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Nach der Bewertung ist vor der Bewertung – Sichtbarkeit und Emotionalität als verbindende Elemente von Bewertungsprozessen
Abstract
Die Bedeutung einer Soziologie des Bewertens beruht in erheblichem Maße auf der Annahme, dass Bewertungsprozesse in größere soziale Kontexte eingebettet sind und in relevanter Weise zu ihnen beitragen. Rankings und Benchmarkings als Bewertungsverfahren gewinnen ihre Relevanz beispielsweise erst im Kontext einer Ausbreitung neoliberaler Marktlogiken (Lamont 2012: 212). Die zahlreichen Fallstudien zu solchen Bewertungsverfahren sind vor allem deshalb von Interesse, weil sie als Fälle für die allgemeine Bedeutung des Phänomens des Bewertens stehen.
... Derartige Bewertungen medial inszenierter Emotionsrepertoires sind wiederum selbst eng mit dem Ausdruck von Emotionen verbunden (Reinhart et al., 2019): ...
Digital infrastructures, such as editorial management systems (EMS), play a crucial role in academic publishing. However, despite their ubiquity, they have received surprisingly little analytical attention. Here, we investigate how EMSs are employed in practice and contribute to editorial evaluations. Conducting a case study of a biomedical publisher, we investigate the selection of peer reviewers by editors, using both qualitative and quantitative data. When looking at how interactions between editors and the digital infrastructures unfold, we observed three analytically different types of interaction: (1) editors and infrastructure jointly accomplish the acceleration of peer review, (2) editors mitigate the infrastructure when establishing a collective memory, and (3) editors disengage from the infrastructure when they evaluate potential reviewers. Through strategic disengagement from and mitigation of the infrastructures, editors create interpretative spaces for themselves. This way, most of the interpretative and evaluative work still remains in the domain of the human editorial staff. Our results furthermore highlight the importance of the specific spatial, social, organizational, and cultural conditions of the editorial office for editors’ ability to modulate their engagement with the infrastructures, create interpretative spaces, and shape infrastructural effects.
Fehlende formale Qualifikationen wirken sich negativ auf Erwerbschancen aus, insbesondere für Frauen. Während die Forschung bisher vor allem makrostrukturelle Faktoren beleuchtete, nimmt dieser Beitrag die Mesoebene in den Blick und fragt danach, wie die Erwerbschancen Geringqualifizierter durch branchenspezifische Formen der Beschäftigung und Arbeitsorganisation beeinflusst werden. Durch den Vergleich zweier geschlechtersegregierter Branchen, dem Bau- und Reinigungsgewerbe in der Schweiz, wird aufgezeigt, wie Systeme der kollektiven Lohnverhandlung, Strategien des Personaleinsatzes sowie Regeln und Praktiken der Beförderung und Weiterbildung zu ungleichen Erwerbschancen beitragen. Analytisch knüpft der Artikel an die Theorie der Unterschätzung von Frauenarbeit an und konzipiert Erwerbschancen als Resultat unterschiedlicher Konstruktionen des Werts von Arbeit. Als empirische Grundlage dienen qualitative Interviews mit Arbeitgebenden, geringqualifizierten Arbeitskräften und Gewerkschaftsvertretern. Zudem wurden die Kollektivverträge der beiden Branchen analysiert. Der Fokus liegt auf Generalunternehmen der Baubranche und auf der Unterhaltsreinigung. Während sich Erstere durch hohe Mindestlöhne sowie institutionalisierte Aufstiegsmöglichkeiten auszeichnen, ist Letztere durch niedrige Löhne, Unterbeschäftigung und mangelnde Möglichkeiten der beruflichen Weiterentwicklung geprägt. Der Beitrag belegt die Vielschichtigkeit der Faktoren, die auf der Ebene von Branchen und Betrieben die Erwerbschancen von Geringqualifizierten beeinflussen.
