Social Theory

A photographic enquiry into social theory about the city of Paris with special attention to its technical «oligoptica », a concept necessary to replace that of « panoptica »....
Even though Tarde is said to have had a literary view of social science, he himself was deeply involved in statistics (especially criminal statistics) and took an essentially quantitative view of...
Although theories of organizations have analyzed many formal and informal types of organizations, they often fail to follow the specificity of the organizational mode of existence because they...
There is a close connection between Gabriel Tarde’s social theory and what has become known as actor network theory, especially because Tarde’s two refusals : there is no difference between natural...
Asked to participate in a reflexion of primatologists on what has shaped their discipline over the past half-century, the paper offers an alternative account to the optical metaphors of biases,...
Cosmopolitism is one of the great traditions in political philosophy, human rights and international law. There is however, a much more recent and small interest in cosmo-politics, as exemplified by...
Two papers by Callon on scallops and Latour on door closers are discussed by Collins and Yearley and accused of bringing back naturalism and technical determinism; this paper explores the claims,...
Outline of the technical regime of enunciation through the semiotic study of simple artefacts like door closers or road bumpers; a vocabulary for the semiotics of technical artefacts is offered.
Methodological article that traces a path between scientistic self-contradictory accounts of science and reflexivists self-destructive accounts of science; pleads for an infra-reflexivity based on...
Semiotics study of Einstein's popular book on relativity; demonstrates the distinction between text and fiction and explores the features of the scientific regime of enunciation; offers a non-...