The moral economy of grades and standards

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Abstract: What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Theory of business enterprise

Abstract: Veblen has been claimed and rejected both by sociologists and economists as being one of theirs. He enriched and attacked both disciplines, as he did so many others: philosophy, history, social psychology, politics, and linguistics. Because he took all knowledge as necessary and relevant to adequate understanding, Veblen was a holistic analyst of the social process. First published in 1904, this classic analysis of the U.S. economy has enduring value today. In it, Veblen posited a theory of business fluctuations and economic growth which included chronic depression and inflation. He predicted the socioeconomic changes that would occur as a result: militarism, imperialism, fascism, consumerism, and the development of the mass media as well as the corporate bureaucracy. Douglas Dowd's introduction places the volume within the traditions of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, tracing Veblen's place among social thinkers, and the place of this volume in the body of his work.

Quality standards, conventions and the governance of global value chains

Abstract: Convention theory helps refine our understanding of the governance of global value chains through its analysis of ‘quality’. In this article, it is argued that global value chains are becoming increasingly ‘buyer-driven’, even though they are characterized by ‘hands-off’ forms of co-ordination between ‘lead firms’ and their immediate suppliers. This is because lead firms have been able to embed complex quality information into widely accepted standards and codification and certification procedures. As suggested by convention theory, their success in doing so has depended on defining and managing value chain-specific quality attributes that are attuned to broader narratives about quality that circulate within society more generally.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Abstract: The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27 The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

Private agri-food standards: Implications for food policy and the agri-food system

Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction to the evolution and nature of private food safety and quality standards, highlighting the resultant impacts on the structure and modus operandi of supply chains for agricultural and food products and the challenges posed for processes of agricultural development. It serves as an introduction to a series of papers that provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge regarding private food safety and quality standards in both an industrialised and developing country context. In so doing, it aims to provide a catalyst for further research on this rapidly evolving field of inquiry.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.

We Have Never Been Modern

Abstract: What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Opening Pandora's Black Box PART I FROM WEARER TO STRONGER RHETORIC Chapter I Literature Part A: Controversies Part B: When controversies flare up the literature becomes technical Part C: Writing texts that withstand the assaults of a hostile environment Conclusion: Numbers, more numbers Chapter 2 Laboratories Part A: From texts to things: A showdown Part B: Building up counter-laboratories Part C: Appealing (to) nature PART II FROM WEAR POINTS TO STRONGHOLDS Chapter 3 Machines Introduction: The quandary of the fact-builder Part A: Translating interests Part B: Keeping the interested groups in line Part C: The model of diffusion versus the model of translation Chapter 4 Insiders Out Part A: Interesting others in the laboratories Part B: Counting allies and resources PART III FROM SHORT TO LONGER NETWORKS Chapter 5 Tribunals of Reason Part A: The trials of rationality Part B: Sociologics Part C: Who needs hard facts? Chapter 6 Centres of calculation Prologue: The domestication of the savage mind Part A: Action at a distance Part B: Centres of calculation Part C: Metrologies Appendix 1

Capitalism and Freedom

Abstract: In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism--the organization of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market--as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. Beginning with a discussion of principles of a liberal society, Friedman applies them to such constantly pressing problems as monetary policy, discrimination, education, income distribution, welfare, and poverty. "Milton Friedman is one of the nation's outstanding economists, distinguished for remarkable analytical powers and technical virtuosity. He is unfailingly enlightening, independent, courageous, penetrating, and above all, stimulating."-Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek "It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."-Stephen Chapman, Chicago Tribune