Der Beitrag führt das Konzept der organisationalen Bewertungsordnung als Analyseinstrument in den Diskurs der Soziologie des Bewertens ein. Bewerten wird dabei auf systemtheoretischer Grundlage als eine spezifische Form von Kommunikation verstanden. In Organisationen ist diese Kommunikation in bestimmte Strukturen eingebettet, die sich mittels des Konzepts der organisationalen Ordnung des Bewertens beschreiben, interpretieren und erklären lassen. Organisationale Bewertungsordnungen werden dabei als situationsspezifische Konfigurationen der sachlichen, sozialen und der temporalen Sinndimension auf der einen und der Entscheidungsprogramme, Kommunikationswege und des Personals – kurz: der Strukturen von Organisationen – auf der anderen Seite verstanden. Die Anwendbarkeit des Konzepts auf empirische Phänomene wird am Beispiel der Bewertungsordnung universitärer Berufungsverfahren aufgezeigt.
Organisationen spielen für viele Bewertungsprozesse eine entscheidende, aber oft übersehene Rolle: Sie geben den Kontext ab, in dem Bewertungen vollzogen werden, sie produzieren und kommunizieren Bewertungen und werden schließlich auch selbst regelmäßig bewertet, evaluiert, geratet und gerankt. Die Beiträge des Bandes verknüpfen systematisch Ansätze aus Organisationsforschung und Valuation Studies und eröffnen dadurch einen dezidiert organisationssoziologischen Blick auf Phänomene des Bewertens, Vermessens, Kategorisierens und Vergleichens in, von und durch Organisationen.
Die Herausgeber
Dr. Frank Meier ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am SOCIUM der Universität Bremen.
Dr. Thorsten Peetz ist Gastwissenschaftler am SOCIUM der Universität Bremen.
Dieses Kapitel zeigt auf, wie Zuschauende in Auseinandersetzung mit Formaten des Reality TV Zugehörigkeiten und Ausschluss verhandeln. Mit der Methode der Gruppendiskussion zeichnen wir affektive Medienpraktiken nach, die im relationalen Geschehen zwischen sozialer Gruppe, Medienangebot und diskursiver Aneignung vollzogen werden. Untersucht wird wie Emotionsgemeinschaften als Ergebnis gemeinsamer affektiver Medienpraktiken erzeugt werden und welche Diskurse bei den Zuschauenden im Anschluss an den Fernsehtext hervorgebracht werden. Besonderes Augenmerk erfahren dabei Fangruppen als Emotionsgemeinschaften.
In the sociology of (e)valuation, visibility,
i. e. who can see whom when and in what ways, is
discussed as an important facet of evaluation processes.
By bringing together theoretical perspectives on visibility
with recent literature on evaluation we shed light on the
calibration of visibility in and through evaluation processes.
We delineate different constellations of visibility
and their specific effects – recognition, control, singularity
– and highlight how the deliberate production of (in-)
visibility decides on how something or somebody is evaluated
and how visibility becomes itself a substantial result
of evaluation processes.
Unter der Überschrift „Soziologie des Wertens und Bewertens“ sind in letzter Zeit eine Reihe von Studien veröffentlicht worden. Obwohl die darin diskutierten Phänomene und Ansätze sehr heterogen sind, gehen diese
allesamt von der grundlegenden Bedeutung des Wertens und Bewertens für die Konstitution sozialer Ordnung und für die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit aus. Konzeptuelle Auseinandersetzungen mit den verwendeten Begriffen und den dahinterstehenden theoretischen Annahmen finden sich dagegen kaum. Unter Rückgriff
auf Simmel, Dewey und Durkheim schlägt der Beitrag allgemeine analytische Begriffsunterscheidungen vor, die sowohl den aktuellen Forschungsstand als auch die sozialtheoretische Tradition reflektieren. Der Beitrag unterscheidet „Wert“ und „Werte“ von Prozessen des „Wertens“ im Sinne von Wertzuschreibungen und Prozessen des „Bewertens“ im Sinne von Wertabwägungen. Im Besonderen geht es um die konstitutive Rolle von Emotionen in Prozessen der Wertzuschreibung. Inwiefern die Soziologie der Emotionen fruchtbare Anstöße liefert, ist Gegenstand des abschließenden Teils.
