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1.
This article explores the cultural framings that all too frequently pass un-noticed in standard cost-benefit accounts of development economics. Our purpose is not simply to add our voice to those who argue for the importance of ‘bringing culture back in’, for we assume that in contexts of modern development economics ‘the cultural’ cannot simply be added to the technical or the economic, as these perspectives are explicitly elaborated as an abstraction from the cultural. Rather, we are interested in how an exploration of the cultural dynamics of technical process leads us to a disjunctive (rather than an additive) mode of ‘inclusion’. Building on approaches from science studies and social anthropology, we draw on our ethnographic and historical investigations of road-building in Peru to explore divergent modes of connectivity through which a politics of cultural engagement is played out. Taking the example of a highway under construction in a frontier zone not generally considered of economic importance to the wider national economy, we discuss the historical desire for ‘connectivity’, highlighting the instability of the physical and social environments on the margins of a marginal state. In this context we find that the vital energies of the frontier – entrepreneurial, innovative, experimental and unruly – consistently disrupt the vision of smooth, orderly, technical integration. We argue that this tension between the cultural and the technical, so clearly manifest at the frontiers of capitalist expansion (but characteristic of technological expansion more generally) is a driver rather than an obstacle in the development process. Attempts to produce a political resolution to a perceived lack of integration on the margins of society too often proceed through further attempts at securing smooth continuity (via further technical modes of intervention) rather than building on the diverse (disjunctive) modes of engagement that already exist.  相似文献   

2.
John Downer 《Minerva》2017,55(2):229-248
Publics and policymakers increasingly have to contend with the risks of complex, safety-critical technologies, such as airframes and reactors. As such, ‘technological risk’ has become an important object of modern governance, with state regulators as core agents, and ‘reliability assessment’ as the most essential metric. The Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature casts doubt on whether or not we should place our faith in these assessments because predictively calculating the ultra-high reliability required of such systems poses seemingly insurmountable epistemological problems. This paper argues that these misgivings are warranted in the nuclear sphere, despite evidence from the aviation sphere suggesting that such calculations can be accurate. It explains why regulatory calculations that predict the reliability of new airframes cannot work in principle, and then it explains why those calculations work in practice. It then builds on this explanation to argue that the means by which engineers manage reliability in aviation is highly domain-specific, and to suggest how a more nuanced understanding of jetliners could inform debates about nuclear energy.  相似文献   

3.
In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.  相似文献   

4.
The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics – that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events.  相似文献   

5.
Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.  相似文献   

6.
Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.  相似文献   

7.
In this paper, I contest the analytic relevance of the term ‘eurocentrism’ to the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation by examining a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’. The clash of these two concepts is explored in a controversial review of Gayatri Spivak's latest book by Terry Eagleton. I argue that Eagleton's understanding of Marxist theory implies an intellectual placed at the centre of a sphere of cognitive sovereignty, and that his critique of Spivak consists in suggesting that, by removing herself from this centre, she has rendered her own discourse unintelligible. In contrast, Spivak, as (in part) a poststructuralist, emphasises space over place. I discuss the gains and losses – as well as the dangers – involved in such an emphasis, and conclude by insisting that poststructuralism cannot be a universally applicable meta-theory, but is in fact ideally suited to attesting to the place in which it finds itself.  相似文献   

8.
ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘demonic’ or rather eschatological elements apparent in the promissory twin rhetoric of disruption and inevitability that a number of contemporary technology firms employ. The conjuring up of liberatory high-tech futures implicates a political-philosophical perspective of the end game. It utilizes at once the productive power of uncertainty to create visions of ‘absolute riches’ and societal gain but at the same time narrows these futures down to one inevitable alternative to the status quo. Through the examples of two Silicon Valley disruptor firms, I argue that these eschatological narratives need to be opened to social scientific critique in order to examine their potential societal consequences above and beyond the narrow geographic confines of ‘the Valley.’  相似文献   

9.
The paper describes a new method for indexing an Arabo-Moresque decor database. This method requires that the images in the database must have the whole principal geometric information, named ‘spine’ of the decor. In practice, it is difficult to respect this request. When the distance between the camera and the real scene (fresco in Zellij) is big, the whole spine is captured but the resolution of the image is bad. On the other hand, when this distance is small, the resolution is high but the spine is not completely captured. This motivates the use of the ‘mosaicing’ technique. The contribution of this work is the combination of the mosaicing and indexing techniques for the development of an Arabo-Moresque decor image retrieval system.  相似文献   

10.
Abstract

The historian Carlo Ginzburg is renowned for his critique of modern, scientific reason and his articulation of an alternative form of knowledge which he labels ‘conjectural’. This form of knowledge, supposedly more attuned to the historian’s interest in the singular and specific fragment, as opposed to the abstract and universal concept, is so rooted in the practices of the prehistoric hunter that Ginzburg sometimes describes it as a ‘venatic’ form of deduction, binding ‘the human animal closely to other animal species’. In this essay, I explore the ramifications of this alternative form of knowledge, attending especially to its relationship to the modernist theme of ‘primitivism’. I do so by juxtaposing Ginzburg’s critical appraisal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, and Rudolph Fisher’s own literary invention, John Archer, the physician who sometimes aids criminal investigations in African American Harlem. I argue that the differences between Archer and Holmes draw attention to some troubling implications of Ginzburg’s historiographical argument. Folding this analysis on itself, however, I also suggest that what might be at stake, when Ginzburg insists so troublingly on the importance of the singular, venatic trace, is the evocation of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historical ‘event’.  相似文献   

