Empirical Vignettes Research Articles

All You Need is Recalcitrance; A Stengerian Fable for Psychology

Recalcitrance is a form of resistance particularly relevant to human sciences. This essay explores how Isabelle Stengers outlined this topic from a critical reading of certain experiments in the history of psychology. Since living beings cannot remain indifferent to the proofs and interrogations they are submitted, scientists must remain attentive to avoid the frequent feature of pliability by which the studied subject adapts its behavior to satisfy the experimenter’s expectations. Further developments have proposed this concept as a demarcation criterion for good and bad experiments for psychology. The second half of the essay offers an auto-ethnographic account of my own clinician practice. From a series of empirical vignettes, a speculative fabulation is woven to explore whether Stenger’s thesis on recalcitrance could and/or should be implemented in psychotherapy.

The Impact of Dissonance? A Valuation Perspective on Rural Social Innovation Processes

Social innovation (SI) has been credited with fostering novel solutions to the socio-economic challenges many rural areas face. The quest for a substantiated understanding of its potential for regional development has spawned a rich literature on SI impact assessments. Yet, having been instrumental, these assessments harbour several ambiguities as they seek to unveil objective impacts in a results-oriented manner. First, SI processes take diverse directionalities, questioning the idea of them being ‘straightforward facts’ and giving leeway to a more constructivist understanding. Second, a results-oriented perspective tends to obscure social processes that initially contribute to the emergence of impacts. In response to such concerns, we suggest a valuation perspective that explores how SI impacts are constructed iteratively throughout the innovation process. To do so, we operationalise the notion of dissonance as a critical factor embedded in innovative activities in three instances: impulses, turning points, and lock-ins. This perspective allows us to study how value is experienced, assigned, and strategically attracted while shedding light on how SI processes and their impacts are co-constructed in valuation processes. The article uses empirical vignettes from selected case studies with SI initiatives in Northern Germany.

Menopause, work and mid‐life: Challenging the ideal worker stereotype

AbstractThis article investigates how the complexity of life domains of menopause‐aged women creates a paradox of simultaneously challenging the ideal worker stereotype while being caught within it. The empirical setting of menopause at work acts to highlight how work, life, and health pressures are entangled in how women present themselves at work, through varying organizational and societal expectations of being ‘fit for work’. We draw on 80 semi‐structured, life‐course interviews of women over 50 working in four occupational settings: social care, manufacturing, finance, and self‐employed. Findings are presented through three empirical vignettes, providing unique insight into how ideal worker expectations perpetuate or challenge the persistent silencing of ‘being’ menopausal at work, reinforced by life domain experiences relevant to mid‐life. We present a theoretical contribution to ideal worker theory by highlighting that women who redefine the ideal worker stereotype might be less vulnerable to gendered ageist workplace cultures. We provide a practical contribution for how organizations can better support this generation and future generations of mid‐life women at work.

Tensions in digital welfare states: Three perspectives on care and control

Proponents of digital transformation in welfare provision argue that digital technologies can take over tedious tasks and free resources to provide better care for those in need. Digital technologies, however, are often developed in line with a logic of control and dispositions around surveillance and efficiency which challenge careful engagements. In this conceptual article, we explore emerging tensions in digital welfare arrangements and propose an analytical framework to illuminate interrelations between care and control in values, infrastructures, and work related to the provision of welfare services. Illustrating the application of this framework with three empirical vignettes, we discuss how digital welfare technologies shape relations between state care and control. Considering theories of care in relation to the digital welfare state, we give a nuanced perspective on the contingencies of the digital transformation and add to the literature concerned with social justice by attending to everyday lived experiences in-between control and care.

Doing sonic urban ethnography: Voices from Shanghai, Berlin and London

Matters of sound and listening are increasingly being attended to across the social sciences and humanities, reflecting what has been termed a ‘sonic turn’ since the early 2000s. In urban ethnographic research, scholars are starting to pay attention to the role of sound in social relations, in expressions of identity and senses of belonging, as well as in processes of othering. In this paper, we explore the theoretical and methodological opportunities of sonic urban ethnography, that is, an urban ethnography that foregrounds sound and listening in theoretical and methodological ways. We argue that the promise of sonic urban ethnography lies in its ability to interrupt the predominant focus on text and the visual by developing expanded practices of listening for alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the urban. We share four empirical vignettes from Shanghai, Berlin and London that illustrate, in their different ways, the power exercised through sound in the urban environment. Our discussion of the empirical cases highlights three key ‘lessons’ for doing sonic urban ethnography.