The UNESCO World Heritage List is an international inventory of natural and cultural sites that are, according to the conception of its initiators and administrators, of importance for mankind as a whole. The evaluation of the list can be interpreted as a specific form of the social production of the valuable. Focusing on the cultural sites, the paper argues that the production of World Heritage renders a form of practical universalization of the value of particular goods. It centres on the questions of how a site is produced as culturally valuable, how its value is universalized, and what role is played by the concept of authenticity in the process. Two aspects of the evaluation practice are examined with regards to the production of universalization: working with and working on the assessment criteria. It is shown that universality and particularity are interwoven in this practice.
Die Liste des UNESCO-Welterbes ist ein internationales Verzeichnis jener Natur- und Kulturstätten, die gemäß dem Verständnis der Initiatoren und Verwalter dieses Instrumentes von Bedeutung für die gesamte Menschheit sind. Das Bewertungsverfahren des UNESCO-Welterbes stellt eine besondere Form der gesellschaftlichen Produktion des Wertvollen dar. Der Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die kulturellen Stätten und vertritt die These, dass der spezifische Produktionsmodus des UNESCO-Welterbes eine praktische Universalisierung des Wertes partikularer Güter darstellt. Im Zentrum des Beitrages stehen die Fragen danach, wie das kulturell Wertvolle produziert wird, auf welche Weise die Universalität einer Stätte hergestellt wird und welche Rolle dabei die Vorstellung von Authentizität spielt. Die Universalisierungsarbeit des UNESCO-Welterbes wird anhand von zwei Aspekten der Bewertungspraxis – der Arbeit mit und der Arbeit an den Bewertungskriterien – beleuchtet und dabei die Verschränkung von Universalität und Partikularität herausgearbeitet.
Höchst umstritten, doch offenbar unverzichtbar – Peer Review trifft als zentraler Mechanismus der Selbststeuerung in der Wissenschaft Entscheidungen über Publikationen, Finanzierungen und Karrieren. Seine Konstanz und Funktion verlangt nach soziologischen und philosophischen Erklärungen.
Unter der Überschrift „Soziologie des Wertens und Bewertens“ sind in letzter Zeit eine Reihe von Studien veröffentlicht worden. Obwohl die darin diskutierten Phänomene und Ansätze sehr heterogen sind, gehen diese
allesamt von der grundlegenden Bedeutung des Wertens und Bewertens für die Konstitution sozialer Ordnung und für die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit aus. Konzeptuelle Auseinandersetzungen mit den verwendeten Begriffen und den dahinterstehenden theoretischen Annahmen finden sich dagegen kaum. Unter Rückgriff
auf Simmel, Dewey und Durkheim schlägt der Beitrag allgemeine analytische Begriffsunterscheidungen vor, die sowohl den aktuellen Forschungsstand als auch die sozialtheoretische Tradition reflektieren. Der Beitrag unterscheidet „Wert“ und „Werte“ von Prozessen des „Wertens“ im Sinne von Wertzuschreibungen und Prozessen des „Bewertens“ im Sinne von Wertabwägungen. Im Besonderen geht es um die konstitutive Rolle von Emotionen in Prozessen der Wertzuschreibung. Inwiefern die Soziologie der Emotionen fruchtbare Anstöße liefert, ist Gegenstand des abschließenden Teils.
Phenomena of attributing value to objects, practices, and people, and of assessing their value have become a popular subject in sociological research. Classification, among other valuation practices, represents a central topic in these studies. Thus, the sociology of valuation is emerging as a new field that, however, lacks common ground in theorizing about its subject even though preoccupation with valuation has a long-standing history in sociology. Authors such as Durkheim, Simmel, and Dewey have interpreted valuation as more than a specific localizable phenomenon, in that valuation is a constitutive element of the fundament of the social. Discussing classical approaches to valuation and relating them to current sociological work, we identify key concepts within different theoretical approaches that need to be taken into account when theorizing valuation. We suggest five building blocks – valuation practices, value structures, valuation infrastructure, valuation situations, and reflexivity of valuation – theories of valuation need to consider for coming to terms with the multifaceted empirical studies in the sociology of valuation.
