Science, technology & society: all publications

Review of: MUSIL, L. (1999): Těžba uhlí, problém prostředí, modernita: jak ovlivnila ekologická výzva organizaci jedné ostravské šachty. Brno: Masarykova univerzita & Georgetown University

This paper proposes a sociology of state socialism. It does so by discussing the place of state socialism within the debates on modernity and postmodernity and reassessing the possibilities of so-called biographical research in the field of post-communist studies. The paper also outlines a theoretical and analytical framework for making the communists[a] power problematic from a sociological point of view. Such a perspective suggests that the power of the communists is not taken - explicitly or implicitly - as something that naturally explains the logic of life under the communist regime; on the contrary, it is presented as something that needs to be explained. As such, this approach is inspired by contemporary sociology of science, particularly by the work of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the paper hopes to achieve one important side-effect, namely to (re)establish the phenomena of state socialism as a topic worthy of general sociological attention.

This text explores the relation between subjectivities, materialities (including technological arrangements) and bodily competencies. Starting from the assumption that all material and bodily arrangements are specific, it considers some of those specifities, and the "passages" through which these specific arrangements are fitted together for a particular person, Liv, who is physically disabled. It explores the character of some Liv[a]s "passages" - some are "good", some "bad", some public, and some discrediting - and the ways in which they are shaped to produce personal and biographical continuity and relative autonomy for her - an autonomy and capacity discretionary decision making which she highly values. The paper thus uses some of the tools developed in the actor-network approach, but also in feminism, to interpret the material and corporeal relations involved in the formation of contemporary subjectivities.

MOSER, I. / LAW, J. (1999): Good passages, bad passages. In: J. Law, J. Hassard, editors: Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell & Sociological Review. Pp. 196-219

The presented essay has been inspired by numerous writers who have one thing in common: they distrust of conceptual dualisms and incommen-surabilities that lie behind the modern social science thinking. That is why the dividing lines between knowledge and power, sociology and society, methods and ethnomethods, or truth and falsity are not approached here as part of the solution (as a resource of explanations) but as part of the problem (as things to be explained). It is argued that sociologists construct the authoritativeness of their knowledge in such a way that they arrange a power play, a plain superiority in numbers. They do so deftly and unnoticeably, yet unwittingly, under the guise of ascetic recluses distanced far away from ordinary life. The argument is illustrated by the case of "objective hermeneutic", a qualitative research strategy of German origin, used typically within so called biographical research. I claim that the case of objective hermeneutic (and the case of qualitative methodologies in general) is only particularly obvious and vivid demon-stration of what is much less obvious and visible elsewhere, throughout the field of social science.