Institutional Expansion and Scientific Development in the Periphery: The Structural Heterogeneity of Argentina’s Academic Field

The relationship between “marginal” and “mainstream” science has, in recent decades, become a matter of discussion. Traditional perspectives must be reexamined in the wake of transformations in the international circulation of knowledge and the subsequent diversification of scientific “peripherality”. Argentina represents an interesting case with which to explore the structure of “peripheral centres” and new forms of scientific development. While it has recently experienced an expansion in terms of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization, that process has been coupled with entrenchment of existing institutional asymmetries and persistent intra-national inequalities; academic prestige is distributed according to opposite principles of legitimation (local/international). Our main task is to explore the current state of research capacities pursuant to that expansion in order to analyze the diverse styles in which knowledge is produced. In our analysis, we make critical use of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the Latin American category of “structural heterogeneity,” while also focusing on the question of circulation. The paper outlines how professionalization has developed locally over time, and the historical tension between the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and the public universities. It describes the current structure of the scientific field in terms of researchers, institutes, publishing circuits, and institutional evaluative cultures. It focuses on geographical asymmetries in order to assess the distribution of new human and material resources throughout the country. Finally, it addresses the current situation under the new government, and raises concern over recent regressive actions.     

Representations of Precarity in Italy

This contribution is focused on collective and individual stories of precarity in Italy. At the present time, when work and the imaginaries socially constructed around it are more and more individualised and fragmented, imaginaries and collective references – whether they be social movements, trade unions or professional groups – have given way to ever more particularistic and singular experiences, which hinder the construction of a coherent identity for workers. In this scenario the question to be asked is then: how is it possible to elaborate a new collective imaginary of precarity and reclaim new rights? After a focus on the phenomenon of precarity in Italy, this contribution move to consider the activities of the network of San Precario, a cultural phenomenon that managed to develop new kinds of social claims based on bottom-up and horizontal practices. It is then discussed that the current return to an almost exclusively individual approach to the question of precarity, which forces subjects to bear the management of their professional life trajectories. Finally, an analysis of social movements' recent efforts of self-organisation and some reflections on the possible role of social sciences in elaborating tools for planning a renewed welfare system are offered.     

Why New Hybrid Organizations are Formed: Historical Perspectives on Epistemic and Academic Drift

By comparing three types of hybrid organizations—18th-century scientific academies, 19th-century institutions of higher vocational education, and 20th-century industrial research institutes—it is the purpose here to answer the question of why new hybrid organizations are continuously formed. Traditionally, and often implicitly, it is often assumed that emerging groups of potential knowledge users have their own organizational preferences and demands influencing the setup of new hybrid organizations. By applying the concepts epistemic and academic drift, it will be argued here, however, that internal organizational dynamics are just as important as changing historical conjunctures in the uses of science when understanding why new hybrid organizations are formed. Only seldom have older hybrid organizations sought to make themselves relevant to new categories of knowledge users as the original ones have been marginalized. Instead, they have tended to accede to ideals supported by traditional academic organizations with higher status in terms of knowledge management, primarily universities. Through this process, demand has been generated for the founding of new hybrid organizations rather than the transformation of existing ones. Although this study focuses on Swedish cases, it is argued that since Sweden strove consistently to implement existing international policy trends during the periods in question, the observations may be generalized to apply to other national and transnational contexts.     

From Artisan to Partisan

This article confronts the question of what a revitalized financial sector might look like if this were to be reconfigured so as to reproduce first an artisanal-like persona for the financial analyst and craft-like organizational structure for financial businesses, and second if this were to be re-territorialized so that it acted like a partisan rather than, as at present, like a disembedded footloose structure of ‘global finance’. Initially the analysis is pitched at a rather abstract and theoretical level – pulling together artisans, nomads and partisans and tracing their intellectual lineages. But the chapter ends with three very concrete illustrations of actual financial relations in practice that meet some of the criteria for being both artisanal and partisanal.     

A definition of cultural heritage: From the tangible to the intangible

The aim of this work is to analyse the evolution of the concept of cultural heritage in West European states. In the last decades of the 20th century, the term “heritage” was characterised by expansion and semantic transfer, resulting in a generalisation of the use of this word, frequently used in the place of another, such as, monument and cultural property. However, all these terms are not able to cover the same semantic field. Starting by the reflection on the semantic evolution of the notion of cultural heritage in France, we approach to the international definition of heritage given by the directives, charters and international resolutions in order to define a global outline of the meaning of heritage that is not just limited to a particular national dimension. From a purely normative approach, one went to a less restrictive approach, one based on the capacity of the object to arouse certain values that led the society in question to consider it as heritage and therefore, to a further step in which heritage is no longer defined on the basis of its material aspect. This development has also made it possible to recognise intangible cultural heritage, which was ignored for a long time, as heritage to be protected and safeguarded.     