What does evaluation mean? This paper studies the evaluative process as a practical judgment that links a situation to a set of values in order to decide upon a course of action. It starts discussing Amartya Sen’s “relational” and “comparative” account of evaluation, based on a critique of John Rawl’s deductive and idealist theory. Comparison, incompleteness, reality and deliberation are the key principles of Sen’s methodology. It echoes in some respects with Dewey’s approach to evaluation; but we show, in a second part, the relevance of completing Sen’s account with Dewey’s pragmatism. Whereas Sen mainly focuses on evaluation as a cognitive process, Dewey brings practical issues on the fore. The shift he introduces from values to valuation, together with the distinction between prizing and appraising, makes out of the logic of inquiry and the search for adequacy between means and ends in a given situation, the fulcrum of practical judgment. In a third step, we address the relationship between values and norms in evaluative processes. Neither Sen nor Dewey pay much attention to this issue, although norms, which are close to values without being the same, contribute to framing evaluations in different ways: as horizons, resources or constrains. Bringing norms into the picture means completing the pragmatist account with an institutionalist one, as we suggest through the example of the evaluation of work.
Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is one of the best-known and most enduring texts of classical sociology, continually inspirational and widely read by both scholars and students. In an insightful interpretation, Jack Barbalet discloses that Weber's work is not simply about the cultural origins of capitalism but an allegory concerning the Germany of his day. Situating The Protestant Ethic in the development of Weber's prior and subsequent writing, Barbalet traces changes in his understanding of key concepts including ‘calling’ and ‘rationality’. In a close analysis of the ethical underpinnings of the capitalist spirit and of the institutional structure of capitalism, Barbalet identifies continuities between Weber and the eighteenth-century founder of economic science, Adam Smith, as well as Weber's contemporary, the American firebrand Thorstein Veblen. Finally, by considering Weber's investigation of Judaism and capitalism, important aspects of his account of Protestantism and capitalism are revealed.
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members' tendency to internalize these pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these measures is a crucial task for scholars.
Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured-offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequences, both intended and unintended, of public measures. The article first identifies two mechanisms, self-fulfilling prophecy and commensuration, that induce reactivity and then distinguishes patterns of effects produced by reactivity. This approach demonstrates how these increasingly fateful public measures change expectations and permeate institutions, suggesting why it is important for scholars to investigate the impact of these measures more systematically.
Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researcher's moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines.
Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing present in our society, as well as in its ratio vis-a-vis the other human sensory dimensions and extensions. At the substantive level, the article addresses the question of the ambivalences of visibility and its effects, according to social places and subjects. Recognition and control are understood and explained as two opposing outcomes of visibility. It is argued that empowerment does not rest univocally either with visibility (as it is assumed by the tradition of recognition) or with invisibility (as it is assumed by the arcana imperii tradition).
This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.
The scientific study of emotion has long been dominated by theories emphasizing the subjective experience of emotions and their accompanying expressive and physiological responses. The processes by which different emotions are elicited has received less attention, the implicit assumption being that certain emotions arise automatically in response to certain types of events or situations. Such an assumption is incompatible with data showing that similar situations can provoke a range of emotions in different individuals, or even the same individual at different times. Appraisal theory, first suggested by Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus, was formulated to address this shortcoming in our understanding of emotion. The central tenet of appraisal theory is that emotions are elicited according to an individual's subjective interpretation or evaluation of important events or situations. Appraisal research focuses on identifying the evaluative dimensions or criteria that predict which emotion will be elicited in an individual, as well as linking the appraisal process with the production of emotional responses. This book represents the first full-scale summary of the current state of appraisal research. Separate sections cover the history of apraisal theory and its fundamental ideas, the views of some of the major theorists currently active in the field, theoretical and methodological problems with the appraisal approach including suggestions for their resolution, social, cultural and individual differences and the application of appraisal theory to understanding and treating emotional pathology, and the methodology used in appraisal research including measuring and analyzing self-report, physiological, facial, and vocal indicators of appraisal, and simulating appraisal processes via computational models. Intended for advanced students and researchers in emotion psychology, it provides an authoritative assessment and critique of the current state of the art in appraisal research.
