Showing papers by "John Law published in 1990"

Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations:

Abstract: We founded ourselves on class; then, at a much later date we learned a little about ethnicity; more recently we discovered gender; and more recently still we learned something perhaps not very much yet about age and disability. So might a white, middle class, middle aged man with a normatively approved set of physical skills write of the history of his sociology. So might he comment on the way in which he slowly learned that 'his' sociology had never spoken for 'us': that all along the sociological 'we' was a Leviathan that had achieved its (sense of) order by usurping or silencing the other voices. Even so, this was a sociology always driven, at least in part, by a concern with distribution for otherwise it would never have learned of its isolation. It was driven by a concern with pain. It was driven by an ambivalent wish to learn of and intervene about injustice. But what should count as a distribution was fought over time and time again in the retreat from a sovereign order. 'We' found it difficult to recognise class for after all, we are all free and equal in the market. And ethnicity, too, was slow to come into focus, perhaps because it was hoped that this was underpinned by a logic of class. Then those who took class seriously and, to be sure, those who did not found it difficult to recognise gender. Where 'we' are now, gender is somewhat, but only somewhat, in

Power, Discretion and Strategy

Abstract: This essay starts with a brief review of some of the main approaches to power, and identifies four: ‘power to’, ‘power over’, ‘power/storage’ and ‘power discretion’. It argues that these are all viable, but that they should be linked to a fifth — that of ‘power/effects' — with its stress on the continued performance of social relations. But how are such relations stabilised? It is argued, in answer to this question, that social relations are never purely social in character: rather they are heterogeneous, being embodied in a series of corporeal, textual, natural and technical materials. Finally, certain strategies for ordering these relations and their power effects are examined for the case of a formal organisation, and it is argued that such strategies are always, and necessarily, discursively impure.

Further comparisons of films, screens and cassettes for mammography

Abstract: In two previous papers (Kirkpatrick & Law, 1987, Law & Kirkpatrick, 1989), films and screens for mammography have been compared, primarily for image quality and secondarily for dose. The rate at which new products become commercially available makes identification of the better films and screens a never-ending task, although the combination found to be still the best in 1987 had been available since before 1980. At the time of the work for the 1989 paper (late 1987) certain newer products did offer some improvement over previous ones, but further products were known to be imminent. That series of comparisons could not be continued because the processor was changed making it impossible to maintain complete comparability of test conditions. This paper reports on new films and screens, using essentially the same experimental technique as before, but on a new processor and a new X-ray set. Certain of the better films and screens from the previous paper were included to form a base line against which to compar...

Recent films and screens for mammography.

Abstract: Comparisons of various film–screen combinations for mammography have been reported in a series of communications, the most recent being one by Law and Kirkpatrick (1990). A further short series is reported here. The technique is unchanged from before. A phantom of “Barts” type (White & Tucker, 1980) with realistic details is used, and films are exposed in evacuated plastic envelopes to avoid any complicating influence from cassette design. The X-ray set used was a CGR 600T with molybdenum target and filter, but in this series all films were exposed at 28 kV with grid (rather than 25 kV, no grid, as before) in line with current clinical practice. All films were contact films at 60 cm focus–film distance (FFD) and were processed by a Dupont-T5A processor at 3.5 minutes, 35°C, and using Kodak chemistry.