Overview

The book aims to explore how governance and accountability are mediated through material relations involving ordinary everyday objects and technologies. It draws on empirical materials in three main areas: waste management and recycling; the regulation and control of traffic; and security and passenger movement in airports.

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9780199584741

Table of Contents

Reviews

Do you want to escape from the rulers who hide in the mundane tools of daily life? Then read this book to find out how it all works. Governance in practice provocatively portrayed. Annemarie Mol, University of Amsterdam After this book, sorting your trash, slowing down to negotiate a speed hump, and transiting through an airport will become intensely social events. Mundane objects will have become your familiars in new ways. Essential reading for new generation science and technology studies. Helen Verran, University of Melbourne This is a book to spark a whole field of research. With droll wit and exquisite prose, Woolgar and Neyland demonstrate that understanding the infrastructures of everyday governance (recycling, speed cameras, airport security) requires new ways of exploring the kinds of objects that make up our world (our sociotechnical ontologies) and the very nature of the state. It is at once a science and technology studies classic and a gage for the continued fertility of the field. Geoffrey C. Bowker, University of California, Irvine

Author Information

Professor Steve Woolgar is a Sociologist who holds the Chair of Marketing at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. He was formerly Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Human Sciences and Director of CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) at Brunel University. He has held Visiting Appointments at McGill University (Sociology '79-81), MIT (Program in Science Technology and Society, '83-84), Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, '88-89) and UC San Diego (Sociology, '95-96). From 1997-2002 he was Director of the ESRC Programme Virtual Society? - the social science of electronic technologies a GBP3m venture comprising 22 research projects throughout the UK. Daniel Neyland is a Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths College. He has previously been Lecturer in the Management School, at the University of Lancaster, and Senior Research Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. His research interests cover issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization.

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