Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which p...

Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom:

Health At A Glance

Interaction ritual chains

How should policy analysis respond to the changing context of policy making? This article examines three aspects of policy analysis in this changing context: polity, knowledge and intervention. It argues that policy making now often takes place in an ‘institutional void’ where there are no generally accepted rules and norms according to which politics is to be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon. More than before, solutions for pressing problems transgress the sovereignty of specific polities. Furthermore, the role of knowledge changes as the relationship between science and society has changed: scientific expertise is now negotiated rather than simply accepted. And, with the weakening of the state, it is far less obvious that the government is the sole actor to intervene in policy making. This article calls for a reconsideration of the analysis of policy making in the light of this changing context. Based on a contextual perspective it calls for a revitalization of the commitments of Harold Lasswell toward a policy science of democracy by proposing a new ‘deliberative’ policy analysis.

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Policy without polity? Policy analysis and the institutional void

Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science

This article argues that the translation of books may be fruitfully understood as constituting a cultural world-system. The working of this system, based on a core-periphery structure, accounts for...

Towards a Sociology of Translation Book Translations as a Cultural World-System

Exploring the ‘globalization’ of the social sciences, this article first presents an historical interpretation of how transnational exchange in the social sciences has evolved. Earlier forms of int...

The social sciences as an emerging global field

Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institutions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embedded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this programmatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans-national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms.

Toward a transnational history of the social sciences.

If translations have to be understood as embedded in their specific social context three dimensions have to be taken into account:1. As cross-national transfers, translations first imply the existence of a field of international relations of exchange. 2. At a more specific level of exchange, one must distinguish between political, economic and cultural dynamics. 3. Finally, the dynamics of translation depends on the structure of the space of reception and on the way in which relevant intermediaries (translators, critics, agents, publishers) shape social demand. Here the analysis focuses on the group of translators, its social profile and the stratification of their craft, as well as on the role of critics and academic specialists, which play a key role in literary translation.

Outline for a sociology of translation: Current issues and future prospects

On the basis of an empirical analysis of the recent emergence, spread and transformation of No Holds Barred fighting contests, it is argued that Norbert Elias's model of sportization provides a fruitful but insufficiently differentiated framework for understanding the development of sports and sport-like contests. Although the successive transformations of martial arts in the twentieth century provide various examples of sportization and para-sportization, the emergence of No Holds Barred events in the 1990s represents an opposing trend, a process of de-sportization. The analysis of No Holds Barred contests demonstrates that the balance between sportization and de-sportization depends primarily on the interests of the organizers, and in particular on the degree to which they rely on the perspectives of practitioners, spectators, or viewers. The decisive factor for the predominance of the latter perspective was the formation of a new market for visual material, which emerged with pay-per-view television. This allowed - at least temporarily - the commercialization of non-sanctioned events, suggesting that new markets for visual material are likely to become an important factor in the development of spectator sports and sport-like forms of entertainment.

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Johan Heilbron

Papers

Towards a Sociology of Translation Book Translations as a Cultural World-System

The social sciences as an emerging global field

Toward a transnational history of the social sciences.

Outline for a sociology of translation: Current issues and future prospects

De-sportization of fighting contests: the origins and dynamics of no holds barred events and the theory of sportization.