How do we place value on goods-and, importantly, why? Valuation and pricing are core issues in the market economy, but understanding of these concepts and their interrelation is weak. In response, The Worth of Goods takes a sociological approach to the perennial but timely question of what makes a product valuable. Structured in three parts, it first examines value in the broader sense-moral values and how they are formed, and the relations between economic and non-economic values- discussing such matters as the value of an oil spill, the price of a scientific paper, value in ethical consumption, and imaginative value. The second part discusses the issues surrounding valuation in aesthetic markets, specifically wine, fashion models, art, and the creative industries. The third part analyzes valuation in financial markets-credit rating agencies, stock exchange markets, and industrial production. This pioneering volume brings together leading social scientists to provide a range of theoretical tools and case studies for understanding price and the creation of value in markets within social and cultural contexts and preconditions. It is an important source for scholars in economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science interested in how markets work, and how value is established.
Zusammenfassung
Der Aufsatz bietet einen Überblick über die Hauptfelder der Peer Review Forschung, also jenes Segments der Wissenschaftsforschung, das sich mit dem zentralen Evaluationsverfahren wissenschaftlicher Praxis befasst. Er kommt zu einem kritischen Befund: Die Peer Review Forschung ist auf verquere Weise in eben die Evaluationspraxis verstrickt, die sie doch professionell beobachten müsste. Der Grund ist ein Mangel an soziologischer Durchdringung des Gegenstands. Der Aufsatz plädiert daher für eine theoretische Neuorientierung von Personen auf soziale Prozesse, von Reliabilitätsmessung auf Dissensanerkennung, von Kognition auf Sprech- und Schreibpraxis sowie von Publikationszählungen auf Kommunikationsforschung. Denn der Peer Review ist kein wissenschaftliches Messverfahren für die Güte von Publikationen, sondern eine soziale Einrichtung zur Kalibrierung der Lesezeit einer Disziplin.
The article shows how in Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu relies on a kind of philosophical myth in his attempt to dispel structuralist accounts of action. Section 2 is a summary of Bourdieu’s use of the concept of habitus against intellectualism and structuralism. Schatzki’s criticism of Bourdieu from a purportedly Wittgensteinian perspective is also examined. Section 3 relates Bourdieu’s use of habitus to a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in action. Section 4 shows how McDowell’s rejection of foundationalist elements in Dreyfus’s account of action also raises problems for Bourdieu’s account of action. Diamond’s recent criticism of Winch is shown to have an interesting connection to this debate.
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) gilt als prononcierter Vertreter des Poststrukturalismus und muss nach Umfang, Reichweite und Rezeption seiner Arbeiten als einer der einflussreichsten sozialwissenschaftlichen Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten, was keineswegs heißt, dass seine Thesen und Interpretationen unumstritten geblieben wären. Das trifft weniger auf seine frühen Arbeiten zu, die sich mit dem Wahnsinn und seiner gesellschaftlich-kulturellen Bedeutung („Maladie mentale et Psychologie“, 1954, deutsche Fassung: „Psychologie und Geisteskrankheit“, 1968; „Histoire de la Folie“, 1961; deutsche Fassung: „Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft“, 1969) beschäftigen.
Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. Economic Lives synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time. Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity--as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, Economic Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.
In Part I of this two part paper we try to set out the 'essence' of the notion of interactional expertise by starting with its origins. In Part II we will look at the notion of contributory expertise. The exercise has been triggered by recent discussion of these concepts in this journal by Plaisance and Kennedy and by Goddiksen.
In diesem Beitrag soll die theoretische Relevanz des Konzepts „Aufmerksamkeit“ für das Verständnis des Sozialen dargelegt werden. Vor dem Hintergrund neurologischer, psychologischer und philosophischer Beobachtungen zum Phänomen der Aufmerksamkeit sowie in Auseinandersetzung mit soziologischen Klassikern und aktuellen Theorien wird der Versuch unternommen, einzelne Bedeutungsdimensionen und genuin soziologische Fragestellungen herauszuarbeiten, die den Mehrwert einer Perspektive auf die Aufmerksamkeit unterstreichen. Zudem wird thematisiert, wie das (post-)moderne Subjekt zwischen Freiheit und Zwang zur Aufmerksamkeit oszilliert und welche gesellschaftlichen Prozesse dafür verantwortlich sind, dass Aufmerksamkeit bis in die Gegenwart hinein zu einem knappen Gut wird. Exemplarisch wird am Beispiel des wissenschaftlichen Feldes der Kampf um Aufmerksamkeit veranschaulicht, um daran ein Plädoyer für eine soziologisch gehaltvolle Auseinandersetzung mit der Schlüsselkategorie Aufmerksamkeit anzuschließen.