Cross-Field Effects of Science Policy on the Biosciences: Using Bourdieu’s Relational Methodology to Understand Change

This paper is based on a study that explored the responses of bioscientists to changes in national science policy and research funding in Canada. In the late 1990s, a range of new science policies and funding initiatives were implemented, linking research funding to Canada’s competitiveness in the ‘global knowledge economy’. Bourdieu’s theory of practice is used to explore the multi-scalar, cross-field effects of global economic policy and national science policy on scientific practice. While most science and educational policy studies use Bourdieu’s concepts ontologically, as “thinking tools” to theorize power, this study adopted Bourdieu’s relational epistemology, empirically linking objective positions of power (capital) with position-takings (rooted in habitus) towards market-oriented science. A relational epistemology made it possible to explore what forms and weight of capital scientists brought to bear on symbolic struggles over the legitimacy of a market and scientific logic. By empirically investigating how power shaped bioscientists’ responses to market-oriented science policy, this study was able to identify key mechanisms of change within the scientific field and between science, politics and the market. First, it identified the rise of a new form of entrepreneurial capital and a market-oriented logic that coexists alongside a traditional scientific logic within the scientific field in a bipolar system of stratification. Second, it illustrated changes in scientific practice, which contribute to change in the structure of the distribution of capital within the scientific field. This study challenges Bourdieu’s emphasis on a single dominant logic or symbolic order and challenges science and technology scholars to both use and extend his theoretical contributions.     

Mobile consumers and the retail industry: the resistible advent of a new marketing scene

ABSTRACT

Over the last ten years, marketing professionals have invested in various devices aimed at digitalizing the point of sale. Mobile phones, and the connection they open between the digital and physical worlds, are likely to profoundly renew the way organizations build the representations of consumers upon which they operate. This article aims to describe the new, mobile-based market infrastructure that is currently being implemented; the figures of the consumer it builds on and renews for marketing purposes; and the opportunities it offers to create a new marketing scene. We address this question by focusing on the world of physical retail. We show that online commerce websites and http cookies have enabled a connection between three traditionally separate figures of the consumer and associated marketing scenes: the consumer as an audience, as a shopping cart, or as a (loyalty) card. The smartphone carries the promise of pursuing this movement into store aisles. We show, however, that the domestication of physical geography to cultivate mobile consumers is particularly difficult, and so far based on a series of disparate attempts and experiments.     

Implementing the Triple Helix Model: Means-Ends Decoupling at the State Level?

The Triple Helix is a global model originating in developed economies but less developed countries have also made attempts to implement it into their national contexts. Meanwhile, the national context can be characterised by means-ends decoupling at the state level which implies that policies and practices of the state are disconnected from its core goal of creating public welfare. It refers to the oligarchic economies in which the state is captured by exploitative, rent-seeking oligarchies in business and politics. Ukraine is an example of such a country. Thus, the research question is: how did means-ends decoupling at the state level affect the implementation of the Triple Helix model in Ukraine? To answer this question, we employed both rational choice institutionalism and sociological institutionalism. The data emanate from interviews with the senior managers of four universities and science parks established within them. The findings reveal that means-ends decoupling at the state level, caused by the rent-seeking behaviour of business and political oligarchies, led to the implementation of the Triple Helix model in Ukraine also reflecting a case of means-ends decoupling. The greater the institutional complexity experienced by the science park and the more the senior managers of the university and the science park maintain a logic of confidence in practices that deviate from the Triple Helix model, the greater rent-seeking and means-ends decoupling at the organisational level. Both rent-seeking and means-ends decoupling were found to not only hinder economic growth but also result in a diversion of human intellectual capital.

     

THE MEANING OF PRICE IN WORLD MARKETS

What is a global price? Studying the making of prices in spot, options and futures markets, the article ethnographically addresses this question by using world cotton trade as its empirical context. It argues that global market prices are not set by the mere coming together of demand and supply, but are produced as mercantile tools. These tools or prosthetic prices are realized by a multiplicity of actors. The article shows that instead of focusing narrowly on price setting, policy makers and researchers should attend to the conditions of price realization. In world and regional markets, prices are realized in multiple forms. Drawing on contemporary economic anthropology and sociology, the article maps the rich world of prices in their multiple manifestations and processes of realization. Price realization in the world cotton market is performed and maintained by constant interventions in the making of the markets and their prices through different forms of perceptions, scientific assumptions, standardizations of the object of exchange, various calculative tools, rumours and indexes. In conclusion, the article hints at the political implications and social scientific consequences of seeing the world price as a mercantile prosthesis.     

Resuscitating Georg Lukács: Form,Metaphysics and the Idea of a New Realism

It is admittedly difficult to imagine that there is something one can learn from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács in a postmetaphysical and nominalistic age. At the centre of this essay is the following question: How to resuscitate a metaphysical thinker in postmetaphysical times? The essay shows that Lukács can play a crucial role in the attempt to theorise what Fredric Jameson has termed a ‘new realism’. Elucidating the Lukácsian understanding of the dialectics of form and totality, it is argued that precisely because of his redemptive notion of form and his metaphysical framework, Lukács might eventually turn out to be useful for the endeavour to artistically represent and conceptually grasp our present.     

