation to be united by (albeit primitive) highways connecting nearly every town and village. For those of us in love with blueprint images, the book has a couple that I would like to have full-sized, framed, and mounted on my office wall. One of the take-aways from this historical analysis is a fresh look at the now old insight that we are growing increasingly isolated, and that one of the core causes is technological in nature. Instead of focusing on cellular phones or social networking media, the book draws our attention to roads, specifically, how roads bring us together on the roads but utlimately isolate us from the people we are now in contact with more often. Still, perhaps the author could have said something more about the role of signs and the innumeration of places. However, the section devoted to how Britain was even colonizing its own people, through the elaboration of roads at home, rings an appropriate bell for scholars that like a little humor in their science.

NOTE: Joanna Guldi is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital History, University of Chicago, and a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. She also runs the Landscape Studies Podcast.

Tom Vanderbilt is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and in a recent news/interest article, he framed the acceptance of public transit as an infrastructure question; that is, infrastructure with soul, that is still efficient for moving human bodies around.

It is a striking comparison he makes in the opening image:

Planned cities like Dubai (left) are considered high system/low empathy while places that grew more organically, like the favelas of  Rio (right) are low system/high empath.

Then he goes onto to ask, can you make infrastructure that is efficient, but still has soul?

A planned-from-scratch place like Dubai, or Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” Leadbeater argued, was “high system/low empathy,” while the favelas of Rio, which grew up organically and are sustained by a web of informal networks, could be considered “low system/high empathy.” Then there are places—Lagos, he suggested—where neither axis is particularly optimized. How, he wanted to know, could you design for both?

For many of us, the “infra” in infrastructure denotes a relatively straightforward image of “something below,” in this case, a structure below, which is usually conceptualized as a supporting or facilitating structure that allows other practices, events, etc. to “happen” or “take place.” Hence, infra equates to below, if sensitized to issues of hiearchy (rather than, say, scale or functionality). I wrote about this here.

The problem is, many of us are, as Hendrik put it, “flat-earthers,” meaning that we have adopted a lateral perspective in our research, mainly, as a matter of principle. Latour is probably one of the most famous proponents of this “view” that challenges hierarchy at every turn, and this argument is made well enough in his 2005 book.Hence, “flat-earthers” reject issues of hierarchy as being in any way hierarchical.

I present these choices as binary, meaning if you elect one you cannot select the other. You must choose either a hiearchical or laternal perspective. To some extent, they are contradictory comments on reality (or perspectives) because “politics from the side” (i.e., assuming a lateral world) rejects any preordained notions of hierarchy, above as well as below (i.e., “politics from below” or assuming a hierarchical world). The only alternative, I posited, “would be a position where one argues that infrastructure is “made to be below” through lateral practices.”

This solution, which I posted moments ago on Hendrik’s post, was that we could turn “politics from below” into the research question for a scholar committed to “politics from the side” and turn hierarchy in to what has to be explained instead of what we assume a priori. This is one way to change the view of “politics from below” vs. the “politics from the side” into “politics from below” as the “politics from the side” in infrastructure studies

I was advertising the paper by Marion Brivot and Yves Gendron earlier last year, now I have finally come around to give it a more thorough read. I am really impressed, and I would like to push a couple of points here about infrastructures that can be taken from this work (which, again, in its entirety is here).
The paper, first of all, does a good job of introducing the literature about new forms of surveillance, adding on a couple of recent French works that have yet to be taken up, as far as I can tell, in international discourse (whether in STS or accounting). Most notably, Brivot and Gendron adopt the notion of “sousveillance” or, in the English terminology they are proposing, “sub-veillance”, from a paper by Dominique Quessada. The basic insight is that contemporary ICTs indeed establish new forms of visibility and discipline but rather than an updated form of Benthamite panopticism a lateral form of surveillance is the result. Against this background the “big brother” idea of control appears like a belittlement of actual governance and the type of discipline that results from the ICT-mediated visibility of individual and collective conduct, and like a more or less infantile projection of disciplinary power among the governed. In contemporary forms of “sub-veillance” individuals play games of visibility and visibilization from which discipline emerges laterally from reflexive processes of reciprocal control and impression management. Brivot and Gendron demonstrate this empirically by a case study of a knowledge management system in an tax/law firm.
The authors argue that while panopticism may be an outdated image of contemporary forms of surveillance, the Foucauldian account of technologies of the self doing the actual governing remains very much valid. In effect, they present us with an Foucauldian account beyond panopticism which I think, may be very relevant to infrastructure studies with respect to ICT. While many people, faced with the power of ICT to make activities and economies visible and accessible to control, are still primarily afraid that a central power will accumulate some form of power-knowledge in order to control them, in the social network, facebook, and twitter world, the real power resides in the spread of artefacts and inscriptions across networks and participants. The despotic power of visibility, if it really exists, primarily derives from participants’ inclination to make themselves visible and from playing ICTs competitively in one way or another. Governance, control, and so on do not the result from some general plan or paradigm but from often from idiosyncratic detournments.
In conclusion, Brivot and Gendron urge the reader to “take into account the complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes which characterize today’s rhizomatic forms of control and surveillance. This is a difficult task since one of the greatest challenges confronting surveillance studies is to develop a grasp on the chaos and cacophony that underlie the spread of surveillance in organizations and society (…). Foucault can be very useful in making sense of this cacophony – as long as researchers look beyond the confines of the panoptical conceptualization which, quite paradoxically, Foucault helped to make fashionable.” (p. 153)
Now, I am stumbling upon another paper in the same journal that is just about to be published, arguing something very similar about the use of online ratings and social media in the travel sector. It is written by Susan Scott and Wanda Orlikowski; check it out here.
Looks like the old Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary power is just getting a Web 2.0 update.