The paper is based on a review of research on media selection and related topics on the one hand and on an explorative pilot survey on the other. In summarising the review, the authors propose that the factors explaining media choice be grouped into five categories: (1) the properties of the media itself affect its choice, (2) properties of the user affect media choice, (3) the communication situation plays an important role, (4) macro factors explain media choice, and (5) media (...) choice can be explained as the outcome of a dynamic multiparty negotiation process. The pilot survey compares Japanese and Finnish students’ preference of media in various communication situations. The survey results encourage reserving, local macro factors or culture, a certain amount of explanatory force in explaining media choice. (shrink)

: This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties which derives from recent lines of work in science and technology studies, and which entails a decentering of the social relative to the material and the conceptual, in terms (...) of both objects of analysis and explanatory formats. In order to display the direct sociological relevance of this approach, I move to the macro level, developing the conceptual apparatus of a decentered social theory via the discussion of a historical example of major sociological significance—the systematic gearing together of scientific research, technological innovation and industrial production that originated in the synthetic dye industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the interest of the topic itself, the aim is thus to exemplify in some detail what a decentered sociology might look like, both empirically and conceptually. (shrink)

Through a fieldwork study of the practice of methadone substitution at a French addiction clinic, the classic ‘theory of action’ is criticized and an alternative one proposed. A sketch of the debates among French drug specialists, drug users and legislators shows the pertinence for these practitioners of such a theoretical question; further, the ethnographic data suggest that they can be seen as actually trying out an alternative to this ‘theory of action’.

The historical variation of scientific knowledge has lent itself to the development of historical epistemology, which attempts to historicize the origin and establishment of knowledge claims. The questions I address in this paper revolve around the historicity of the objects of those claims: How and why do new scientific objects appear? What exactly comes into being in such cases? Do scientific objects evolve over time and in what ways? I put forward and defend two theses: First, the ontology of science (...) is so rich and variegated that there are no universally valid answers to these questions. Second, we need a pluralist account of scientific objects, a pluralist metaphysics that can do justice to their rich diversity and their various modes of being and becoming. I then focus on hidden objects, which are supposed to be part of the permanent furniture of the universe, and I discuss their birth and historicity: They emerge when various phenomena coalesce as manifestations of a single hidden cause and their representations change over time. Finally, I examine the conditions under which an evolving representation may still refer to the same object and I illustrate my argument drawing upon the early history of electrons. (shrink)

The monad, of which we will speak here, is nothing else than a simple substance, which goes to make up compounds; by simple, we mean without parts. From its origins in antiquity the monad is a concept that has time and again beguiled and attracted philosophers. This thesis will argue that it is a concept that lives on in the work of Bruno Latour and that it continues to have a contemporary relevance, offering a way out of sterile debates rooted (...) in Cartesian dualism – subject/object, interior/exterior, essence/accident, whole/part, mind/body – and an alternative to those traditions which privilege one side of the dualism over the other – positivism on one hand, postmodernism on the other. The present study charts the development of the monad through the modern period, beginning with the work of Gottfried Leibniz and, thereafter, its recurrence in the work of Gabriel Tarde, Alfred North Whitehead, and, finally, Bruno Latour. However, rather than simply sketching a chronological history of the monad this study takes as its starting point Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, or to use Latour’s preferred formulation, Actant Rhizome Ontology. Arguing that Latour’s work is best understood as being another instance of a monadological metaphysics that – contra Graham Harman – owes more to Whitehead than Heidegger, to Tarde than Nietzsche, to Leibniz than Spinoza; the thesis traces the genetic intellectual relations between Latour and his three co-monadologists. Latour himself frequently identifies Leibniz, Tarde and Whitehead as intellectual antecedents in his own work; in the spirit of Latour’s own Actor-Network Theory, this thesis takes a closer look at these claimed chains of association. The first chapter surveys Leibniz’s monadology and argues that, far from being an idealist, Leibniz was committed to a monism that recognized the materiality of simple substance through his corporeal ‘de Volder’ monad. This does not necessarily lead, as argued forcibly Pauline Phemister, to pan-psychism, as Leibniz anticipates William James’ ‘depsychologized’ category of experience with his three level system of bare, soul and spirit monads, where only the spirit monads possess anything resembling a mind; however, it takes Whitehead’s transformation of the monad into the actual entity to complete the break between experience and mind. The second chapter provides a close reading of Gabriel Tarde’s Monadology & Sociology, a work only made available in English in 2012. Latour has played a significant role in the rediscovery of Tarde, claiming his criminologist compatriot as an intellectual forefather; yet throughout the 20th century Tarde’s work quietly influenced continental philosophy through Giles Deleuze who, despite only ever mentioning Tarde parenthetically, borrows Tarde’s very own formulation for the title of Difference et Repetition. The chapter presents Tarde’s work as being an explosion of the Leibnizian monad where the universe is no longer reflected but literally embodied in each individual entity while at the same time diffused through the universe of monads by virtue of relations of possession. Taken together with his theory of repetition and imitation, his privileging of difference over identity, and his philosophy of having – his ‘echontology’ – Tarde’s monadology provides the foundations for a truly relational ontology; foundations which Latour will retrospectively claim for Actor Network Theory. The third chapter considers Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme as presented in Process and Reality. Whitehead resolves the ‘audacious fudge’ committed by Leibniz – the doctrine of pre-established harmony – through a complex and sophisticated realist metaphysical system, one held together by ‘creativity’. Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, his peculiar vocabulary, his reiterative method whereby ideas are presented over and over again in different contexts mirror the very metaphysical scheme he describes. This – along with his insistence on the atomic nature of time and the instantaneous emergence and realization of each ‘actual entity’ – lays the basis for Latour’s democratic ontology which, as well as famously according equality between human and non-human actors affords concepts the same ontological status as the thinker in whose mind they have been formed. The final chapter returns to the work of Latour himself to find the monad reassembled as the ‘actor-network’. Latour’s ontological scheme is discussed in detail with reference to his three antecedents, and his ontology is presented as a reiteration/renewal of the monad; an ontology that itself demands to be renewed each and every time it is deployed. Finally, the thesis argues that Latour pays insufficient heed to Whitehead’s understanding of abstraction with the result that, despite developing the idea himself, Latour fails to fully embrace the ontological reality of the abstract. This in turn leads to his preference for litany over critique and results in a philosophy with a great deal of descriptive power but little or no transformational power. The ‘compositionist’ politics that emerge from Latour’s Actant Rhizome Ontology are ambiguous and utopian, and the thesis concludes by suggesting that more work is required to further Latour’s democratization of the monad, to include its radicalization, in pursuit of a monadology that provides an ontological basis for: …the genuine resolution of the conflict between man [sic] and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. (shrink)