The invisible work of data
Elements for a sociology of scriptural infrastructures
Open, massive, raw… data are at the heart of many debates today. Optimists see it as a natural resource whose…
The grip of markets. Understanding how they function in order to change them
While partisans and despisers of the market economy confront each other with a rare violence, a prior question arises: what is a market?
Michel Callon shows that the organization of market activities is not limited to the mere confrontation between offers and demands. How is a “thing” transformed, after immense […]
In Democratic Experiments, Brice Laurent discusses the challenges that emerging technologies create for democracy today. He focuses on nanotechnology and its attendant problems, proposing nanotechnology as a lens through which to understand contemporary democracy in both theory and practice.
The authors are: Fabian Muniesa, Liliana Doganova, Horacio Ortiz, Álvaro Pina-Stranger, Florence Paterson, Alaric Bourgoin, Véra Ehrenstein, Pierre-André Juven, David Pontille, Başak Saraç-Lesavre and Guillaume Yon What does it mean to turn something into capital? What does considering things as…
Health that counts? Costs and hospital rates in the French hospital policy What is a profitable patient? What is an excessively costly patient? How do we judge that a hospital is not productive enough? How do some hospitals end up…
Signing Together. Contribution and Evaluation in Science Scientific activity is crossed with a fundamental tension between organizational forms of collaborative work and evaluation policies that consecrate individual geniuses. This tension regularly restarts the debates about the authorship of scientific articles…
A Primer on Distributed Architectures What is meant by distributed network architecture? Trivially it is called peer-to-peer. From a technical standpoint, it evokes an organization made of multiple calculation units, resources sharing, the absence of unique point, flexibility… in short,…
The Equilibrists. An Ethnography of Management Consulting Conquering technicians? Quacks of the modern world? Management consultants are often ridiculed by critics but they are little studied for what they do. Consulting can neither be reduced to the mechanical application of…
Initially published in French in 1993 by éditions Métailié (and reprinted in 2007), La passion musicale : une sociologie de la médiation, was published by Routledge with translation by Margaret Rigaud in 2015.
The book is now open-access on Routledge site.
Dwarfs without Giants – Decentralized architecture and Internet services Decentralization is central in the genesis of the Internet, its primary objective was to make heterogeneous and distant machines communicate without going through a unique point. Today, concentration dominates around macro-actors,…
