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Keywords: Weber; Economization; Economists EN Weber Economization Economists 849 853 5 02/14/23 20221201 NES 221201 One of the major merits to Keith Tribe's new introduction and translation of Weber's Economy and Society is to I re-place i Weber, taking him out of the firm grasp of (American) sociology and releasing him onto alternative planes for grasping economic life and the problem of social-economic explanation.[1] It is as if he asks us to consider: What would happen to our way of relating to Weber if we read his main concern, in the context of his writing, as the economy and economics and not the social and sociology? In fact, it could be argued that The Norwegian post-war economist profession took Weber's objectivity thesis almost to the extreme in their insistence on the division between fact and value (or in Norwegian - "sak" and "vurdering"). Troubling how Weber's concepts of ' I herrschaft' i and ' I verband' i have been translated as "authority" and "corporate group", Tribe argues that these translations 'conceal internal linkages in the conceptual armory that Weber so painstakingly assembles' (4). From scarce resources to "the good economy": a new "version of economization" replacing Weber's rational ascetism as the capitalist spirit?. [Extracted from the article]

How is objectivity accomplished in laboratory economic experiments? To address this question, this paper focuses on a modest and mundane thing: the written instructions that guide experimental subjects in the lab. In a material-semiotic perspective, these instructions can be understood as text-devices. We follow text-devices 'on the move' from their very writing, through the lab, the review process and out into the journal article. To do so, we analyse 'text-author ensembles', which are journal articles together with practice-oriented interviews with their authors. We show that instructions act not simply as texts, but as experimental instruments that also perform the procedure of experimental economics. They draw together the procedural, material and rhetorical dimensions of experimental work in economics, and link the lab setting to collective validation procedures within the discipline of economics. To achieve this, experimental economists rely on qualitative writing skills refined in collective writing and reviewing practices. These text-devices 'on the move' alert us not only to the role of writing and writing skills in the production of scientific knowledge, but to the role of texts as material and semiotic objects that can produce facts as well as labs and disciplines, and that are key to the accomplishment of objectivity in experimental economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has highlighted ‘assetization’ as an increasingly prevalent process in which valuation practices from financial economics are imposed on new aspects of society. This paper analyses the establishment of the Norwegian ‘oil fund’ – currently the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund – as the outcome of such a process. It traces the shift in the Norwegian government’s valuation arrangements from valuing oil as ‘activity’ in the 1970s towards valuing oil as a ‘national asset’ from the mid-1980s, and shows how this shift happened through close exchanges between economic expertise and governmental procedures. The paper contributes to understanding assetization as a mode of governing by showing both how it happens through governmental tools and practices and how it can have direct material consequences. In the case of Norwegian oil, the introduction of new tools of valuation made the Norwegian government manage the oil resource in a new way, and led to a re-timing of the pace of its extraction. The outcome was speeding up the conversion of oil into financial holdings, and the establishment of the ‘oil fund’ as a new infrastructure for handling oil as a national asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating consumers' valuations of farmed fish, and these are almost comical in their painstaking attention to mundane details. However, when looked into closely, they provide key insights into commodification processes and the scholarly literature to understand them. Most importantly, their analysis allows us to grasp how commodities do not simply emerge as the outcome of a one way process directed towards the market, but through a relational process that jointly works with and acts upon things and people, markets and production. The paper works with the notion of co-modification to trace and stay close to these relational processes. In doing this the paper simultaneously strives for an approach that is not framed by the dominant conceptual distinction between production and market, but instead directed towards the materiality and activeness of the things exchanged. The notion of co-modification emphasises that there is more to market that the human hand. The paper shows that it can also be used in a stronger sense to suggest that commodification is a process where things, people, production methods and markets are actively modifying one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'blue economy' has in recent years become a leading concept for envisioning what may come after the fossil-based era. In efforts at calculating the potential economic value of the ocean, policy-oriented documents seek to unite diverse actors around common goals. Through the calculation of numbers, large-scale and long-term policy visions are being crystallized. But how do such numbers come into being in practice? This article interrogates this question with an example from the Norwegian context: the established policy goal of a so-called 'five-fold increase' in marine value creation in the year 2050. While powerful numbers are commonly expected to be produced through the procedures of 'mechanical objectivity' that involve strict quantification and scientific methods, our analysis shows a rather different route towards a powerful number: By loosely combining tools developed for business management, the number is calculated by, first, openly combining qualitative and narrative operations into the calculation and then, next, decoupling qualitative uncertainties from the quantified potential. The result is a calculative process that takes the form of what we suggest to call 'reflexive objectivity' and a policy-oriented number that encourages risk-taking and action over restraint and precaution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What produces the power of senior civil servants at ministries of finance, positioned at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy? Max Weber has claimed that a hierarchical organization, meritocratic recruitment and procedural work provide bureaucracies with legitimacy. In particular he insisted on the role of Fachwissen (disciplinary knowledge) obtained through formal education. However, he also argued for the role of Dienstwissen, forms of knowledge and skills stemming from the experience of service in