In a thought-provoking essay, Jana Bacevic reflects on the problem of prediction and its relevance for social scientists in a post-truth era. This issue has become institutionally relevant, as opposed to being a philosophical consideration or a practical challenge, for two reasons: One is that, as reflected in the (by now overwrought and overdetermined) crisis of expertise […]
Month: December 2017
In the new year, I’ll be giving a talk at the Arctic University of Norway on using social media as a social theorist. This post is an initial attempt to get my thoughts on paper before the break, in order to make it easier to get the talk written when I get back from holiday. […]
There’s a background to it here and a collection of his other work here.
A conversation I had recently about the digitalisation of the archive left me thinking back to this section on pg 81-82 of World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: There have been various stabs at coining a term to capture the dominant role of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Mark Zuckerberg has called his company a “utility,” perhaps un […]
In recent years, we have seen a renewed focus on the political ideologies which are currently emerging within Silicon Valley. Such considerations are not new and contemporary accounts are influenced, implicitly and explicitly, by earlier notions such as the Californian ideology. But the dominant approach appears to be a cultural one, treating these emerging political […]
The Concept Lab would meet on a weekly basis, usually for an hour unless there was logistical business to be undertaken concerning the future of the lab. Each meeting would revolve around a presentation from one member, detailing either: A practical problem they have faced in their research, as well as a singular concept they […]
This is a wonderful expression I just picked up from Machine, Platform, Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. As they describe on pg 112-113, suitcase words jumble together multiple meanings in a way which renders questions more obscure than they would otherwise be: Is generative-design software really “creative?” It’s a hard question because creativity is […]
The ESRC offer a list of nine factors which help generate impact: establishing networks and relationships with research users acknowledging the expertise and active roles played by research users in making impact happen involving users at all stages of the research, including working with user stakeholder and participatory groups flexible knowledge exchange strategies, which recognise […]
Accelerated Academy #4 Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, ResponsibilitiesMay 24-25, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our understanding of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed, imagined and contested across different institutional contexts. […]
Call for papers to a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change [SSCI 3.226, Scopus, CNRS***, ABS***, VHB***]. Guest editors Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School and Yerevan State University Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Frank Welz, University of Innsbruck Sandro Cattacin, University of Geneva There once was a time when leaders could both appreciate books and govern empires […]
Workshop at the S-BPM ONE 2018, the 10th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management on April 5-6, 2018 at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Wolfgang Hofkirchner Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna Austria Christian Stary JKU, Business Informatics – Communications Engineering, Linz Austria Towards Common Process Understanding in Collective Welfare […]
What are learned societies for? This is how Jennifer Platt answers this question on loc 119 of her history of the British Sociological Association: Learned societies such as the BSA are a vital part of the social structure of academic life; not every eligible person belongs to one, but nonetheless all are affected by them. […]
One of my pet hates is the legacy of the ‘intellectual’, with its connotations of heroic figures speaking truth to power. This is recognised even by those who seek to retain the notion, as was the case with Foucault’s project “to break with the totalizing ambition of what he called the ‘universal intellectual’” as Bourdieu […]
In his recently released book Collusion, Luke Harding briefly discusses the media cooperation taking place behind the scenes, as media organisations grappled with a rapidly changing landscape. On loc 898 he writes: At the Guardian we were pursuing leads from both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, how UK spy agencies had first picked up suspicious […]
How does what we eat shape how we are seen? Cultural sociologists have long accepted the role which culinary consumption plays in reproducing status hierarchies. However the meal of breakfast and the role of devices have been conspicuously absent from these debates, leaving us with a misleading view of how people eat and the social […]