‘Black Is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis’

Abstract

Race is rigorously policed through, and predicated on, a crisis of maintaining a claim to supposed racial ontology. The language of crisis pervades race; yet crisis is only brought into focus – shows itself – when racial ontology is called into question or threatened as an axiomatic reality. This essay argues, however, that it is crisis, in the form of the imperative regulatory call to race or the intricate operations of racialising discipline that constitutes raced subjects. The crisis is one of belonging or of successfully representing a ‘racial truth’. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that it is when race is viewed as performative that crisis becomes evident as the ever‐present condition of racial identity formation. From this vantage point, the concept of crisis as a point of danger can be revised to be seen as a turning point when an important change can take place: then, crisis might be envisaged as a positive means through which to imagine and realise new enactments of racial being.     

Sourcing newness: ways of inducing indeterminacy

This paper engages with the question of the new as the first stage in what may, at a later time, turn into an innovation. Taking our cue from John Dewey, the new is here interpreted as a consequence of indeterminacy. We study practices that induce indeterminacy in order to ‘source’ the new. Based on findings from a collective research programme, we distinguish three ways of inducing indeterminacy: configuring situations, creating things and risking valuations. For each of these ways of inducing indeterminacy basic variations are described and discussed in greater detail. The three ways of inducing indeterminacy are shown to correspond to a present-centred concept of time that distinguishes the now from a past and a future horizon. The cases presented affirm the claim that the new is not an inevitable consequence of the increasing entanglement of technoscience and the economy but something that needs to be sought for, cared for and actively produced.     

D. H. Lawrence: Letter‐writer and craftsman in verse

Art history has lost and rediscovered semiotics several times since the 1950s, and at the moment writers employ an eclectic mixture of theories derived mainly from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. Of the two, Peirce is possibly the more influential model, on account of his tripartite theory of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. (The Saussurean model is identified more closely with the poststructuralist moment in art history, beginning in the 1970s.) The question of semiotics is once again topical now that visual culture is consolidating as a discipline, because the new field can choose from a wide range of semiotic practices – or it can choose to bypass semiotics altogether. This essay is a contribution to that current state of affairs. My principal point is that Peirce is much stranger than he is taken to be: he is idiosyncratic and demanding, and at times outlandishly hermetic. For most of what art history and visual studies aim to do, Peirce is simply not necessary; and when he is pertinent, he is so mainly as a model for concertedly logical thinking of a sort that is rare in visual studies or art history.     

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.     

Black Swan,Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process?     

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.     

Knowledge for the West,Production for the Rest?

This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.     

Negotiating Global Finance

This paper delineates how stockbrokers in Mumbai negotiate (contest, reconcile and appropriate) global finance. In recent years, the social studies of finance have grown profoundly, enhancing our understanding of finance across disciplinary boundaries. However, the way in which global finance is practised by local stockbrokers in non-western financial markets has received minor attention. Even though the Mumbai financial market is comparatively small, it is an instructive case due to a transition of financial practices over the previous two decades. Despite these rapid changes, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the oldest exchange in India, and its ‘traditional’ brokers remain active and relatively influential. Drawing on present-day experiences as well as historical recollections of BSE stockbrokers, this article shows that global finance is not an unambiguous or predictable force, but instead negotiated and thus actively shaped by local stockbrokers.     

Milk,Modernity and the Making of the Human

Branding is an economic and cultural process. Branding endows goods and services with value which corporations protect as their intellectual property, enabling brands to support share prices and be traded as assets in takeovers and mergers, at the same time as they serve to differentiate products competitively in the marketplace. Yet this ‘brand value’ depends on cultural perceptions of the meaning and worth of a brand. More than the unique image or positioning of a brand being maintained relative to others of its kind, such perceptions may involve the expressive and emotional attachment of consumers, and this may be very widely shared. This paper argues that, with certain brands, such shared attachment can occur on a national basis, so that they become symbols of national belonging. Whereas consumers attribute a putative foreign national origin to some global brands – for example, Harley-Davidson is unequivocally ‘American’ – they relate to other brands as expressive of their own national origin. This identification often persists even when national brands are taken over by global corporations, since the brand's association with the nation is a major dimension of its value, or the ‘brand equity’ which the new global owner has paid for, and intends to capitalise upon. The paper examines instances in which this has happened in Australia, such as the traditional brand Vegemite, long ago acquired by Kraft, and also cases where the Australian associations of a brand have been exploited in establishing its global identity, notably Foster's Lager.     

Artistic education matters: survival in the arts occupations

The literature of cultural economics generally finds that an artistic education has no significant impact on artists’ income and careers in the arts. In artists’ labor markets, indefinable features such as talent and artistic creativity apparently contribute more to success or higher rates of payment than education and training. In this article, we will readdress this question by looking at the artists’ survival in the arts occupations. We find it reasonable to expect than an artistic education can have a significant impact on artists’ careers because of the importance of technical skills, networks and signaling effects. We analyze the question by using a unique longitudinal dataset for five different groups of artists in Denmark, using the Cox model to apply survival functions and semi-parametric analysis. The results show, among other things, that an artistic education has a significant impact on artists’ careers in the arts, and we find important industry differences.