itself. Weber did not elaborate on this concept in detail, and few analysts of governmental expertise have examined this notion. We draw on the practice‐turn in sociology, combining the study of governmental expertise with micro‐sociological studies of administrative practices. By analysing interviews with 48 senior civil servants at the British, French and Norwegian ministries of finance about their daily practices, this article demonstrates that bureaucratic note‐writing and the procedural evaluation of such notes constitute a key form of expertise that yields authority. The study provides an analytical framework for understanding what administrative expertise consists of, how it is integral to procedural work, the forms bureaucratic hierarchies take in practice and how these three dimensions provide authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with politics. Nevertheless STS research tends to disregard the work of conventional political institutions such as parliaments, especially in the politics of nature, which is often seen as delegating ‘nature’ to science. Parliaments work on nature-objects through documents; paperwork is crucial in its procedures for delegating an issue to be further worked upon at other sites, for securing the issue's return and for enabling a decision. This mode of circulating an issue amounts to a central infrastructure for taking nature into account in politics; this infrastructure enables ‘assembling work’ as a specific mode of parliamentary practice. In the late nineteenth century the Norwegian parliament handled a controversy over whaling. New species, questions and publics were entangled with the whale issue through the parliament's work, its tools and procedures. As such, parliament enabled, worked upon and modified the issue. By assembling the whale issue it performed a politics of nature in rich, complex ways. Hence, understanding the specificsitewhere an issue is taken up is necessary in order to grasp its trajectory and to understand how conventional political sites do politics of nature in practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call ‘modifying work’. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to ‘materiality’ or the ‘materialities of objects’, a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take ‘the environment’ into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to ‘materiality’ or ‘materialities’ is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Economics does not come in only one version. In order to understand the emergence of carbon markets, this paper turns to the offices of politics and administration and argues that carbon markets ought to be seen as an effect of different versions of economics. Hence, the paper suggests that, in analysing and exploring the emergence of carbon markets, it is not sufficient to focus on market devices. We must study a wider set of devices, such as modelling practices, planning documents, and paper trails. The basis for this analysis is a study of a particular office, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance. The paper traces how, within this office, the climate issue was transformed into an oil issue and how accounting and planning technologies took part in enacting the macroeconomy, rather than the environment, as an endangered object. Hence, when studying the performativity of economics, the macroeconomy must be included, the paper argues, and so must the study of the issue that is being enacted. In pursuing the analysis in this way, the paper seeks to demonstrate that the emergence of carbon markets pertained to not only an emergent climate issue but also to an emergent oil issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including environmental change, economic sociology, and social problems.

In contemporary writing Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich are being celebrated as the first to produce an animal model for the experimental production of scurvy. But in their time their research was contested by their peers, most vocally by the polar hero and zoologist Fridtjof Nansen. This paper explores how Axel Holst initially started out as a microbe hunter and worked within a bacteriological framework, before he shifted to performing feeding experiments and came to understand scurvy as a deficiency disease. This radical shift in framework may take part in explaining the controversy around their research. But most importantly, this paper argues, we must understand this in light of the contested status of animal models and modelling work in medical science. In order to analyse this, the paper suggests that we attend to a broad set of approaching and defining ‘models’. Moreover, the paper suggests that we extend our discussion from ‘the animal model’ and what an animal model is, to modelling practices and what models can do, and sometimes fail to do. The paper concludes with arguing that Holst and Frølich in fact did not develop an animal model, i.e. a shared example upon which scientists base their work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the turn of the twentieth century the Norwegian market flourished with milk products intended for infants. But medical doctors argued in favor of “going back to nature”: Women ought to breastfeed their children. This paper explores how a re-naturalization of mother's milk emerged within experimental medicine. The prescribed “natural way” did not develop within medicine alone. The paper demonstrates how the natural developed within a relational space of different versions of milk: the free-market milk, the dirty and decaying milk, and the non-nutritional milk. But why did Norwegian mothers, in contrast to the development in for instance the US, continue to breastfeed their infants? Drawing on the work of the leading pediatrician Theodor Frølich, the paper suggests that this may in part be explained by the development of a distinct version of care: A matter-of-fact, pragmatic and flexible version of care that nevertheless came to enact mother's milk as the supreme form of nutrition to which there was hardly a competing or healthy alternative. “The natural way” became a thought style and was made integral to everyday culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the common characteristics of science, technology, and medicine is their ambition to epistemologically and organizationally move beyond the confines of nation states. In practice, however, they develop differently in countries or regions. Scientists, engineers, and physicians are constrained as well as enabled by national boundaries and specific cultures. The cultural status of such practices in reverse is influenced by a country's history, politics, and the view of the role of science, technology, and medicine in society. It is the relation between a specific region, Scandinavia, and the history of science, technology, and medicine within this region that this issue of Science in Context sets out to explore. But what is this “Scandinavia”? To many, Scandinavia besides being a specific geographical region