Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

In 1995, the Dutch Minister of Health proposed that a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with heroin-maintenance for severe abusers be conducted. It took nearly four years of lengthy debates before the Dutch Parliament consented to the plan. Apart from the idea of prescribing heroin, the minister and her scientific advisers had to defend the quite high material and non-material costs that would arise from employing the randomized controlled design. They argued that the RCT represented the truly scientific approach and was (...) the royal way to unambiguous results. In the present article, I question this common dual justification of RCTs. First, I situate the historical origins and the basic assumptions of the ideal experiment in 20th-century economic liberalism. Secondly, using the Dutch heroin experiment as an example, I discuss human-science experimentation as an attempt to create reality rather than merely record it. Finally, I discuss some surprising responses by heroin users. These responses display the assumptions of RCTs discussed in the historical section, and underline the importance of the culture of heroin use. In the epilogue, I suggest that cultural aspects of heroin consumption can best be studied by thorough ethnographic research. (shrink)

Developments in biomedical science continue to transform our understanding of concepts such as health and disease. The creation of this expertise has also had a substantive role in changing the veterinary approach to animal diseases. Traditionally, companion animal veterinarians modelled their practices on developments in the diagnosis and treatment of human patients. As science and technology have realigned the boundaries between normalcy, intra-species variation and pathology in particular domains of expertise such as orthopaedic surgery, these patterns of knowledge translation have (...) changed. Not so long ago, treatments for the rupture of the cruciate ligament in human and canine patients were based on pathoanatomical comparison and designed to reestablish the stability of the joint by the functional restoration of ligament anatomy. Recently, a radically different characterization of the canine injury—with a corresponding alternative intervention—has been proposed within the field of veterinary orthopaedics. It views the normal anatomy of the canine knee as being in some way inherently pathogenic and proposes the surgical creation of an idealized structure as a remedy to dysfunction and disease. The veterinary focus on an ideal of patient performance, rather than a specific pathology, is now influencing how orthopaedists choose to approach analogous human injuries. In this article, I chart the history of canine ‘cruciate disease’ therapies as a means to map some of the epistemic assumptions, interplays of idealized and analogical reasoning and patterns of knowledge translation central to the biomedicalization of the science and practice of orthopaedic surgery. (shrink)

In this brief essay, we combine biological, historical, philosophical and anthropological perspectives to ask anew the question about the nature of the virus. How should we understand Sars-CoV-2 and why does it matter? The argument we present is that the virus undermines any neat distinction between the natural and the human-made, the biological and the social. Rather, to understand the virus and the pandemic we need to understand both as intimately connected to our own social and historical condition. What started (...) as a reflection on the nature of the virus thus turns into a reflection on the human condition as refracted in this pandemic or an anthropology of the virus. (shrink)

Scholars have revealed how moral evaluation is woven into formal administrative processes. While research examining these dynamics tends to assume that a person’s naturalized identity (such as race and gender) precedes administrative processing, we argue that social categorization by administrators is the tacit precondition upon which further processing takes place. We make this argument by looking at a set of unusual cases: parole hearings where prisoners fall outside of, conflict with, or move between categories of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. (...) We find that categorization acts as a prerequisite to moral evaluation. When administrators cannot easily categorize a prisoner, they resolve this uncertainty by denying parole. Yet, social categorization can also serve as a pathway to moral approval and administrative allocation. In certain situations, administrators encourage prisoners’ identification with a new social category as proof that they are deserving of parole. In both cases, successful administrative categorization occurs through a combination of what we call narrativization, or crafting a narrative around one’s identity that aligns with administrators’ presumptions, and authorization, or marshalling official evidence from prior classification moments to support identity claims. These insights extend our understanding of classification, moral evaluation, and the administrative reproduction of inequality. (shrink)

