Undisciplined research: the proceduralisation of quality control in transdisciplinary projects

In this paper I argue that so-called trans-disciplinary research, that is problem-oriented, non-technological research outside the disciplinary structure, leads to a strengthening of organisational aspects of knowledge production and, particularly, of a change in quality standards. Quality standards are increasingly defined in intra-organisational or project-dependent and procedural instead of disciplinary terms. The paper is based on fieldwork in several environmental consulting companies that perform a broad, non-disciplinary spectrum of research and consulting. Although they perform government-funded research, neither their organisational structure nor their praxis is oriented towards disciplines. Instead their research focuses on social problems and methods that are translated into research without an intermediary disciplinary filtering. Quality has to be accomplished via non-disciplinary standards. These non-disciplinary standards are all procedural: namely quality management, timesheets and accompanying supervisory group

Are academic spin-offs really doing science?

Organisations make an indispensable contribution to reproducing functional systems. Can this also be said of organisations with multiple systemic ties? In considering this issue, this paper looks at the example of academic spin-offs. On the basis of qualitative interviews with people involved in founding spin-offs from non-university research institutes in Germany, the authors investigate the extent to which such firms help reproduce the structural characteristics of science. The theoretical yield of this study is the linkage of systems-theoretical and practice-theoretical perspectives.Organisationen leisten unverzichtbare Beiträge zur Reproduktion von Funktionssystemen, aber trifft das auch für mehrfach systemisch gebundene Organisationen zu? Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht diese Frage am Beispiel akademischer Ausgründungen. Auf der Grundlage von qualitativen Interviews mit Personen, die an Firmengründungen aus außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen in Deutschland beteiligt waren, wird gezeigt, inwiefern diese Firmen dazu beitragen, Strukturmerkmale des Wissenschaftssystems zu reproduzieren. Der theoretische Ertrag dieser Analyse besteht in einer Verknüpfung von systemtheoretischen und praxistheoretischen Perspektiven

How to Use ANT in Inventive Ways so that its Critique Will not Run out of Steam?

‘Critique behaves like blasé tourists who would like to reach the most virgin territories with- out difficulty, but only if they don’t come across any other tourists’ (Latour 2013, 85). It is one of the recurring tropes of ANT to portray itself as nothing but an empiricist endeavour to understand the socio-material word, abstaining from the blasé practices of critique. When I was drawn to ANT as a student in the 1990s, I became quickly puzzled by the strong claims that ANT cannot be delineated, that it is supposed to be a method, or a ‘sensibility’ but not a theory, while at the same time the proponents of ANT voiced very strong critiques of other approaches (see e.g. Law 2008). Reading ANT texts, it is hard not to conclude that ANT itself is a critical theory of sorts, full of critical judgements about the world. In short, very often, ANT is like a blasé tourist itself. In this chapter, I take up to question of ANT’s relationship to critique, not in order to point the finger at ANT, but to explore what ANT as a critical theory can accomplish. I ask with regard to which element of the world ANT is (not) critical, how and why it is so, and what the effects of this selective criticality are. I will first explain what I mean by critique. Then, I will detail why ANT has such a dim view of critique and finally I will introduce four different kinds of critique within ANT. ANT as a critique of natural science, ANT as a non-critique of design, ANT as a critique of theories of society and finally ANT as a speculative critique of social practices

The Proof Is In the Pudding. On 'Truth to Materials' in STS, Followed by an Attempt to Improve It

What could it mean to use cooking as a medium or translation device for sociology? Why is the use of media other than writing so unusual in sociology, but not in other sciences? The sociology of translation has made the claim that sociology should stay true to its object. Rather than jumping into abstractions, sociology should translate its object step by step. I show, that if this holds, then the sociology of translation fails its own claim to what I call “truth to materials”, because in its practice it engages in jumps in media from objects, such as food, image or body, to text. Instead, I propose to take the issue of truth to materials more serious by engaging, as other sciences, more directly with the senses. What prevents the sociology of translation from doing so is a belief in mechanical objectivity that excludes all other forms of translation except texts. For the case of taste, this suggests to engage in cooking. In the second part of the text I provide an attempt to create such more nuanced translations in the form of a buffet that we cooked as comment to a symposium. Some of the issues that were discussed with the help of the buffet were new kitchen technologies, the relationship between the visual and the olfactory, and the relationship between knowledge and taste

Are academic spin-offs really doing science?

"Organisations make an indispensable contribution to reproducing functional systems. Can this also be said of organisations with multiple systemic ties? In considering this issue, this paper looks at the example of academic spin-offs. On the basis of qualitative interviews with people involved in founding spin-offs from non-university research institutes in Germany, the authors investigate the extent to which such firms help reproduce the structural characteristics of science. The theoretical yield of this study is the linkage of systems-theoretical and practice-theoretical perspectives." (author's abstract)"Organisationen leisten unverzichtbare Beiträge zur Reproduktion von Funktionssystemen, aber trifft das auch für mehrfach systemisch gebundene Organisationen zu? Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht diese Frage am Beispiel akademischer Ausgründungen. Auf der Grundlage von qualitativen Interviews mit Personen, die an Firmengründungen aus außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen in Deutschland beteiligt waren, wird gezeigt, inwiefern diese Firmen dazu beitragen, Strukturmerkmale des Wissenschaftssystems zu reproduzieren. Der theoretische Ertrag dieser Analyse besteht in einer Verknüpfung von systemtheoretischen und praxistheoretischen Perspektiven." (Autorenreferat

Making Taste Public: Industrialized Orders of Sensing and the Democratic Potential of Experimental Eating

Existing discussions of food democracy focus on people’s freedom to choose healthy, sustainable, or otherwise ‘good’ foods. Such foods are supposed to be unrestrained by oligopolistic structures of food supply, economic inequality, misinformation, or the misleading lobbying campaigns of the food industry. Our article aims to broaden the discussion about food democracy: focusing on people’s freedom to choose the food they want, but also on people’s freedom to engage with what they eat and how they want to eat it. This thematizes collective orders of sensing and, more specifically, taste. Based on pragmatist and praxeological studies we pose that tasting food is a matter of historically grown collective practices. In a second step, we assert that the reflexive shaping of such practices is currently dominated by the food industry and related forms of sensory science. Democratizing taste is a matter of people’s capacity to self-govern how they experience and enjoy food. To this end, we suggest the approach of ‘experimental eating’ as a way to question and reflexively engage with embodied forms of tasting. We report on the development of methods that, in a next step, are to be combined for a participatory exhibition inviting people to experimentally reconfigure their habitual tasting practices and experience agency in matters of shaping taste. The exhibition makes taste public by demonstrating the construction of sensory experience in eating practices. It positions taste as a collective issue which every human being can experiment with—and thus to contest the governance of taste as currently exercised by industrial corporations and scientific experts