Einleitung

Abstract Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents. 

Reassembling the Social

L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345321

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

Foreword Nancy Farriss Preface Part I. Toward an anthropology of things: 1. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value Arjun Appadurai 2. The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process Igor Kopytoff Part II. Exchange, Consumption, and Display: 3. Two kinds of value in the Eastern Solomon Islands William H. Davenport 4. Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the Muria Gonds Alfred Gell Part III. Prestige, Commemoration, and Value: 5. Varna and the emergence of wealth in prehistoric Europe Colin Renfrew 6. Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics Patrick Geary Part IV. Production Regimes and the Sociology of Demand: 7. Weavers and dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet Brian Spooner 8. Qat: changes in the production and consumption of a quasilegal commodity in northeast Africa Lee V. Cassanelli Part V. Historical Transformations and Commodity Codes: 9. The structure of a cultural crisis: thinking about cloth in France before and after the Revolution William M. Reddy 10. The origins of swadeshi (home industry): cloth and Indian society, 1700-1930 C. A. Bayly Index.

The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective

This analysis of the history of the Chicago Board Options Exchange explores the performativity of economics, a theme in economic sociology recently developed by Callon. Economics was crucial to the creation of financial derivatives exchanges: it helped remedy the drastic loss of legitimacy suffered by derivatives in the first half of the 20th century. Option pricing theory—a “crown jewel” of neoclassical economics—succeeded empirically not because it discovered preexisting price patterns but because markets changed in ways that made its assumptions more accurate and because the theory was used in arbitrage. The performativity of economics, however, has limits, and an emphasis on it needs to be combined with classic themes in economic sociology, such as Granovetterian embedding and the way in which exchanges can be cultures and moral communities in which collective action problems can be solved.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/374404

Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange

The paper introduces the current debate in the human sciences between the opposing conceptual positions of 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' and discusses its implications for organizational analysis. The debate focusses on the nature of 'discourse' (information, knowledge, communication) and its role in social systems. The discourse of modernism rests on transcendent yet anthropocentric criteria such as 'progress' and 'reason' which are varyingly exemplified in the work of Bell, Luhmann and Habermas. In contrast, postmodern discourse (represented here mainly by the work of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari) analyzes social life in terms of paradox and indeterminacy, thus rejecting the human agent as the centre of rational control and understanding. The paper then considers two contrasting views of the organizing process which follow from these opposing approaches to discourse. In the modernist model, organization is viewed as a social tool and an extension of human rationality. In the postmo...

Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction

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Einleitung

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References

Reassembling the Social

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective

Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange

Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction

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