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- Winter, Katarina, 1982-
(författare)
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Everybody knows? : Conversational coproduction in communication of addiction expertise
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The coproduction idiom within Science and Technology Studies (STS) centers on how science and society produce knowledge together. The current thesis explores expert communication – which is immersed in the relationship between science and society – as a case for understanding such coproducing processes. Expert communication is often characterized as a democratic initiative of knowledge enlightenment. But we know less about the consequences that communication initiatives bring. For instance, while groups of publics and experts are large and heterogeneous, expert communication often involves simplified and dichotomized relationships between these groups. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practice of expert communication in terms of how expertise is communicated and received. Who gets to represent experts and publics, in what ways and in which situations, and how do they engage with expertise?Expert communication takes place in all kinds of fields. The focus of this thesis is communication of addiction expertise. The addiction field makes a suitable case for studying co-constitutive practices of communication, as it is broad and disparate, and filled with different contradictory perspectives, actors and relations. The current study explores communication of addiction expertise through three cases that involve different types of experts and publics, as well as different dimensions of the expert/public relationships and of communication as a process of coproduction: Newspaper readers’ interpretations of media representations of biomedical addiction expertise, conference participants’ collaboration within a conference on codependency, and civil servants’ and politicians’ interaction within county council committee meetings. Drawing on STS approaches of coproduction of knowledge and classical sociological conversation analysis, the thesis explores questions of how, what, and whose knowledge is communicated and received, and what activities and actors are involved in these processes. A specific focus is put on how sociability in the form of conversational routines is productive, as sociability carries expertise and establishes relations between actors involved in coproducing processes of communication.Publics are not only recipients of expertise but also active enablers of how expertise comes into being in the everyday society, as publics engage with expertise through filtering and intertwining expertise through and with their personal experiences. Expertise, at least regarding human and social activities such as addiction, is thus bound to everyday experiences and lives. It is also shown how certain expertise, certain experiences, and certain actors and victims of addiction related problems are included while others are excluded. For example, biomedical explanations such as the reward system and the brain disease model seem to co-exist well with peoples’ personal experiences in contrast to social scientific explanations. Moreover, certain actors manage to draw on personal experiences in multiple roles as both experts and publics. Introducing the concept of conversational coproduction, the studies also highlight the sociability and conversational routines involved in expert communication as crucial for (de)establishing relations and making expertise flow or freeze in local coproducing processes as well as for understanding consequences of expert communication and its relation to public participation and democracy.
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| 2. |
- Ye, Rebecca, 1985-
(författare)
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The Aspirants : How faith is built in emerging occupations
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Anticipating future demands in skills and workforce development has been a longstanding practice and challenge for governments and policy-makers. While such developments are examined closely at the national and regional levels, an even more pressing issue is to advance our understanding of how people who take on jobs in new and emerging fields embark on and persist in their occupational pathways. A striking feature of these occupations is their weakly defined and unstable nature. How do individuals traverse career trajectories with these characteristics? What drives and enables them to take the road less travelled? To address such questions, this research project set off from a distinctive occupational school in Sweden that prepares individuals for emerging occupational roles in digital work. Using an interpretative, longitudinal, and multi-method approach, this study focuses on a group of aspirants who were being trained to become specialists in extracting, analysing, and using digital data for the growth and profit of organisations. These individuals can be viewed as experiencing a double “not-yet” situation, since not only are they at the stage of aspiring to certain work roles, but the occupations to which they aspire are also in a nascent, not yet fully defined stage. This study accompanies them through significant events over the years: from when they are in training, to when they search for jobs, and, finally, when they are in work.The monograph contains three empirical sections that are sequenced by the aspirants’ school-to-work pathways. The first section examines the processes of socialisation into the occupational school; the second analyses their efforts to meet the labour market; and the final one investigates the ways in which they persist in their occupational trajectories. Following these stages reveals how a strong school culture, coupled with a strong labour market, facilitates the building of “faith” into weak-form occupational pathways. Through the ceremony of being selected into the educational organisation and performing everyday rituals that engender confidence in their individual and collective futures, the analysis reveals types of “scripts” that are fashioned into the school’s methodology as well as the expectations of future hirers. It becomes apparent that aspirants generally accept these scripts as necessary and adhere to them to navigate the constantly changing demands of the labour market. However, when these interpretive schemes fail to help them cope with their unclear occupational futures, uncertainties of worth, and the unstable normative logics they encounter at work sites, the aspirants are compelled to deliberate and adapt conceptions of what is possible and permissible through individual and collective projections. In all, the empirical findings form the basis for a sociological model that offers a perspective on how to treat temporality, anticipation, and the “not-yets”, particularly in the context of education to work transitions.
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| 3. |
- Edlund, Peter, 1986-
(författare)
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Constructing an Arbiter of Status : A Study of the European Research Council's Emergence in the Field of Science
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to shed light on how certain actors are constructed into third-party arbiters of status. Such arbiters mediate the triadic relations in which status is created, assessing and suggesting certain candidates as particularly worthy of deference from audiences.While previous literature has provided us with compelling insights into the pervasive authority of status arbiters, less attention has been paid to the ways in which these arbiters reach their authoritative positions. I seek to build new knowledge on the processes through which third-party status arbiters are constructed by exploring how the European Research Council (ERC) was transformed into an authority in science. In a short period of time, the ERC’s evaluations of funding applications and subsequent allocations of research resources came to be approached as a benchmark of scientific quality, which scientists, departments, universities, and countries anxiously compared their research performance with. I suggest that these evaluations and allocations soon became more than instances in which quality was assessed and resources were distributed, thus turning into potent bases for status creation as well.In three empirical chapters, which draw upon documents, interviews, and observations, I place the ERC within the context of a field, showing how its construction into a third-party status arbiter needs to be understood as a process that unfolded over time. First, I look at major tensions and struggles that surrounded Europe-level science in the advent of the ERC’s founding. Then, I examine the active efforts with which the ERC attempted to engender acceptance for its evaluations of Starting Grant (StG) funding applications. Finally, I explore the status consequences of ERC StG allocations for the careers of scientists, the milieus within departments, and the relations between universities in Sweden.My findings contribute to previous literature by demonstrating how arbiters are constructed through mutually reinforcing relations in which the status-creating potential of evaluations is continuously framed and validated. My findings also contribute by showing how the creation of status over time requires constant maintenance efforts to sustain the agreement between arbiters and audiences in terms of candidates that are worthy of deference.
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