11.
This paper studies the behavior of commercial television broadcasters in markets where the distribution of viewer tastes varies. Our results show that a highly “clustered” market enables the broadcaster to offer a program of a popular type but with lower quality (i.e., lower production values) than is the case when viewers have more diffused tastes. We find that viewer equity in the television market (i.e., the percentage of all potential viewers who have at least one program they consider worth watching) and viewer welfare (i.e., total consumer surplus) may not coincide. Depending upon the distribution of viewer tastes and the cost of providing quality programming, the number of broadcasters required to fully cover the market to avoid market failure may be greater than the number of broadcasters that produce greater viewer welfare. The study suggests that regulatory bodies need to pay attention to the distribution pattern of viewer tastes and the broadcasters' desire for return on programming investments, since both factors have important implications for competitive outcomes and viewer well-being.  相似文献   

12.
ABSTRACT

Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.  相似文献   

13.
ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.  相似文献   

14.
Abstract

This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother's experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one's identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.  相似文献   

15.
In this essay we argue that there is an important but frequently overlooked link between Walter Benjamin’s and Julia Kristeva’s attempts to explore new modes of critical practice. What connects Benjamin and Kristeva, in our account, is a vital concern with the cost of critique, that is, with the question whether critical agency in its most productive modes is inherently related to certain forms of ethical violence. We aim to show that, once we read them together, these authors’ pivotal contribution consists of offering an alternative model of critique animated by an ethos of in(ter)-vention, which is keyed to techniques of criticism that are both disruptive and innovative. Ethical violence here refers to a strategic displacement of moral self-perception, which undercuts people’s aspirations toward maintaining a morally robust character in the face of political adversity and social injustice. To illustrate the stakes of such displacement, we turn to the figure of the ‘anti-journalist’ Karl Kraus whose in(ter)ventions display integrity in action rather than integrity of character. Specifically, under the rubric of ethical violence, we propose a dynamic interpretation of Kraus’ performance in terms of polemical witnessing, which combines the corrosive aspects of Benjamin’s ‘destructive character’ with the constructive aspects contained in Kristeva’s notions of ‘sharing singularity’ and ‘intimate revolt’.  相似文献   

16.
Reflecting a wider trend in the social sciences, the field of organization studies has adopted an increasingly general and metaphysical vocabulary to guide and frame its analyses of life and dynamics in organizations. Where classic organizational analyses would describe organizations in terms of core objects such as ‘task’ and ‘coordination,’ contemporary organization studies emphasize, much like other social science disciplines, broader topics such as ‘network,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘change.’ The paper argues that this altered focus and vocabulary is accompanied by a diminished ability to specify and intervene into the practical reality of organizations. It further argues that a discipline's core objects are not anachronisms to be discarded with, but crucial for specifying reality in ways that have proven practically relevant and still are.  相似文献   

17.
The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, messy and sometimes contradictory understandings of value, values, worth and goodness that are present in the calculative device of Punternet reveal the complex ways in which market actions are made moral by consumers. ‘Value’ in the market for sex is a moral judgement made by male authors whose understandings of themselves as deserving customers derives from the stories they tell of good and bad service providers. Although the moral status of prostitution is contested by many, Punternet reports lay claim to it being a legitimate consumer activity, with customers themselves vulnerable to being denied ‘value for money’. The good worker is seen as providing value for money by being professional, committed to pleasing the customer and appearing to enjoy her job.  相似文献   

18.
GOOD TASTE     
In political theory citizens are defined as being willing to serve the ‘common good’ while consumers are supposed to seek ‘pleasure’. The two terms pull in different directions, so that adding a hyphen is not enough to craft a figure capable of acting in ways that are generous as well as gratifying. This, or so I will argue, is linked with the understanding of the body that lurks in the background. The idea is that the body is naturally greedy. It only acts ‘properly’ if norms are imposed on it from the outside. To interfere with this understanding, I seek help from advertisements for ‘good food’ as well as from ethnographic research into the way bodily pleasure (rather than being innate) is being shaped in socio-material practices. It might as well be shaped in wise, sensitive and responsive ways. This leads me to suggest that, in theory, we experiment with a ‘consumer-citizen’ whose normativity is literally incorporated. I propose that, despite the caveats, we might call this normativity good taste.  相似文献   

19.
Amongst the many calls for regulatory reform voiced in the wake of the global financial crisis, the contributions of Andrew G. Haldane and his colleagues at the Bank of England stand out as some of the most politically and intellectually ambitious. In 2009, Haldane, the Bank's Executive Director of Financial Stability, delivered a speech advocating the integration of complex systems theory (particularly as developed in the field of ecosystems science) into the toolkit of financial regulation. In an effort to understand what is at stake in such calls for theoretical and regulatory regime change, this article traces the prehistory of complex systems thinking in economics. It focuses special attention on two contributions to this minor tradition – the little-known later work of the Austrian neoliberal, Friedrich von Hayek, who elaborated a philosophy of spontaneous economic order on the basis of complex systems theory, and the more recent work of the so-called ‘new institutionalists’, economists who lay claim to the tradition of ‘evolutionary’ philosophy articulated by the neoclassical Alfred Marshall. These exemplary currents in economic complexity theory articulate very similar critiques of the neoclassical orthodoxy yet diverge sharply in their political commitments. This paper situates recent calls to import complexity theory into financial regulation in ambivalent tension between the Austrian and new institutionalist traditions. It concludes with some skeptical reflections on the notion that the financial crisis signals the ‘death of neoliberalism’.  相似文献   

20.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.  相似文献   

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