Abstract
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the theoretical relevance of the concept of “attention” for understanding the social. Against the backdrop of neurological, psychological and philosophical insights into this subject matter, and drawing on both classical as well as current theories on this phenomenon, the article will examine the term’s respective meanings and develop genuinely sociological questions in order to underline the heuristic value of research on this topic. Furthermore, it will be argued that the (post-)modern subject oscillates between being at liberty to bestow his attention at will and being forced to do so, and the social processes accounting for attention gradually becoming an ever more scarce resource will be identified. The field of science is then drawn upon as an example to illustrate the fight for attention, followed by a plea for the comprehensive treatment of attention as a key sociological issue.
Preface (1994)AcknowledgmentsIntroduction31From Mobs to Memorials: The Sacralization of Child Life222From Useful to Useless: Moral Conflict Over Child Labor563From Child Labor to Child Work: Redefining the Economic World of Children734From a Proper Burial to a Proper Education: The Case of Children's Insurance1135From Wrongful Death to Wrongful Birth: The Changing Legal Evaluation of Children1386From Baby Farms to Black-Market Babies: The Changing Market for Children1697From Useful to Useless and Back to Useful? Emerging Patterns in the Valuation of Children208Notes229Index267
Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields.
How do we attribute a monetary value to intangible things? This article offers a general sociological approach to this question, using the economic value of nature as a paradigmatic case, and oil spills litigations in France and the United States as real world empirical illustrations. It suggests that a full-blown sociology of economic valuation must solve three problems: the “why,” which refers to the general place of money as a metric for worth; the “how,” which refers to the specific techniques and arguments laymen and experts deploy to elicit monetary translations; and the “then what” or the feedback loop from monetary values to social practices and representations.
This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a condenser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate previously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft protections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also expanded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of “market-situations”, and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations.
Recently, scholars have used a Bourdieusian theory of practice to analyze systems of sexual stratification, including an examination of sexual fields and sexual (or erotic) capital. While the broad structural features of the sexual field have been a point of focus in this latter research, a systematic analysis of the interactional processes that operate within the sexual status order has not been performed. In this paper, drawing on original data from an urban gay enclave, I identify six key interactional processes that occur within sexual fields, including: 1) actors’ recognition that the sexual field is constituted by a set of relations anchored to competition and sexual selection; 2) the perception of a generalized other (Mead 1934) within the field, including knowledge concerning a given field’s collective valuations of sexual attractiveness; 3) a formulation of one’s own position within the sexual status order vis-à-vis intersubjective feedback and the development of a looking-glass self (Cooley 1902); 4) an assessment of others’ positions within the sexual status order; 5) knowledge of “the game” (Goffman 1959)—including how to conduct a successful self-performance (ibid.), the construction of an optimizing front (ibid.) and proper field-specific demeanor (Goffman 1967); and finally, ideally, 6) the ability to “save face.” In total, these interactional processes draw from and reproduce systems of sexual stratification, and are likely to generalize across sexual fields.
Expanding use of Web 2.0 technologies has generated complex information dynamics that are propelling organizations in unexpected directions, redrawing boundaries and shifting relationships. Using research on user-generated content, we examine online rating and ranking mechanisms and analyze how their performance reconfigures relations of accountability. Our specific interest is in the use of so-called “social media” such as TripAdvisor, where participant reviews are used to rank the popularity of services provided by the travel sector. Although ranking mechanisms are not new, they become “power-charged”—to use Donna Haraway’s term—when enacted through Web 2.0 technologies. As such, they perform a substantial redistribution of accountability. We draw on data from an on-going field study of small businesses in a remote geographical area for whom TripAdvisor has changed ‘the rules of the game,’ and we explore the moral and strategic implication of this transformation.