Affect and relational agency: How a negative ontology can broaden our understanding of IS research

The sociomaterial lens within IS research holds that agency should not be considered as a property solely of humans, or of technology, but instead arises from an emergent interaction between the two. This, emergent, account of agency deepens our understanding of unfolding IS practice, but its largely cognitive orientation remains naïve towards affectively-sensed motivations that also form part of this interaction. By implication, a sociomaterial perspective lacking an affective dimension offers an incomplete conceptualisation of information systems. In response, an affectively-informed negative ontology encourages IS researchers to extend their focus beyond the visible, to encompass how actors' receptiveness towards material objects (discourses, technologies) is shaped by deep, affectively-derived motivations of which they are not focally aware, but which nonetheless acquire agency in contributing to a sociomaterial outcome. A central argument, and illustrative empirical vignette, demonstrate how the concepts of sociomateriality, affect, and negative ontology combine to offer researchers an enhanced understanding of relational agency. A discussion follows, exploring some initial ontological, epistemological and methodological implications of an affectively-informed negative ontology for IS research.

Community organising in higher education: activist community-engaged learning in geography

ABSTRACT This paper highlights the transformative potential of place-based community organizing as a theory and practice of progressive social change and as a critical approach to the social purpose of community engagement in Higher Education Institutions. The aim is to expose power asymmetries and civic renewal “from below” through a focus on community engaged learning, specifically community organizing on the curriculum for geography undergraduates. The empirical focus is an English university, but the issues and observations are widespread. Around the world, students are coping with disruptions following a global pandemic, austerity, and loss of trust in local democracy – participating in climate emergency and racial justice movements. This paper advances community organising and community engaged learning as a mutually co-constitutive challenge to conventional notions of the student as a passive consumer of recruitment, learning, and individualised notions of civic responsibility. Methods of community organising are based on the theory that if you want change, you need power: change ultimately traces a motivational journey from anger to agitation and action. Empirical vignettes explore the transformative role of emotionally stirring “political theatre” and direct action, while exposing tensions that arise due to the transitory status of students in place and time.

Digital Norm Contestation and Feminist Foreign Policy

Abstract This article examines the role of digital norm contestation in feminist foreign policy (FFP). It analyzes how states that participate in digital diplomacy are involved in challenging and resisting norms, values and expectations related to feminist positionings in the digital environment. The article presents an analytical framework for the study of digital norm contestation and conducts an empirical case study of Sweden as the first country in the world to brand its foreign policy “feminist.” This triggered a process of digital norm contestation, particularly visible in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Three empirical vignettes of digital norm contestation are analyzed. The first example illustrates how the Swedish government was able to exercise global leadership to visually perform and digitally advocate the contestation of the US global gag rule. The second example underlines how the Swedish government harnessed its leadership by connecting it to grassroots contestations of the global gag rule through digital advocacy networks. The third example illuminates how the Swedish government’s visit to Iran backfired because of a lost sense of control over visual performative effects in the digital environment. By way of conclusion, we suggest three avenues that can be pursued to further the research agenda on gender, digital norm contestation, and foreign policy.

Abolish, Accept, Apply: Coping With Ignorance in Project Ecologies

This article seeks to advance the current debate on the role of ignorance in the management of large projects by mobilizing insights from recent literature on the interplay between temporary projects and permanent contexts. Instead of examining how ignorance shapes the success or failure of isolated projects, we intend to examine how ignorance is addressed and framed within these projects and their wider environment and how this framing shapes the practices of planning and managing projects. The usefulness of the proposed framework is gauged with two empirical vignettes that elucidate different perspectives on ignorance in recent, German, large construction projects.

The Agonistic Politics of Invitation: Narrating Moments of Cultural Policy Interventions in Berlin, New York and Vancouver

Abstract This paper offers the framework of an agonistic politics of invitation to nuance the political implications of contextually- and temporally-specific cultural policy invites that bring to light a range of conflicts. Invitations are conceptualized with respect to their rationale, form, role expectations, and responses in three empirical vignettes: (1) the collectivized articulation of Berlin’s trans-disciplinary Koalition der Freien Szene as future invitee in local cultural governance; (2) the counter-invitation formulated by New York City’s People’s Cultural Plan to tackle ongoing racial inequities in the municipal Cultural Plan; and (3) uninvited graffiti responses to Vancouver’s Chinatown public art call to reconcile century-long discrimination against Chinese Canadians. The paper argues that invitations crucially shape and condition future spaces of possibilities for collaborative urban cultural governance.