Large-scale data systems are increasingly envisioned as tools for justice, with big data analytics offering a key opportunity to advance health equity. Health systems face growing public pressure to collect data on patient “social factors,” and advocates and public officials seek to leverage such data sources as a means of system transformation. Despite the promise of this “data-driven” strategy, there is little empirical work that examines big data in action directly within the sites of care expected to transform. In this (...) article, I present a case study on one such initiative, focusing on a large public safety-net health system’s initiation of sexual orientation and gender identity data collection within the clinical setting. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with providers, staff, and administrators, I highlight three main challenges that elude big data’s grasp on inequality: provider and staff’s limited understanding of the social significance of data collection; patient perception of the cultural insensitivity of data items; and clinic need to balance data requests with competing priorities within a constrained time window. These issues reflect structural challenges within safety-net care that big data alone are unable to address in advancing social justice. I discuss these findings by considering the present data-driven strategy alongside two complementary courses of action: diversifying the health professions workforce and clinical education reform. To truly advance justice, we need more than “just data”: we need to confront the fundamental conditions of social inequality. (shrink)

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization, a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven (...) management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education. (shrink)

If capitalism is being increasingly understood as performative and processual, and if these understandings are being folded into capitalism's production of itself, what place does gender have in performing the commercial world? This article argues that the significance of gender as genre or type has been overlooked in the recent literature on the performance of the market or market relations. While the role of economic theories and management practices in making markets has been examined, and the place of women in (...) organizations has been explored, little attention has been paid to how gender as a productive process marks the creation and maintenance of market relations. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of the advertising industry, I examine how advertising practitioners incorporate vitalist understandings of market relations and of knowledge-producing activities into their practices. Framed as `creativity' and `innovation', these discursive practices perform what practitioners understand as a reproductive function in commercial life. (shrink)

As an instrument for participatory technology development, Scenario-Based Design offers significant potential for an early inclusion of future users. Over the course of a 3-year research project, this method was examined as a procedure for participatory technology development. Methods and instruments aimed at achieving a potential user’s participation, and the resulting cooperation of heterogeneous social groups can be seen as translation tools. Their purpose is to act as translators between different social fields and the specific knowledge associated with them. These (...) translation capabilities and participatory methods should result in the best possible convergence of different orientations and purposes. In this paper, attempting to achieve the best possible convergence is described as a dilemma of alignment. Several approaches will be used to describe the dynamic of the alignment dilemma within the above-mentioned project. The reconstruction follows one question that is proposed as a heuristic pattern to meet the requirements of an accurate analysis of holistic participatory methods: Who or what has to adjust to whom or what, why, when, and in which way? The main conclusions include the finding that the alignment dilemma is not equally balanced, that the agency of epistemic objects within the process has to be captured, and that it is easy for translation—provided primarily by core instruments of the participatory method used—to begin to overwrite the needs and purposes of one social group with the interests and orientations of another. (shrink)

This article focuses on emotions, conceptualised as emotional labour, evoked during data practices used to repurpose and enable healthcare data journeys for Finnish public healthcare. Combined approaches from critical data studies and the sociology of emotions were used to contribute to a better understanding of the mundane but often invisible work of the emotions of experts involved in data practices, such as facilitating data journeys and building data technologies. The article is based on a two-and-a-half-year ethnographic study conducted in a (...) Finnish regional public healthcare and social service organisation. The study results were derived from the analysis of 39 interviews and fieldnotes produced by observing 170 h of various meetings, events and work activities performed by experts. The results were organised into three forms of observed experts’ emotional labour related to three phases of healthcare data journeys: caring for data production and preparing data for travel, managing excitement and frustration in data processing for continually building the data management system, and reassuring users in making sense of obtained data analytics. The results contribute to a greater understanding of the emotions and emotional labour generated by healthcare data journeys and in relation to the volatile nature of healthcare data and the collaborative character of data practices. This work advocates for a better recognition of the emotional aspects of data practices and their implications on data-based knowledge and datafication processes in healthcare. (shrink)

Proclaimed the “greenest television programme in the world,” the award-winning soap opera Coronation Street is seen as an industry success story. This paper explores how the integration of carbon literacy training led to a widespread transformational change of practice within Coronation Street. Using the theoretical lens of Communities of Practice, this study examines the nature of social learning and the enablers and barriers to change within the organization. Specifically, how boundary spanning practices, objects and people led to the transformation on (...) both a personal and group level. Based on a qualitative analysis of 22 interviews with Heads of Departments and other staff, the paper argues that CLT is a boundary practice which has evolved into a boundary spanning CoP. The importance of infrastructures supporting boundary objects and practices is highlighted as reinforcers of the CLT, both as a boundary object and a community, with the “ultimate” boundary spanning object being the show. A significant enabler in social learning and change in practice is the creation of discursive and creative space, both within CoP and across the boundaries. Findings also highlight the role of “self” in the process of social learning and organizational change. Distinct patterns emerged in the relationship between self-identity, social learning and change across a range of boundary objects, practices and communities both in the CLT and CoP. This suggests that in a diverse social learning setting such as CLT there are different transformational catalysts within the CoP and these identities can influence how knowledge is translated into practice. (shrink)