of three countries (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) with entwined histories and closely related languages is a way of denoting a specific style or movement. “Scandinavian design” is renowned for three interrelated features; minimalism or simplicity, functionalism, and “design to the people” i.e. functional products for the average citizen (Beer 1975; Glambek 1997; Fallan 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1920s there were still very few fossil human remains to support an evolutionary explanation of human origins. Nonetheless, evolution as an explanatory framework was widely accepted. This led to a search for ancestors in several continents with fierce international competition. With so little fossil evidence available and the idea of a Missing Link as a crucial piece of evidence in human evolution still intact, many actors participated in the scientific race to identify the human ancestor. The curious case of Homo gardarensis serves as an example of how personal ambitions and national pride were deeply interconnected as scientific concerns were sometimes slighted in interwar palaeoanthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Scandinavian countries share a solid reputation as longstanding contributors to top level Arctic research. This received view, however, veils some deep-seated contrasts in the ways that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have conducted research in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. In this paper it is argued that instead of focusing on the geographical determinism of science – the fact that the Arctic is close to, indeed part of, Scandinavian territories – we should look more closely at the geopolitics of science to understand the differences and similarities between these three Nordic countries. Through case studies of, mainly, Swedish Arctic and North Atlantic glaciology in the 1920s through to the 1940s, and of Norwegian preparations in the 1950s for the International Geophysical Year 1957/58, the paper demonstrates how different styles of research – research agendas, methodological choices, collaborative patterns, international networks, availability of infrastructure, relations to politics and power – are conditioned on economic interests and strategic and geopolitical trajectories, either these are explicitly put in the forefront of scientific priorities as in the case of Norway in the 1950s, or when they are manifestly disregarded in the name of scientific internationalism, as in the case of Swedish glaciology. The case of Danish colonial science in Greenland is only cursorily drawn into this analysis but corroborates the overall thesis. The analysis of this wider science politics of Scandinavian circumpolar science is exercised against a brief introductory backdrop of Arctic science historiography. Its chief message is that the analysis of polar science applying modern theory and method of the social studies of science is comparatively recent and that the full potential of merging the literature of Arctic science and exploration with those of security, geopolitics, indigenous voices, and the politics of nationalism is yet to be realized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Uppsala school in separation science, under the leadership of Nobel laureates, The (Theodor) Svedberg and Arne Tiselius, was by all counts a half-century-long success story. Chemists at the departments for physical chemistry and biochemistry produced a number of separation techniques that were widely adopted by the scientific community and in various technological applications. Success was also commercial and separation techniques, such as gel filtration, were an important factor behind the meteoric rise of the drug company Pharmacia from the 1950s. The paper focuses on the story behind the invention of gel filtration and the product Sephadex in the 1950s and the emergence of streamlined commercially oriented separation science as a main activity at the department of biochemistry in the 1960s. The dynamics of this development is analyzed from the perspectives of moral economy and storytelling framed by the larger question of the social construction of innovation. The latter point is addressed in a brief discussion about the uses of stories like the one about Sephadex in current research policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1950s it became apparent that antibiotics could not conquer all microbes, and a series of tests were developed to assess the susceptibility of microbes to antibiotics. This article explores the development and standardization of one such testing procedure which became dominant in the Nordic region, and how the project eventually failed in the late 1970s. The standardization procedures amounted to a comprehensive scheme, standardizing not only the materials used, but also the methods and the interpretation of the results. Focusing on Sweden and Norway in particular, the article shows how this comprehensive standardization procedure accounted for several co-dependent factors and demanded collaboration within and across laboratories. Whereas literature on standardization has focused mostly on how facts and artefacts move within and across laboratories, I argue for the importance of also attending to regions and territories. More particularly, while arguing that the practices, ideals, and politics related to what have been called the “Nordic welfare state” were contributing to the design of the standardized procedure in the laboratory, I also argue that Scandinavia was drawn together as a unified region with and by these very same practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1970s, Danish population registries were increasingly used for research purposes, in particular in the health sciences. Linked with a large number of disease registries, these data infrastructures became laboratories for the development of both information technology and epidemiological studies. Denmark's system of population registries had been centralized in 1924 and was further automated in the 1960s, with individual identification numbers (CPR-numbers) introduced in 1968. The ubiquitous presence of CPR-numbers in administrative routines and everyday lives created a continually growing data archive of the entire population. The resulting national-level database made possible unprecedented record linkage, a feature epidemiologists and biomedical scientists used as a resource for population health research. The specific assemblages that emerged with their practices of data mining were constitutive of registry-based epidemiology as a style of thought and of a distinct relationship between science, citizens, and the state that emerged as “Scandinavian.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights about syncretism. The author talks about the argument of sociologist Bruno Latour that modernity presents itself as gleaming, consistent, and coherent. He also tackles the reasons why Latour has considered modernity as pure and at the same time not pure at all.