The Agonistic Politics of Invitation: Narrating Moments of Cultural Policy Interventions in Berlin, New York and Vancouver

Abstract This paper offers the framework of an agonistic politics of invitation to nuance the political implications of contextually- and temporally-specific cultural policy invites that bring to light a range of conflicts. Invitations are conceptualized with respect to their rationale, form, role expectations, and responses in three empirical vignettes: (1) the collectivized articulation of Berlin’s trans-disciplinary Koalition der Freien Szene as future invitee in local cultural governance; (2) the counter-invitation formulated by New York City’s People’s Cultural Plan to tackle ongoing racial inequities in the municipal Cultural Plan; and (3) uninvited graffiti responses to Vancouver’s Chinatown public art call to reconcile century-long discrimination against Chinese Canadians. The paper argues that invitations crucially shape and condition future spaces of possibilities for collaborative urban cultural governance.

Three laws of teleonometrics

Abstract We define teleonometrics as the theoretical and empirical study of teleonomy. We propose three laws for teleonometrics. The first law describes the hierarchical organization of teleonomic functions across biological levels from genes to individuals. According to this law, the number of goal-directed functions increases from individuals (one goal, maximizing inclusive fitness) to intermediate levels and to genes and alleles (myriad time-, space- and context-dependent goals, depending upon degrees and patterns of pleiotropy). The second law describes the operation of teleonomic functions under trade-offs, coadaptations and negative and positive pleiotropies, which are universal in biological systems. According to this law, the functions of an allele, gene or trait are described and defined by patterns of antagonistic (trading off) and compatible (coadapted) functions. The third law of teleonometrics is that the major transitions in evolution are driven by the origins of novel, emergent goals associated with functional changes and by the breaking and reshaping of trade-offs, especially by mechanisms involving increases in resources or time, and new divisions of labour or function. We illustrate the application of these laws using data from three empirical vignettes, which help to show the usefulness of teleonometric viewpoints for understanding the interfaces between function, trade-offs and dysfunctions manifest as disease.

Revisiting path-as-process: agency in a discontinuity-development model

ABSTRACT In the literature on regional industrial path development, the path-as-process perspective conceptualizes the emergence, evolution, transformation, and decline of regional industries in the long term. However, critical questions about the role of agency in path development and transformation remain open, partly due to a frequent empirical focus on isolated episodes. This article argues that path development should be seen as a long-term sequence that includes episodes of path development interrupted by occasional episodes of transformation. These transformative episodes are driven by agency within a changing or stable structural context. Such a discontinuity-development model focuses attention on how and why agency patterns change and on which practices agents employ during critical junctures. An empirical vignette on the long-term development of tourism in Eilat, Israel, illustrates how the model can be applied and elucidates methodological challenges for further empirical research.

Rubbish? Envisioning a sociolinguistics of waste

Abstract(English) As the opening statement in a curated dialogue on Language and Waste, this paper considers what a sociolinguistics of waste might look like. In the first two parts, I provide some general rationale and academic context for starting to notice waste. By avoiding the dirty places and raw lives of waste, sociolinguists obscure two important relations: first, the social worlds of people who live and work with/in waste; second, the social connection between “us” (as makers of waste) and those left to pick up the pieces. I briefly review the isolated precedents in sociocultural linguistics for attending to waste. In the third and fourth parts, I propose at least two ways sociolinguistics can contribute usefully and distinctively to discard studies. I start by offering two empirical vignettes concerned with the discursive creation and destruction of value. In this vein, and orienting to economic sociology, I argue that scholarship on stancetaking can helpfully pinpoint the processes of (e)valuation and valuation by which things are declared unworthy or “waste‐able.” Against the backdrop of these initial propositions, the dialogue continues with commentaries by Jillian Cavanaugh, Annabelle Mooney, and Joshua Reno who contribute their own ideas about approaching waste from a decidedly (socio)linguistic angle.

Language and symbolic violence in computational models of ethnocentrism: A critical phenomenology and Southern re-orientations

Viewing code as heterogeneous language we offer an investigation of the relationship between language and symbolic violence in computational models of sociopolitical phenomena such as segregation and ethnocentrism. We offer a critical phenomenological account of how the transparency and ambiguity inherent in computational models of ethnocentrism embody and enact symbolic power and violence through assumptions of docility and omissions of marginalized voices and experiences. Centering voices of immigrants of color and Dalit scholars from the Global South, we present an empirical vignette as well as theoretical arguments that illustrate experiences of pain, oppression and erasure that underlie experiences of migration and urban segregation. Our work illustrates that dignity in learning is not independent of how dignity is represented computationally, and argues for a fundamental axiological re-orientation of computational ontologies toward Southern perspectives.