The idea of transformative and troublesome ‘threshold concepts’ has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the ‘concept of thresholds’ in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted through established materialising discourses in different disciplinary settings and enacted through pedagogical practice, technology and assessment. This has implications for professional development and pedagogical practice and endeavours to create ‘self-organising classrooms’ along Deleuzian (...) lines. (shrink)

Abstract As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, “‘There’s an App for That’: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as “the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work” or progressive effects such as how “technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces.” (...) In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature . Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0048-1 Authors Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 429A Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

Laplace once argued that if one could “comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated,” it would be possible to predict the future and explain the past. The advent of analysis of large-scale data sets has been accompanied by newfound concerns about “Laplace’s Demon” as it relates to certain fields of science as well as management, evaluation, and audit. I begin by asking how statistical data are constructed, illustrating the hermeneutic acts necessary to create a variable. These include attributing (...) a certain characteristic to a particular phenomenon, isolating the characteristic of interest, and assigning a value to it. In addition, a population must be identified and a sample must be “taken” from that population. Next, I examine how statistical analyses are conducted, examining the interpretive acts there as well. In each case, I show how big data add new challenges. I then show how statistics are incorporated into audits and evaluations, emphasizing how alternative interpretations are concealed in the audit process. I conclude by noting that these issues cannot be “resolved” as Laplace suggested. His Demon, already banished from physics, needs to be banished from other fields of science, management, audits, and evaluations as well. (shrink)

This article considers the issue of opacity as a problem for socially consequential mechanisms of classification and ranking, such as spam filters, credit card fraud detection, search engines, news trends, market segmentation and advertising, insurance or loan qualification, and credit scoring. These mechanisms of classification all frequently rely on computational algorithms, and in many cases on machine learning algorithms to do this work. In this article, I draw a distinction between three forms of opacity: opacity as intentional corporate or state (...) secrecy, opacity as technical illiteracy, and an opacity that arises from the characteristics of machine learning algorithms and the scale required to apply them usefully. The analysis in this article gets inside the algorithms themselves. I cite existing literatures in computer science, known industry practices, and do some testing and manipulation of code as a form of lightweight code audit. I argue that recognizing the distinct forms of opacity that may be coming into play in a given application is a key to determining which of a variety of technical and non-technical solutions could help to prevent harm. (shrink)

Who can still keep a secret in a world in which everyone and everything are connected by technology aimed at charting and cross-referencing people, objects, movements, behaviour, relationships, tastes and preferences? The possibilities to keep a secret have come under severe pressure in the information age. That goes for the individual as well as the state. This development merits attention as secrecy is foundational for individual freedom as well as essential to the functioning of the state. Building on Simmel’s work (...) on secrecy, this paper argues that the individual’s secrets should be saved from the ever-expanding digital transparency. The legitimate function of state secrecy in turn needs rescuing from a culture of secrecy and over-classification that has exploded in recent years. Contrary to popular expectation, the digital revolution adds another layer of secrecy that is increasingly hidden behind the facade of the ‘big usable systems’ we work and play with every day. Our dependence on information systems and their black-boxed algorithmic analytical core leads to a certain degree of Weberian enchantment that may increase the disconnect between the system, user and object. (shrink)

The development of territorology requires the overcoming of the dichotomy between determinist and constructivist approaches, in order to advance towards a general science of territory and territorial phenomena. Insights for this task can come from at least four main threads of research: biology, zooethology and human ethology; human ecology, social psychology and interactionism; human, political and legal geography; and philosophy. In light of the insights derived from these traditions, the article aims to conceptualize territorial components, technologies, movements, effects, and their (...) interplay, in order to establish the main lines of inquiry for territorology. A general territorology, it is argued, amounts to a sociology of territorial acts and relations, whose aim is to analyze the expressive and functional components of territories, as fixed through their organizational and technological devices. (shrink)