In 'Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lynch (1988) explores how the animal body is transformed into a scientific object in the laboratory. How did the laboratory become a (relatively) closed space in which scientists, the experts, were delegated the task of negotiating and transforming the interpretative sense of the animal - from sentient beings to analytic objects - as tools in a scientific machinery? By exploring a parliamentary controversy on experimental medicine at the turn of the 20th century I argue that this depended on a reworking of the status of the animal body, as well as the status of the laboratory. Crucial to this was social theory; specifically, utilitarian reasoning. Thus, what we need to study - this paper argues - is not simply the ways in which the practices of annual experimentation were met with opposition and critiques, but also how these practices came to be culturally and politically accepted, and what this implied for science - society relations. In analysing this controversy, the author attends to recent turn to politics in STS and argue for the significance of studying conventional political sites such as 'Parliament' and the role that social theory plays in renegotiating and remaking sites and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities of government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way of a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context of the microphysics of power, as techniques of domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion 'tool of democracy'. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics of emissions down to earth, thus enabling the environmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracy was never like we thought it to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to the issue, discussing the political aspects of technology and its impact on governance and power within social systems.

This paper explores a little‐known aspect of Norway's ‘closed‐fist’ policy and union history that played a role in the fate of the Union Trade Act during the dissolution of Norway's union with Sweden, namely the controversy over livestock trade. By way of this controversy and the establishment of Norwegian veterinary services the paper points to the way in which statistics and veterinary medicine may act as a form of political technology. In this case it took part in producing a national territory. Hence, science took part in carving a way out of the union. Theoretically, what the paper argues is the importance of studying economic and political history in combination with the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Back cover matter for "Science in Context" is presented which includes guidelines for submissions, subscription information, and information about forthcoming articles to be published on topics including mathematics during China's Qing dynasty, geology in 20th-century Sweden, and the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak.

The front cover featuring a 1958 photograph of employees of the pharmaceutical wholesale import-export company Norwegian Medical Depot [Norsk Medisinaldepot] in Oslo, Norway is presented. Front cover matter including the table of contents and a list of the journal's editors is also presented.

A key ambition in care studies has been to study care in practice and as practice. By turning towards practices, care studies has rendered visible and acknowledged important work that is not captured through looking at formal procedures or official and written materials, such as policy documents and medical protocols. In this literature, document materials and the written have often been seen as unable to demonstrate and address the 'specificities of care' (Mol et al., 2010, p. 9). We challenge this view by showing how pragmatically-oriented approaches can be extended to the procedural and formalized aspects of care practices. We draw upon fieldwork in the life sciences-comparative immunology-investigated through experiments on Atlantic cod ( Gadus Morhua ). How to care for fish is a contested domain; many uncertainties exist around how to care for fish so that legal requirements are met. We ask: How are existing legal and ethical principles and procedures put to work in cod immunology and animal research? By what document-practices and document-tools is care for cod in research negotiated and settled? How does the cod stand out as an object of care in the life sciences? Our article answers these questions by empirically teasing out how scientists navigate the terrain and arguing for the importance of bringing the document-based realities of animal research into analysis. We do this by delineating three different versions of care: procedural care, skilled care, and dispassionate care.