The philosophical significance attached to the construction of systems of units has traditionally been confined to the notion of convention, while their adoption was considered to be the exclusive province of the history and sociology of science. Against this tradition, a close articulation between history, philosophy, and sociology of science is needed in order to analyse the recent reform of the International system of units. In the new SI, units are redefined on the basis of certain fundamental constants of nature, (...) established by physical theories, whose values are fixed without uncertainty. The purpose of this article is to show that the redefinition of SI units, far from being a convention, involves a holistic reconstruction of our concepts of quantities from accepted theoretical laws. Fixing the values of the defining constants stabilizes these laws within the framework of physics through a twofold adjustment procedure that ensures both a semantic coordination between theory and world and an intersubjective coordination between human agents required by social activities. This double adjustment implies a treatment of uncertainties that results in closely entwining the pursuit of truth as correspondence and truth as coherence which turn out to be complementary, thus highlighting the anthropological underpinnings of scientific realism. (shrink)

This study supports the idea that fields form around issues, and describes the roles of various stakeholders in the structuring, shaping, and legitimating of the emerging field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A model of the institutional history of the CSR field is outlined, of which a key stage is the appearance of CSR rating agencies as the significant players and Institutional Entrepreneurs of the field. We show to which extent the creation and further development of CSR rating agencies, and (...) the activism of other significant stakeholders of the field (typically portrayed as “standard setters” and “regulatory agents”), contribute to the institutionalization of CSR. With this in mind, among various stakeholders that legitimate the field of CSR, we present the efforts of global and local stakeholders such as the European Union, the United Nations, the International Organization for Standardization, and governments and their interactions. We suggest that the different paths of CSR development and institutionalization in France and in the United States depend on the nature of local and global stakeholders’ involvement in this process and their interactions. (shrink)

This paper argues for a novel account of deceitful scientific communication, as “wishful speaking”. This concept is of relevance both to philosophy of science and to discussions of the ethics of lying and misleading. Section 1 outlines a case-study of “ghost-managed” research. Section 2 introduces the concept of “wishful speaking” and shows how it relates to other forms of misleading communication. Sections 3–5 consider some complications raised by the example of pharmaceutical research; concerning the ethics of silence; how research strategies—as (...) well as the communication of results—may be misleading; and questions of multiple authorship. The conclusion suggests some more general conclusions. (shrink)

This paper re-interprets the precautionary principle as a ‘social epistemic rule’. First, it argues that sometimes policy-makers should act on claims which have not been scientifically established....

Corporate social performance (CSP) has been a prominent concept in the management literature dealing with the social role and impacts of the corporation; it has been promulgated as a unifying paradigm for the field. However, the concept of CSP is still lacking strong theoretical foundations and empirical validity, suggesting that the paradigmatic status of CSP might be lost. In this paper, the authors draw on Hirsch and Levin’s (1999) life cycle approach to explore the development of CSP as a concept, (...) explain why it has so recurrently failed to deliver on these dimensions, and offer possible routes for future research that may potentially ameliorate this problem. (shrink)

The guest editors would like to thank the University of Paris and the ENSA Paris-Val de Seine for having provided premises to successfully host the 2018 "Measurement at the Crossroads" conference in Paris.Our thanks extend to our funding sources: the conference was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Institut Humanités, Sciences et Sociétés, the SPHERE laboratory and the Laboratoire Matériaux et Phénomènes Quantiques of the University of Paris, the department of History and Philosophy of Science of the (...) University of Paris, the Laboratoire National de métrologie et d'Essais, and the University of Geneva.We would like to thank the many people who contributed to the organization of... (shrink)

ArgumentDuring the 1950s it became apparent that antibiotics could not conquer all microbes, and a series of tests were developed to assess the susceptibility of microbes to antibiotics. This article explores the development and standardization of one such testing procedure which became dominant in the Nordic region, and how the project eventually failed in the late 1970s. The standardization procedures amounted to a comprehensive scheme, standardizing not only the materials used, but also the methods and the interpretation of the results. (...) Focusing on Sweden and Norway in particular, the article shows how this comprehensive standardization procedure accounted for several co-dependent factors and demanded collaboration within and across laboratories. Whereas literature on standardization has focused mostly on how facts and artefacts move within and across laboratories, I argue for the importance of also attending to regions and territories. More particularly, while arguing that the practices, ideals, and politics related to what have been called the “Nordic welfare state” were contributing to the design of the standardized procedure in the laboratory, I also argue that Scandinavia was drawn together as a unified region with and by these very same practices. (shrink)

Are the categories used to study the social world and acting on it real or conventional ? An empirical answer to that question is given by an analysis of the debates about the quality of statistics produced by the European National Institues of statistics in the 1990s. Six criteria of quality were then specified: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, accessibility, comparability and coherence. How do statisticians and users of statistics deal with the tension produced by their objects being both real (they exist (...) before their measurement) and conventionally constructed (they are in a way, created by these conventions)? In particular, the technical and sociological distinction between the criteria of relevance and accuracy implies a realistic interpretation, desired by users, but that is nonetheless problematic. (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)

This response raises two critical questions about Nico Stehr's article 'Knowledge, Markets and Biotechnology.' First, it examines his claim that in a 'knowledge society' consumers now base their decisions about purchases on more intangible criteria than a product's utility. We demonstrate that this is not unique to a 'knowledge society.' For more than a century Western consumers have been enmeshed in markets where advertisers aim to fashion consumer desires for products by employing strategies that appeal to anything but a product's (...) 'use value.' Second, we address Stehr's claim that in a market undergoing a process of 'moralization,' decisions about consumption occur in a context of epistemological uncertainty caused by proliferating and contradictory information. We propose that such a situation of radical uncertainty in decision-making is not unique to the marketplace, but reflects how most individuals must now relate to almost all scientific claims. The propagation of contested knowledges about any number of scientific truths - which are themselves largely unverifiable by laypeople - means that most individuals must rely on assorted social and cultural considerations when aligning themselves with any scientific knowledge. (shrink)