It is a truism that the design and deployment of information and communication technologies is vital to everyday life, the conduct of work and to social order. But how are individual, organisational and societal choices made? What might it mean to invoke a politics and an ethics of information technology design and use? This editorial paper situates these questions within the trajectory of preoccupations and approaches to the design and deployment of information technology since computerisation began in the 1940s. Focusing (...) upon the dominant concerns over the last three decades, the paper delineates an interest in design and use in relation to socio-technical theories, situated practices and actor-network theory. It is argued that each of these approaches is concerned with a particular form of politics that does not explicitly engage with ethics. In order to introduce ethics into contemporary debates about information technology, and to frame the papers in the special issue, it is argued that Levinas’ ethics is particularly valuable in problematising the relationship between politics and ethics. Levinas provides a critique of modernity’s emphasis on politics and the egocentric self. It is from a Levinasian concern with the Other and the primacy of the ethical that a general rethinking of the relationship between politics, ethics and justice in relation to information and communication technologies can be invoked. (shrink)

This article examines the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its claim of incorporating a “greater cultural sensitivity.” The analysis reveals that the manual conveys mixed messages as it explicitly addresses the critique of being ethnocentric and having a static notion of culture yet continues in a similar fashion when culture is applied in diagnostic criteria. The analysis also relates to current trends in psychiatric nosology that emphasize neurobiology and decontextualize distress and points to how (...) the DSM-5 risks serving as an ethnic dividing line in psychiatry by making sociocultural context relevant only for some patients. (shrink)

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider (...) socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended. (shrink)

Healthcare organizations and workers are under pressure to produce increasingly complete and accurate data for multiple data-intensive endeavors. However, little research has examined the emerging occupations arising to carry out the data work necessary to produce “improved” data sets, or the specific work activities of these emerging data occupations. We describe the work of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists, an emerging occupation that focuses on improving clinical documentation to produce more detailed and accurate administrative datasets crucial for evolving data-intensive forms of (...) healthcare accountability, management, and research. Using ethnographic methods, we describe the core of CDIS’ work as a translation practice in which the language, interests, and concerns of clinicians and clinical documentation are translated via real-time “nudging” and ongoing education of clinicians into the language, interests, and concerns of medical coders, structured administrative datasets, and the various stakeholders of these datasets. Further, we show how the institutional context of CDIS’ work shapes the occupational virtues that guide CDIS’ translation practice, including financial reimbursement, quality measures, clinical accuracy, and protecting clinician’s time. Despite the existence of these multiple virtues, financial reimbursement is the most prominent virtue guiding CDIS’ limited attention. Thus, overall clinical documentation is “improved” in specific, partial ways. This research provides one of the first studies of the emergent data work occupations arising in the wake of digitization and big data opportunities, and shows how local data settings shape large scale data in specific ways and thus may influence outcomes of analyses based on such data. (shrink)

Although it is now generally acknowledged that new biomedical technologies often produce new definitions and sometimes even new concepts of disease, this observation is rarely used in research that anticipates potential ethical issues in emerging technologies. This article argues that it is useful to start with an analysis of implied concepts of disease when anticipating ethical issues of biomedical technologies. It shows, moreover, that it is possible to do so at an early stage, i.e. when a technology is only just (...) emerging. The specific case analysed here is that of ‘molecular medicine’. This group of emerging technologies combines a ‘cascade model’ of disease processes with a ‘personal pattern’ model of bodily functioning. Whereas the ethical implications of the first are partly familiar from earlier—albeit controversial—forms of preventive and predictive medicine, those of the second are quite novel and potentially far-reaching. (shrink)

The power of algorithms has become a familiar topic in society, media, and the social sciences. It is increasingly common to argue that, for instance, algorithms automate inequality, that they are biased black boxes that reproduce racism, or that they control our money and information. Implicit in many of these discussions is that algorithms are permeated with normativities, and that these normativities shape society. The aim of this editorial is double: First, it contributes to a more nuanced discussion about algorithms (...) by discussing how we, as social scientists, think about algorithms in relation to five theoretical ideal types. For instance, what does it mean to go under the hood of the algorithm and what does it mean to stay above it? Second, it introduces the contributions to this special theme by situating them in relation to these five ideal types. By doing this, the editorial aims to contribute to an increased analytical awareness of how algorithms are theorized in society and culture. The articles in the special theme deal with algorithms in different settings, ranging from farming, schools, and self-tracking to AIDS, nuclear power plants, and surveillance. The contributions thus explore, both theoretically and empirically, different settings where algorithms are intertwined with normativities. (shrink)

