Die Ethnomethodologie umzirkeln. Karin Knorr-Cetina im Gespräch mit Hannes Krämer & René Salomon

In dem nachfolgenden Interview spricht Karin KNORR-CETINA über ihre Erfahrungen und Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Buch "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (GARFINKEL 1967) und dem intellektuellen Umfeld des Buches in den USA sowie in Deutschland. Sie unterscheidet eine orthodoxe ethnomethodologische Linie von einer offeneren Perspektive, die generell die kompetente Hervorbringung alltagsweltlicher Prozesse ernst nimmt und von der Ethnomethodologie (EM) beeinflusst ist, ohne dass die Forschungsperspektive unbedingt so benannt wird. Zugleich diskutiert sie die methodologischen Implikationen der Ethnomethodologie für die qualitative Sozialforschung im Allgemeinen und der Ethnografie im Speziellen. In diesem Zusammenhang identifiziert sie originelle methodologische Annahmen der EM, die sie auch heute noch zu einer aktuellen Forschungsperspektive machen (Alltagsweltlichkeit, Langsamkeit, Anti-Interpretativität). Schließlich verortet KNORR-CETINA die Ethnomethodologie in der Diskussion um neuere Sozialtheorien wie etwa die Praxistheorie

The politics of valuation and payment for regenerative medicine products in the UK

The field of regenerative medicine (RM) faces many challenges, including funding. Framing the analysis in terms of institutional politics, valuation studies and ‘technologies of knowledge’, the paper highlights growing debates about payment for RM in the UK, setting this alongside escalating policy debates about ‘value’. We draw on interviews and publicly available material to identify the interacting and conflicting positions of institutional stakeholders. It is concluded that while there is some common ground between institutional stakeholders such as industry and health system gatekeepers, there is significant conflict about reward systems, technology assessment methodologies and payment scenarios; a range of mostly conditional payment schemes and non-mainstream routes are being experimented with. We argue that current developments highlight a fundamental conflict between a concern for the societal value of medical technologies in a resource-limited system and a concern for engineering new reward and payment models to accommodate RM innovations

Epistemic communities in universities

The creation of new knowledge, as evidenced by trends in research publications is increasingly a collaborative affair. However, the epistemological assumptions underlying how we see knowledge are predominantly based on a view of knowledge as created and owned by individuals who may then ‘trade’ this ‘commodity’. These assumptions permeate the way we try to manage knowledge creation and dissemination – an issue of increasing centrality for universities. This paper examines the concept of epistemic communities from the strategic view of universities wishing to augment their role as knowledge producers and disseminators. It shines a light on underlying assumptions about the nature of knowledge and offers some alternative more socially oriented views to the prevailing individualist orthodoxy. The paper draws on a range of current studies and quotes expert witnesses to inform how universities could better widen their capacity for novel research, reaching out to a geographically dispersed network of experts and across national and organisational frontiers

Academic "Centres", Epistemic Differences and Brain Circulation

This article investigates the factors that shape how migrant academics engage with fellow scholars within their countries of origin. We focus specifically on the mobility of Asian‐born faculty between Singapore, a fast‐developing education hub in Southeast Asia, and their "home" countries within the region. Based on qualitative interviews with 45 migrant academics, this article argues that while education hubs like Singapore increase the possibility of brain circulation within Asia, epistemic differences between migrant academics and home country counterparts make it difficult to establish long‐term collaboration for research. Singapore institutions also look to the West in determining how research work is assessed for tenure and promotion, encouraging Singapore‐based academics to focus on networking with colleagues and peers based in the US and Europe rather than those based in origin countries. Such conditions undermine the positive impact of academic mobility between Singapore and surrounding countries within the region

Corporal diagnostic work and diagnostic spaces: Clinicians' use of space and bodies during diagnosis

© 2015 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.An emerging body of literature in sociology has demonstrated that diagnosis is a useful focal point for understanding the social dimensions of health and illness. This article contributes to this work by drawing attention to the relationship between diagnostic spaces and the way in which clinicians use their own bodies during the diagnostic process. As a case study, we draw upon fieldwork conducted with a multidisciplinary clinical team providing deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat children with a movement disorder called dystonia. Interviews were conducted with team members and diagnostic examinations were observed. We illustrate that clinicians use communicative body work and verbal communication to transform a material terrain into diagnostic space, and we illustrate how this diagnostic space configures forms of embodied 'sensing-and-acting' within. We argue that a 'diagnosis' can be conceptualised as emerging from an interaction in which space, the clinician-body, and the patient-body (or body-part) mutually configure one another. By conceptualising diagnosis in this way, this article draws attention to the corporal bases of diagnostic power and counters Cartesian-like accounts of clinical work in which the patient-body is objectified by a disembodied medical discourse.The Wellcome Trust (Wellcome Trust Biomedical Strategic Award 086034