Objective Styles in Northern Field Science

Social studies of science have often treated natural field sites as extensions of the laboratory. But this overlooks the unique specificities of field sites. While lab sites are usually private spaces with carefully controlled borders, field sites are more typically public spaces with fluid boundaries and diverse inhabitants. Field scientists must therefore often adapt their work to the demands and interests of local agents. I propose to address the difference between lab and field in sociological terms, as a difference in style. A field style treats epistemic alterity as a resource rather than an obstacle for objective knowledge production. A sociological stylistics of the field should thus explain how objective science can co-exist with radical conceptual difference. I discuss examples from the Canadian North, focussing on collaborations between state wildlife biologists and managers, on the one hand, and local Aboriginal Elders and hunters, on the other. I argue that a sociological stylistics of the field can help us to better understand how radically diverse agents may collaborate across cultures in the successful production of reliable natural knowledge

Students make a plan: understanding student agency in constraining conditions

Drawing on Archer’s perspectives on the agency / structure relationship, this paper explains situations where students in varied, challenging circumstances find ways to negotiate difficult conditions. The paper firstly reports specific findings of a study on student access and use of technology in three universities in South Africa; and then uses Archer’s concept of agency to explain the findings. The context of the study is a South African higher education system clearly committed to preparing university students for participation in the knowledge society as is evident in numerous policy documents. However, the response to this rapid worldwide social and economic transformation has occurred simultaneously with the substantial restructuring of a fragmented, divided and unequal sector, the legacy of racially demarcated and differentially resourced apartheid institutions (Department of Education, 2001, Gillard, 2004). Additionally, social demands on South African higher education institutions have intensified in recent years. Increased participation by a diverse range of students has resulted in massification of the sector within a context of limited or even reduced funding (Maasen and Cloete, 2002). As is the case internationally, there are both more and different students entering the sector

A wolf enters the field of the arts in Wanganui after the 2004 local body elections : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University

This research uses a Bourdieuian framework to explore 'the collision' between the fields of local government and the arts at the symbolic site of the Sarjeant Art Gallery in Wanganui, New Zealand. The Sarjeant Gallery Extension Project, conceptualised to make the Gallery more accessible and inclusive, had 84% of the necessary funds committed when it became a key issue in the 2004 local body elections. Once elected the new Mayor, who opposed the Project, swiftly undertook an intensive media campaign to discredit it. Within weeks, the entire Sarjeant Gallery Trust Board had resigned, the Extension Project was abandoned and the artists of the town were profoundly shocked. In response to these acts of symbolic violence by the Mayor, the artists developed a number of strategies that were ultimately unsuccessful in reviving the Project. Pierre Bourdieu's conception of the social space as a site of struggle between fields for the many different kinds of capital he identified resonates with the aim of this research, which was to explore the possible causes and consequences of this monumental clash of fields. Undertaken in three phases, the first two stages of the research mapped the field of the arts in Wanganui and documented the events of 'the collision'. These set the scene for the fieldwork, which took the form of structured interviews with eight agents from the field of the arts who had been involved in devising strategies to respond to the attacks on their field. Bourdieu's analysis of the field of the arts as autonomous explains why its agents looked for support for the Sarjeant Gallery Extension Project from the national field of the arts instead of its own social space. This meant that the Project never gained the wide support and political leadership it needed to take it through to completion and that calling on funding from local government became fraught with difficulty even though the Project was predicated on social inclusion. His notion of habitus, an unspoken set of values and beliefs within fields, explains why the agents within the field of the arts responded the way they did to the attack on their symbolic capital, with some agents abandoning the site of struggle and others engaging in strategies that were ultimately ineffective in constructing an included and supportive public that could have persuaded the politicians of Wanganui to invest in art

Organizational alternatives for flexible manufacturing systems

There is an increasing importance of different productive architectures related to worker involvement in the decision making, where is given due attention to the intuitive capabilities and the human knowledge in the optimization and flexibilization of manufacturing processes. Thus having reference point architecture of a flexible manufacturing and assembling system existent at UNINOVA-CRI, we will present some exploratory hypothesis about applicability of the concept of hybridization and its repercussions on the definition of jobs, in those organizations and in the formation of working teams.flexibility; robotics; work organization; manufacturing industry

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur

Transnational Private Regulatory Governance: Ambiguities of Public Authority and Private Power

The continuing proliferation of transnational private regulatory governance challenges conceptions of legal authority, legitimacy and public regulation of economic activity. The transnational law merchant or, lex mercatoria, is a case in point in this context, as it represents a laboratory for the exploration of “private” contractual governance in a context, in which the assertion of public or private authority has itself become contentious. The ambiguity surrounding many forms of today’s contractual governance in the transnational arena echoes that of the far-reaching transformation of public regulatory governance, which has been characteristic of Western welfare states over the last few decades. What is particularly remarkable, however, is the way in which the depictions of “private instruments” and “public interests” in the post-welfare state regulatory environment have given rise to a rise in importance of social norms, self-regulation and a general anti-state affect in the assessment of judicial enforcement or administration of contractual arrangements. The paper suggests the need to short-circuit and to read in parallel the justifications offered for a contractual governance model, which prioritizes and seeks to insulate “private” arrangements from their embeddedness in regulated market contexts, on both the national and transnational level