Mundane Governance

Author : Steve Woolgar
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199584745
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mundane Governance written by Steve Woolgar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book aims to explore how governance and accountability are mediated through material relations involving ordinary everyday objects and technologies. It draws on empirical materials in three main areas: waste management and recycling; the regulation and control of traffic; and security and passenger movement in airports.

Author : Steve Woolgar
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191505293
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mundane Governance written by Steve Woolgar and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is to be made of the outcry when newly issued recycling "wheelie" bins are discovered to contain microchips for weighing and evaluating householders' rubbish? The angry accusations that speed cameras are generating excessive income for the government? The consternation at the measures taken by airports to heighten security in the wake of the increased threat of terrorist attacks? These increasingly widespread reactions to ordinary events and everyday phenomena share a common theme. They all embody concerns about the ways in which our lives are increasingly regulated and controlled in relation to ordinary objects and technologies. This book takes these concerns as the starting point for exploring the ways in which relations of governance and accountability in contemporary life are organized around ordinary, everyday, pervasive objects and technologies. In contrast to the contemporary literature on governance, the book argues for the importance of examining how accountability relations are enacted on the ground, in relation to mundane objects and technologies. In particular, it is crucial to understand how governance and accountability are mediated through material relations involving ordinary everyday objects and technologies. The book argues that the key to understanding governance is to focus on political constitution at the level of ontology rather than just on the traditional politics of organization, structure, and human compliance. The term ontology is used here to draw attention to the social and cultural processes whereby the nature and existence of ordinary things come to matter. The argument is developed in relation to a wide variety of empirical materials drawn from three main areas of everyday life: waste management and recycling; the regulation and control of traffic (especially speed cameras and parking); and security and passenger movement in airports.

Author : Mike Michael
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1473987733
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Actor-Network Theory written by Mike Michael and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking and engaging book, Mike Michael brings us a powerful overview of Actor-Network Theory. Covering a breadth of topics, Michael demonstrates how ANT has become a major theoretical framework, influencing scholarly work across a range of fields. Critical and playful, this book fills a notable gap in the literature as Michael expertly explicates the theory and demonstrates how its key concepts can be applied. Comparing and contrasting ANT with other social scientific perspectives, Michael provides a robust and reflexive account of its analytic and empirical promise. A perfect companion for any student of Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Geography, Management & Organisation Studies, Media & Communication, and Cultural Studies.

Author : Jörg Krüger
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1447147634
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secure Information Society written by Jörg Krüger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our modern information societies, we not only use and welcome computers; we are highly dependent upon them. There is a downside of this kind of progress, however. Computers are not 100% reliable. They are insecure. They are vulnerable to attackers. They can either be attacked directly, to disrupt their services, or they can be abused in clever ways to do the bidding of an attacker as a dysfunctional user. Decision-makers and experts alike always struggle with the amount of interdisciplinary knowledge needed to understand the nuts and bolts of modern information societies and their relation to security, the implications of technological or political progress or the lack thereof. This holds in particular for new challenges to come. These are harder to understand and to categorize; their development is difficult to predict. To mitigate this problem and to enable more foresight, The Secure Information Society provides an interdisciplinary spotlight onto some new and unfolding aspects of the uneasy relationship between information technology and information society, to aid the dialogue not only in its current and ongoing struggle, but to anticipate the future in time and prepare perspectives for the challenges ahead.

Author : Jörg Dünne
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110645343
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cultural Techniques written by Jörg Dünne and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary cultural techniques research lab at the University of Erfurt. Taking up an impulse from media studies, its contributions examine —from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history, literary (and media) studies, and the history of science reconstruct seemingly fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order. Ranging from manual and philological "paper work" to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly, these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors.