Since the turn of the lastcentury, Michigan farmers, elevators, and stategovernment have used production and processstandards to shape the dry bean industry totheir interests and set a worldwide standardfor quality dry beans. Over the last 20 years,however, multinational agro/food firms haveintroduced their market criteria into standardssetting, and recent changes in Michigan beanstandards largely accommodate the interests ofthese firms. A review of the changes in thesestandards over time allows us to explore howconcepts of accountability and control improveour understanding of changes in (...) the structureand operation of food production and marketing.What is the measure of state governmentaccountability to corporate capital and to thestate's bean farmers? In what ways can farmersuse standards to re-assert their priorities andgain a greater measure of influence overmarketing? What challenges do changing qualitystandards pose for public research as well asfor the institutions representing Michiganfarmers and elevators? (shrink)

Decisions based on algorithmic, machine learning models can be unfair, reproducing biases in historical data used to train them. While computational techniques are emerging to address aspects of these concerns through communities such as discrimination-aware data mining and fairness, accountability and transparency machine learning, their practical implementation faces real-world challenges. For legal, institutional or commercial reasons, organisations might not hold the data on sensitive attributes such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality or disability needed to diagnose and mitigate emergent indirect discrimination-by-proxy, such (...) as redlining. Such organisations might also lack the knowledge and capacity to identify and manage fairness issues that are emergent properties of complex sociotechnical systems. This paper presents and discusses three potential approaches to deal with such knowledge and information deficits in the context of fairer machine learning. Trusted third parties could selectively store data necessary for performing discrimination discovery and incorporating fairness constraints into model-building in a privacy-preserving manner. Collaborative online platforms would allow diverse organisations to record, share and access contextual and experiential knowledge to promote fairness in machine learning systems. Finally, unsupervised learning and pedagogically interpretable algorithms might allow fairness hypotheses to be built for further selective testing and exploration. Real-world fairness challenges in machine learning are not abstract, constrained optimisation problems, but are institutionally and contextually grounded. Computational fairness tools are useful, but must be researched and developed in and with the messy contexts that will shape their deployment, rather than just for imagined situations. Not doing so risks real, near-term algorithmic harm. (shrink)

Health authorities increasingly request that general practitioners use information and communication technologies such as electronic patient records for accountability purposes. This article deals with the use of EPRs among general practitioners in Britain. It examines two ways in which GPs use the EPR for accountability purposes. One way is to generate audit reports on the basis of the information that has been entered into the record. The other is to let the computer intervene in the clinical process through prompts. The (...) article argues that GPs' ambivalence toward using the EPR makes them active in finding ways that turn the EPR into a meaningful tool for them, that is, a tool that helps them provide what they see as good care. The article's main contribution is to show how accountability and autonomy are coproduced; less professional autonomy does not follow from more requests to document one's work. Instead, new forms of autonomy are produced in the sociotechnical network that is made up by health policy and local engagements with patients and technology. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article explores the scientific partnership between geology professor Gerard De Geer and his wife Ebba Hult following their marriage in 1908. De Geer was an influential participant in Swedish academia and international geology. Hult worked as his assistant until his death in 1943. The partnership was beneficial for both spouses, in particular through the semi-private Geochronological Institute, which they controlled. The article argues that marriage was a culturally acknowledged form of collaboration in the academic community, and as such it (...) offered Hult access to geological research. However, the paper also argues that the gendered scientific institutions produced a fractured position. Partly, Hult managed to create her own role as researcher in geochronology. As a woman and a wife, however, she never moved out of her husband's shadow. Gender is understood as a relational category: Hult was an outsider who participated partially in standardized structures which gave great power to her husband and other men. The fact that she shared this status with other women in Swedish science at the time indicates the structural nature of their position. Nevertheless, they all had individual trajectories through academia. Indeed, the study of collaborative couples illustrates the multifaceted links between individual actions and the historical context of science. (shrink)