HE SUBJECT OF THIS ESSAY is a problem in the sociology of science that has long been of interest to me. That problem, a candid friend tells me, is somewhat obscured by the formidable title assigned to it. Yet, properly deci- phered, the title is not nearly as opaque as it might at first seem. Consider first the signal emitted by the Roman numeral II in the main title. It informs us that the paper follows on an earlier one, "The Matthew Effect in Science, " which I finally put into print a good many years ago.' The ponderous, not to say lumpy, subtitle goes on to signal the direction of this follow-on. The first concept, cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advan- tages of trained capacity successive increments of 7 s
Based on participant observation of editors' decisions for a sociology journal, the paper investigates the peer review process. It shows a hidden interactivity in peer review, which is overlooked both by authors who impute social causes to unwelcome decisions, and by the preoccupation with 'reliability' prevalent in peer review research. This study shows that editorial judgments are: (1) attitudes taken by editorial readers toward various kinds of text, as a result of their membership in an intellectual milieu; (2) impressions gained through the reading process (through a 'virtual interaction' with the author); and (3) rationalizing statements about manuscripts made by editors and addressed to their peers on a committee. Since all these judgments are themselves subjected to judgments about their quality, the 'review' of peer review does not consist in an asymmetric examination of a text, but in the mutual monitoring of expert judgments, complementing and controlling, supervising and competing with each other. What has become known as scientific 'criticism' is an ongoing panoptic organization of communication: in peer review, judgments themselves are judged and made public.
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.
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.
Peer review research is the sphere of academic studies dealing with the central mechanism of the self-evaluation of scholarly practice. This article offers a critical review of practices. It seems that peer review research is deeply involved in the selfsame evaluative process which it should be observing with professional distance. The reason is a lack of sociological conceptualization of this activity. The article pleads for a theoretical reorientation from persons to social processes, from measures of reliability to acknowledgement of dissent, from cognition to speech and writing practices, and from publication counts to research in communication. Peer review is not a scientific measurement of the quality of publications, but a social institution for the calibration of reading time within a discipline.
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
This account of the Matthew effect is another small exercise in the psychosociological analysis of the workings of science as a social institution. The initial problem is transformed by a shift in theoretical perspective. As originally identified, the Matthew effect was construed in terms of enhancement of the position of already eminent scientists who are given disproportionate credit in cases of collaboration or of independent multiple discoveries. Its significance was thus confined to its implications for the reward system of science. By shifting the angle of vision, we note other possible kinds of consequences, this time for the communication system of science. The Matthew effect may serve to heighten the visibility of contributions to science by scientists of acknowledged standing and to reduce the visibility of contributions by authors who are less well known. We examine the psychosocial conditions and mechanisms underlying this effect and find a correlation between the redundancy function of multiple discoveries and the focalizing function of eminent men of science-a function which is reinforced by the great value these men place upon finding basic problems and by their self-assurance. This self-assurance, which is partly inherent, partly the result of experiences and associations in creative scientific environments, and partly a result of later social validation of their position, encourages them to search out risky but important problems and to highlight the results of their inquiry. A macrosocial version of the Matthew principle is apparently involved in those processes of social selection that currently lead to the concentration of scientific resources and talent (50).
Qualitative analysis of historical data concerning the diffusion of life insurance in the United States during the 19th century helps to explore the problem of establishing monetary equivalents for those aspects of the social order, such as death, that are culturally defined as above financial relationships. The financial evaluation of a man's life introduced by the life insurance industry was initially rejected by many as a profanation which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity. By the latter part of the 19th century, the economic definition of the value of death became finally more acceptable, legitimating the life insurance enterprise. However, the monetary evaluation of death did not desacralize it; life insurance emerged as a new form of ritual with which to face death.
Die vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse
- J Lacan
Beschreibung des Menschen
- H Blumenberg
Über einige primitive Formen von Klassifikation. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der kollektiven Vorstellungen
- É Durkheim
- M Mauss