Author : William H. Rupp
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191662704
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Globalization in Practice written by William H. Rupp and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of globalization has become ubiquitous in social science and in the public consciousness and is often invoked as an explanation for a diverse range of changes to economies, societies, politics and cultures - both as a positive liberating force and as a wholly negative one. Whilst our understanding of the politics, economics, and social resonance of the phenomenon has become increasingly sophisticated at the macro-level, this book argues that globalization too often continues to be depicted as a set of extra-terrestrial forces with no real physical manifestation, except as effects. The essays challenge this dominant understanding of 'globalization from above' through explorations of the mundane means by which globalization has been achieved. Instead of a focus on the meta-political economy of global capitalism, the book concentrates on the everyday life of capitalism, the not-so-'little' things that keep the 'large' forces of globalization ticking over. With its eye on the mundane, the book demonstrates that a series of everyday and, consequently, all but invisible formations critically facilitate and create the conditions under which globalization has flourished. The emphasis is on concrete moments in the history of capitalism when these new means of regular reproduction were invented and deployed. Only by understanding these infrastructures can we understand the dynamics of globalization. In short, punchy essays by distinguished researchers from across a range of disciplines, this book provides a new way of understanding globalization, moving away from the standard accounts of global forces, economic flows, and capitalist dynamics, to show how ordinary practices and artefacts are crucial elements and symbols of globalization.

Author : David Bissell
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262345153
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transit Life written by David Bissell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-03-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the ways that everyday life in the city is defined by commuting. We spend much of our lives in transit to and from work. Although we might dismiss our daily commute as a wearying slog, we rarely stop to think about the significance of these daily journeys. In Transit Life, David Bissell explores how everyday life in cities is increasingly defined by commuting. Examining the overlooked events and encounters of the commute, Bissell shows that the material experiences of our daily journeys are transforming life in our cities. The commute is a time where some of the most pressing tensions of contemporary life play out, striking at the heart of such issues as our work-life balance; our relationships with others; our sense of place; and our understanding of who we are. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with commuters, journalists, transit advocates, policymakers, and others in Sydney, Australia, Transit Life takes a holistic perspective to change how we think about commuting. Rather than arguing that transport infrastructure investment alone can solve our commuting problems, Bissell explores the more subtle but powerful forms of social change that commuting creates. He examines the complex politics of urban mobility through multiple dimensions, including the competencies that commuters develop over time; commuting dispositions and the social life of the commute; the multiple temporalities of commuting; the experience of commuting spaces, from footpath to on-ramp, both physical and digital; the voices of commuting, from private rants to drive-time radio; and the interplay of materialities, ideas, advocates, and organizations in commuting infrastructures.

Author : Megan Watkins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131774540X
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct written by Megan Watkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pedagogy is often glossed as the ‘art and science of teaching’ but this focus typically ties it to the instructional practices of formalised schooling. Like the emerging work on ‘public pedagogies’, the notion of cultural pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in realms other than institutionalised education, but goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies in two ways: it includes spaces which are not so public, and it includes an emphasis on material and non-human actors. This collection foregrounds this broader understanding of pedagogy by framing enquiry through a series of questions and across a range of settings. How, for example, are the processes of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ realised within and across the pedagogic processes specific to various social sites? What ensembles of people, things and practices are brought together in specific institutional and everyday settings to accomplish these processes? This collection brings together researchers whose work across the interdisciplinary nexus of cultural studies, sociology, media studies, education and museology offers significant insights into these ‘cultural pedagogies’ – the practices and relations through which cumulative changes in how we act, feel and think occur. Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct opens up debate across disciplines, theoretical perspectives and empirical foci to explore both what is pedagogical about culture and what is cultural about pedagogy.

Author : Michael D. Barr
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136001662
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cultural Politics and Asian Values written by Michael D. Barr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Politics and Asian Values looks at the political, cultural and religious background of East and Southeast Asian societies and those of 'the West', with a view to seeing how they are affecting contemporary national and international politics: democratization, the international human rights discourse, NGOs and globalization. The book surveys the political history and pre-history of the 'Asian values' debate, taking it up to the era of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Chen Shui-bian and Kim Dae-jung. In chapters on Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and liberalism, Barr explores the histories and conceptual essences of the world religions involved in or affected by the debate.

Author : Paul Martin
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1783479310
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Implementing Environmental Law written by Paul Martin and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful book explores why implementation of environmental law is too often ineffective in achieving effective environmental governance. It provides careful analysis and innovative proposals to help improve the practical effectiveness of legal i