This article explores human genetic diversity research east of what was the iron curtain. It follows the technique of “genogeographic mapping” back to its early Soviet origins and up to the post-Soviet era. Bringing together the history of genogeographic mapping and genealogies of “nationality” and “race” in the USSR, I discuss how populations and belonging were enacted in late Soviet biological anthropology and human genetics. While genogeography had originally been developed within the early Soviet livestock economy, anthropologists, public health scientists, (...) and medical geneticists reanimated the technique in the late 1960s after the end of the Lysenko era and its ban on classical genetics. In the 1970s, population geneticists pursued a project to compile all genetic data on the USSR population, resulting in a “genogeographic atlas,” consisting of series of tables as well as maps projecting genetic markers onto geographic grids. Following the post-Soviet trajectories of these maps, I examine the ways in which human genetic diversity studies realign with renegotiations of difference in today’s Russian Federation. The exploration of the Soviet case of human genetic diversity research contributes to our understanding of the varied ways in which racializing discourses were entangled in the project of modernization. (shrink)

As algorithms pervade numerous facets of daily life, they are incorporated into systems for increasingly diverse purposes. These systems’ results are often interpreted differently by the designers who created them than by the lay persons who interact with them. This paper offers a proposal for human-centered algorithm design, which incorporates human and social interpretations into the design process for algorithmically based systems. It articulates three specific strategies for doing so: theoretical, participatory, and speculative. Drawing on the author’s work designing and (...) deploying multiple related systems, the paper provides a detailed example of using a theoretical approach. It also discusses findings pertinent to participatory and speculative design approaches. The paper addresses both strengths and challenges for each strategy in helping to center the process of designing algorithmically based systems around humans. (shrink)

This article is about ‘genogeographic’ maps produced by late-Soviet geneticists and published during post-Soviet time. It focuses on the visual and numerical techniques scientists used to project genetic data onto geographic space. Rather than discussing their representational character, I follow these visuals as ‘folded objects’, describing the layering and realigning of measurements and temporalities as well as the shifts in the practices and meanings of genetics. In the 1970s Soviet biological anthropologists transformed scattered data points by means of spatial statistics (...) into visually coherent maps for a ‘genogeographical atlas’, by interpolating data for the entire USSR territory. Computer-aided modelling rendered ‘populations’ as systemic entities and enacted specific cybernetic versions of population, evolution and difference. Tracing the history of their making helps one in understanding what these folded objects hold in store, in terms of data ranging from Russian imperial and colonial anthropology, through early Soviet traditions, to cold war technologies. Folded into those maps in intricate ways, they have co-shaped post-Soviet human genetics as an ever-active site for possible reinscriptions of difference. (shrink)

Statistics constitute the social universe of which they are gathered. The foundation necessary to develop quantified knowledge about society is the population. If quantified knowledge changes society, the question arises on how individuals become to be represented as population. The population has to be extracted from individuals in a process that we call “populationisation.” This encompasses the development of the individual into a segment of a population through the compilation of individual data into population data and its analysis. To describe (...) the process of populationisation, we follow a statistical risk assessment tool, the German Diabetes Risk Score, from its inception in a cohort study to its entry into the public sphere of German society. The population is extracted from individuals that function as research subjects through an identification number. Preprocessed information is entered into a dynamic database that enables its rearrangement according to main aggregates. Through populationisation, a signified is enacted that can be sliced up and that is equal in all its parts. Now predictions can be computed and fed back to society as tools of moral judgment. The acting individual and “society” are—numerically and literally!—entangled in the production and enactment of risk knowledge. (shrink)

ArgumentSince the 1970s, Danish population registries were increasingly used for research purposes, in particular in the health sciences. Linked with a large number of disease registries, these data infrastructures became laboratories for the development of both information technology and epidemiological studies. Denmark's system of population registries had been centralized in 1924 and was further automated in the 1960s, with individual identification numbers (CPR-numbers) introduced in 1968. The ubiquitous presence of CPR-numbers in administrative routines and everyday lives created a continually growing (...) data archive of the entire population. The resulting national-level database made possible unprecedented record linkage, a feature epidemiologists and biomedical scientists used as a resource for population health research. The specific assemblages that emerged with their practices of data mining were constitutive of registry-based epidemiology as a style of thought and of a distinct relationship between science, citizens, and the state that emerged as “Scandinavian.”. (shrink)