The Development of Pedagogical Competence in Tacit Knowing

Polanyi’s theory of personal knowledge provides a paradigmatic conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of tacit knowing and learning. We use this framework to analyze the development of pedagogical competence. Drawing on Polanyi, we regard pedagogical competence as a particular field of professional tacit knowing that relates subsidiary and focal awareness of events in class, effects situated appraisal, and relates events to teaching intentions. The development of pedagogical competence takes place when a teacher struggles to relate teaching intentions to ongoing events in tacit knowing and engages in situated experimentation. Based on Polanyi’s conception of subsidiary awareness, focal awareness, and appraisal, we present an empirical vignette from a case study. In it, a teacher engages in situated experimentation to resolve two opposing semantic fields in class: an intended field of interaction, which focuses on the lesson topic, and the field of student peer relations. Based on our analysis, we argue that the teacher’s competence development is focused on the educative task of managing students’ peer culture, while the teacher’s focal awareness remains on the didactical task of teaching a subject.

Theorizing the globally engaged city in world politics

Cities both large and small, more and less economically advanced, are deeply involved in efforts to address the most challenging and complex issues of contemporary global governance, ranging from climate change and conditions of insecurity to human migration and public health. Yet this puzzling phenomenon is largely ignored within International Relations (IR) scholarship, and only partially theorized by scholars working in other fields of inquiry. Our premise in this article is that attempts to understand and assess city participation in world politics are augmented by focusing on the global identity of the city, since understanding what cities do in world politics is shaped by who cities (think they) are on the global stage. In proposing a subtle shift, from the passively labeled global city to what we call the globally engaged city, we direct analysis to the political and discursive forces shaping, delimiting, and informing this novel role for the city as a world-political actor. We propose that city identity is now fractured into local and global dimensions and set out two analytically distinct contexts in which the global identity of the city is forged through a process of differentiation from the nation-state. Our framework highlights in particular the politics of recognition shaping how the globally engaged city is defined and diffused. Through two empirical vignettes we illustrate the value of our framework as a means for IR scholarship to bring cities in from the analytic hinterlands and better understand their (potential) impact on the world stage.

Constitutional Dictatorships, from Colonialism to COVID-19

In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. It is capable of illuminating—and retelling—epic histories of constitutional law, of alerting us to commonalities in constitutional practices of domination—and thus of violence—that would otherwise remain shrouded in legal orientalism. The analysis aspires to make constitutional law strange again. To this end, I trace nomoi and narratives of constitutional dictatorship from colonialism to the coronavirus pandemic. Arguing against emergency scripts, I relate the idea of “emergency” to the everyday and both to coloniality. Mine is a rudimentary conceptual history—a Begriffsgeschichte—of constitutional dictatorship. I think of the empirical vignettes about crisis government in the colony/postcolony on which my comparative historical analysis is based as prolegomena to a critical theory of constitutional dictatorship.

Operation Warp Speed: Projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has profound socio-economic consequences. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, so this paper focuses on radical changes to accepted practice in project organizing in response. In particular, we focus on schedule compression to deliver outputs to mitigate the immediate impact of the pandemic on health. In the spirit of engaged scholarship, which is problem-driven rather than theory-driven, we address directly the evidence of what happened in two empirical vignettes and one more substantial case study – the CoronavirusUY app; emergency field hospitals; and vaccine development. We then suggest the implications for project management theory in discussion.

Pandemic disruption, extended bodies, and elastic situations - Reflections on COVID-19 and Mobilities

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented disruption. The quantitative effects on health, economy, travel, social interaction and almost any walk-of-life imaginable are massive. There is no doubt that this is a deep crisis, with profound effects. As we speak estimations and extrapolations of what this means for the future of cities and societies takes on new heights. This paper is not about these ‘big effects’. Rather, it will invite a reflection upon the often taken-for-granted nature of mobilities and the contemporary city. We propose to ‘think with’ Covid-19 as it were in order to utilize it as a catalyst for bringing about more nuanced and deep descriptions of ‘banal’ everyday mobilities practices. For example, the standing in line at the bus-shed, the positioning and seating on the subway, the passing of pedestrians on the pavement, and the mobile negotiation of street spaces. The paper treat Covid-19 as a window into the ‘politics of visibility’. The paper presents two key concepts as tools for enabling this reflection. One is the notion of the ‘extended body’ and the other the ‘elastic situation’. These are exemplified in three short empirical vignettes of public space activities: queuing, running, and drive-in services.