Knowledge and society: Changing practices and persistently intractable issues

Recent changes in scientific practices

Among the productive tensions animating social sciences since their inception is the ‘transfer’ of concepts from one discipline to another, sometimes from sciences to social sciences (though rarely the other way around). In his article, Julien Larrègue examines the emergence of a new sub-discipline – genopolitics – and the afferent problems that can trickle down through social analysis activities when the mobilization of a particular concept, in this case the concept of a gene, is taken for granted. Showing how flaws can infuse arguments as well as render actual tensions visible within an established discipline, his piece provides more than a case study of regular scientific epistemology. In fact, Larrègue’s work invites us to carefully rethink the enmeshment, within apparently stabilized fields of inquiry, of conceptual production and its archaeological dimensions with political agendas, individual and collective trajectories, and institutional constraints. All of this renders social sciences not only sciences of social phenomena, but actually phenomena of sciences in the (un)making.

Also addressing the transformations of research topics (and frictions of connection between natural and socio-political realms), the article by Anthony Larsson and his co-authors, Carl Savage, Mats Brommels and Pauline Mattsson, raises issues revolving around the actual configuration of social sciences activities – this time not only at the level of a discipline, but at the level of an institution. Unfolding the intricacies surrounding the creation of a distributed biobank facility in Sweden, the authors show how deeply intertwined political, economical and societal dimensions actually are, and how their respective affinities, interests and prospectives can converge and work together or, as was the case with this research infrastructure, diverge and complexify even more any attempt at stabilizing processes.

Problematizing in its own terms the question of measure (how do we actually measure success, emergence or knowledge? And what does such measuring imply exactly?), Nadine Desrochers and her co-authors’ article dwells on the density of the reward system surrounding (and most of the time sustaining) scientific practices themselves. Examining the profound restructuring digital activities have provoked regarding how (and why) scholarly communication is now possible, their contribution is twofold. First, it reminds us of the different levels of reflexivity at stake in any examination system. Second, it recalibrates the logic of peer-reviewing, canonically regarded as being at the core of any knowledge production activities within academia.

The generation of social form

Concepts becoming (quasi)facts, political agendas transforming into (sometimes dysfunctional) institutions or scientific explorations turning into the production of knowledge (or the impression of knowledge) – all those aspects of contemporary research activities can be regarded as processes of territorializations, as Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm show in their text. In fact, by inviting us to look more attentively at morphogenesis, the two authors bring our attention back to not only the product of any social activities, but to the actual production of action within social and scientific worlds. In other words (and this bears the potential to actually change the way we not only look at social sciences, but we do social sciences), faced with the increasingly complex and intricate densities of social activities, researchers may want to shift their attention from the apprehension, a priori, of social activities or the explanation, a posteriori, of social facts, to the actual composing with of any social engagement.

Persistently intractable issues (1): Consumption and crowds

Within the sociological tradition, very broadly understood, there are a number of themes that have been centrally addressed at some point, establishing a kind of canonical view, but that tend to resist being determined by any given ‘state of the art’ and take on a different guise when looked at from other angles. Among them are certainly the issues of consumption and crowds, explored here from renewed perspectives by Samuel Sadian, and by Eduardo Cintra Torres, Sérgio Moreira and Rui Costa Lopes, respectively.

Starting out from political economy, not least from Say’s theorem that all supply creates its own demand, consumption has commonly been connected to production – and often subordinated to production. The impact of this view can still be felt when consumption in 20th-century societies is seen as functional for the reproduction of capitalism, both sustaining demand for commodities and generating either conformism, in mass consumption, or the illusion of self-realization, in current apparently individualized consumer styles. Taking the recent emphasis on agency and knowledgeability in social theory seriously, Samuel Sadian insists that this cannot be the whole story. Drawing on anthropological work in which consumption is seen in its own right, and not merely as a mechanism of social reproduction, and reviewing forms of consumption in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, he develops a perspective on consumption as knowledgeable action with a creative potential for bringing about social change.

Like consumption, crowd behaviour is a time-honoured but always less-than-central topic in the sociological tradition. Unlike consumption, however, it has long been seen with great ambiguity, namely both as functional to social reproduction, but also as potentially disruptive of social order. Crowd behaviour has often been distrusted by societal elites, including the sociological observers. Christian Borch’s (2013) recent reconstruction of the crowd topic in the history of sociology can in many respects be read in parallel to Samuel Sadian’s review of the topic of consumption. Rather than searching for elements of alternative views in existing research, as Samuel Sadian does, Eduardo Torres and his co-authors try to change perspective by exploring the views of participants in crowd events, their reasons for participating and their experiences of those events. But they similarly contribute to a new understanding of the phenomenon that emphasizes action and meaning, rather than functionality or disfunctionality.

Persistently intractable issues (2): knowledge and subject

In contrast to consumption and crowds, the concept of ‘knowledge society’ does not appear to have a long history, instead serving to designate a recent societal transformation. It follows up on the rather successful characterization of 19th- and 20th-century ‘advanced’ social configurations as ‘industrial societies’ and tries to give more substantive content to the transitional notions of ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-modern’ societies. As such, it is only one of a whole set of related attempts, reaching from Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the spectacle’ and Randall Collins’s ‘Credential society’ to Ulrich Beck’s ‘Risk society’, through Manuel Castells’s ‘Network society’, Gerhard Schulze’s ‘Experience society’ and Byung Chul-Han’s ‘Transparency society’, to name just a few. Never have attempts to define – or rather, redefine – large social configurations by a single term been, it seems, as fashionable as in recent decades.

Despite all due scepticism towards such attempts, the term ‘knowledge society’ has some history and record of persistence, briefly alluded to in the articles both by Andrea Cerroni and Hamilton Viana Chaves, which suggests one should take it seriously. It is conceptually linked to the terms ‘post-industrial society’ and ‘information society’, which emphasize the fact that the manufacture of material objects is no longer the activity that employs most people in many societies. As such, it connotes a social transformation of comparable significance to the one that led from societies with predominantly agricultural activities to ‘industrial societies’. However, it presents at least two problems that need to be identified and explored before continuing to use the term.

First, the term ‘industrial society’ had a rather unambiguous meaning. It referred to the production of goods through the use of inanimate sources of energy and suggested that this form of production was becoming dominant. (Of course, when based on ‘industriousness’, the term ‘industry’ also has a broader meaning, the significance of which has been emphasized by recent research in economic history. But we leave that question, important as it is, aside for the moment.) In this sense, there can be societies without industry; thus, the term is useful, in principle, for making distinctions. But there cannot be a society without knowledge. To make the term ‘knowledge society’ useful, one therefore must make distinctions within the category of knowledge. This is the objective of Andrea Cerroni’s reflections, providing a comprehensive and systematic typology of forms of knowledge that may serve to enlighten further debate on the knowledge society.

Second, the conceptual history of ‘knowledge society’ and its correlates shows that it was accompanied by assumptions about the mode of social integration typical of such social configurations. Very broadly, there has been a bifurcation between those views that see knowledge as enabling, and thus ‘knowledge society’ as a new stage in enhancing the social conditions for personal self-realization, on the one hand, and those that emphasize the domination of the subject by the constraints of functional knowledge, on the other. While the former is an underlying feature of the current advertisements of the benefits of the knowledge society, the latter has been the main concern of the critical traditions of social theory, with maybe Herbert Marcuse’s ‘One-dimensional man’ as the key example. A sorting out of this divide under current conditions is the key concern of Hamilton Viana Chaves’s reflections. As such, his article connects to Samuel Sadian’s attempt at renewing critical social thought by opening up to wider experiences and integrating broader observations.