The ability to (re)classify populations is a key component of state power, but not all new state classifications actually succeed in changing how people are categorized and governed. This article examines the French state’s partly unsuccessful project in 2005 to use a new classification—“psychic handicap”—to ensure that people with severe mental disorders received services and benefits from separate agencies based on a designation of being both “mentally ill” and “disabled.” Previous research has identified how new classifications can be impeded by (...) cultural and cognitive barriers to their adoption and struggles between professionals or administrators over their implementation. Drawing on 186 interviews, archival sources, and 13 months of observations across different French bureaucracies, I expand on this literature in two ways. First, I use the case of psychic handicap to argue that a new classification can also fail to achieve its intended effect when it constitutes a bureaucratically split personality—a combination of classifications that imply that individuals belong to two, mutually exclusive kinds of people. I show how psychic handicap embodied contradictory expectations about the behavior, characteristics, and institutional trajectory of people with mental disorders. Second, I identify how bureaucrats resolved these contradictions through mechanisms of refractory looping, outsourcing expertise, and classification by default, which in this case led to the reclassification of this population as simply “mentally ill.” This framework calls attention to how practical inconsistencies can limit the impact of new classifications, even absent overt resistance to their elaboration or implementation. (shrink)

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, systematic scientific abstracting played a crucial role in reconfiguring the sciences on an international scale. For mathematicians, the 1931 launch of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik and 1940 launch of Mathematical Reviews marked and intensified a fundamental transformation, not just to the geographic scale of professional mathematics but to the very nature of mathematicians’ research and theories. It was not an accident that mathematical abstracting in this period coincided with an embrace across mathematical (...) research fields of a distinctive form of symbolic and conceptual abstraction. This essay examines the historical, institutional, embodied, and conceptual bases of mathematical abstracting and abstraction in the mid-twentieth century, placing them in historical context within the first half of the twentieth century and then examining their consequences and legacies for the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focused on scale, media, and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and its forms of articulation, my analysis connects the changing social structure of modern mathematical research communities to their changing domains of investigation and resources for representation and collective understanding. (shrink)

The availability of medical and health information on the world wide web has led to a long discussion about the reliability of that information. Various medical, political, and independent organizations have created user-friendly tools for finding reliable medical/health information on the web and have been faced with the challenge of defining what it means for information to be reliable. Little attention has been given to the work of reviewing web-based information and applying selection criteria to individual sites. In this article, (...) the authors examine how guidelines are applied in practice and discuss how the selection criteria and the practices of applying them reinforce distinctions that current medical sociology and informatics literature suggests have been broken down by internet technologies and the availability of web-based medical information. (shrink)

Examples from the sciences showing that mechanisms do not always succeed in producing the phenomena for which they are responsible have led some authors to conclude that the regularity requirement can be eliminated from characterizations of mechanisms. In this article, I challenge this conclusion and argue that a minimal form of regularity is inextricably embedded in examples of elucidated mechanisms that have been shown to be causally responsible for phenomena. Examples of mechanistic explanations from the sciences involve mechanisms that have (...) been shown to produce phenomena with a reproducible rate of success. By contrast, if phenomena are infrequent to the point that they amount to irreproducible observations and experimental results, they are indistinguishable from the background noise of accidental happenings. The inability to detect or measure the phenomenon of interest against the background noise of accidental correlations makes it impossible to elucidate a mechanism by experimental means, to demonstrate that a proposed mechanism actually produces the phenomenon, and ultimately to justify why a hypothetical scenario involving an irregular mechanism should be preferred over attributing irreproducible happenings to chance. (shrink)

James Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked, Give Me Everything You Have, has provoked considerable controversy. Whilst the quality of the writing is widely praised, some critics object to the way Lasdun documents in unsparing detail his experiences without taking any account of the stalker’s apparent mental health problems. There are ethical and conceptual problems with Lasdun’s approach, but side-stepping medical knowledge and relying on what we might call common sense help Lasdun to find ways to interpret his stalker’s actions as (...) meaningful and human. I suggest three interlinked implications concerning: medicalization, stigma, and the relationship between ethics and scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Part of understanding the meaning and power of algorithms means asking what new demands they might make of ethical frameworks, and how they might be held accountable to ethical standards. I develop a definition of networked information algorithms as assemblages of institutionally situated code, practices, and norms with the power to create, sustain, and signify relationships among people and data through minimally observable, semiautonomous action. Starting from Merrill’s prompt to see ethics as the study of “what we ought to do,” (...) I examine ethical dimensions of contemporary NIAs. Specifically, in an effort to sketch an empirically grounded, pragmatic ethics of algorithms, I trace an algorithmic assemblage’s power to convene constituents, suggest actions based on perceived similarity and probability, and govern the timing and timeframes of ethical action. (shrink)

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’. In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

The interventionist turn in science and technology studies increasingly involves researchers with practices of technology development and thus entails the need for appropriate methodologies. Based in software engineering, this article introduces the deconstructive technique of “mind scripting” as a method for analyzing processes of the co-materialization of gender and technology and as a tool to support cooperative, reflective work practices. Anchored in critical design approaches, “mind scripting” is a means for development teams to disclose discourses implicitly guiding work practices in (...) order to make negotiable the underlying value systems. After discussing its foundation in deconstructivist feminist theory, the author illustrates how the method is applied by drawing on selected empirical results. Generating insights into the reproduction of hegemonic social discourses in development processes, “mind scripting” enables the rethinking of established ways of doing. (shrink)

Work injury compensation and pensions are often determined according to medical disability rating scales attributing a percentage to each impaired body part or function. Incorporated into central medical–administrative networks of committees and examinations, these produce disability as a calculable space. This article examines the specific case of the Israeli National Insurance regulations regarding work injuries of 1956 and analyzes the shifted order they set. Looking at this system in the specific historical context of transition from the British Mandate workmen’s compensation (...) system to the “disability percentages” system, provides insight into the process of structuring and stabilizing durable numerical forms and the production of centralized government. Drawing on conceptualizations regarding the sociotechnical role of classification systems, I contend that through encoding and calculating classifications of disability, heterogeneity is eliminated and an ordering based on physiology is “black boxed,” illustrating the importance of technoscientific formations in structuring the “medical model of disability.”. (shrink)

We argue that abduction does not work in isolation from other inference mechanisms and illustrate this through an inference scheme designed to evaluate multiple hypotheses. We use game theory to relate the abductive system to actions that produce new information. To enable evaluation of the implications of this approach we have implemented the procedures used to calculate the impact of new information in a computer model. Experiments with this model display a number of features of collective belief-revision leading to consensus-formation, (...) such as the influence of bias and prejudice. The scheme of inferential calculations invokes a Peircian concept of ‘belief’ as the propensity to choose a particular course of action. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Henk ten Have's Genetics and Culture: The Geneticization thesis . In it, I refute Ten Have's suggestion that geneticization is not the sort of process that can be measured and commented on in terms of empirical evidence,even if he is correct in suggesting that it should be seen as part of ‘philosophical discourse’. At the end, I relate this discussion to broader debates within bioethics between the social science and philosophy, and suggest the need (...) for philosophical approaches to take the social sciences seriously. (shrink)

While corporate social responsibility is recognized as taking on various national meanings and practices, research has not sufficiently investigated how multinational companies simultaneously achieve global CSR integration and local CSR adaptation. Building on a qualitative case study carried out at ASICS, an MNC headquartered in Japan, we show how this organizational dilemma may be solved through hybridization work, a form of institutional work performed by CSR managers in subsidiaries to combine and adapt different institutional approaches to CSR. By developing the (...) notion of hybridization work, we contribute by revealing a set of practices that contribute to institutional change within organizations and enriching the study of CSR organizational change and international business by showing how hybridization Work leads to a greater organizational integration between core and periphery, and by identifying the triggering factors for subsidiary initiative in CSR. (shrink)

The history of the field of business ethics in the U.S. remains understudied and misunderstood. In this article I begin to remedy this oversight about the past, and I suggest how it can be beneficial in the present. Using both published and unpublished primary sources, I argue that the business ethics field emerged in the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of the establishment of business schools in major universities. I bring to light four important developments: business ethics lectures at (...) the University of California and Yale University, Leon Marshall’s curriculum at the College of Commerce of the University of Chicago, and the William A. Vawter Foundation on Business Ethics at Northwestern University. Then, I consider the payoffs of my historical account for business ethics theory, pedagogy, and practice. Specifically, I present four implications of my account under these headings: business ethics as a public problem; the place of ethics in business schools; historicizing business ethics; and historical self-knowledge. (shrink)