This book examines a range of critical concepts that are central to a shift in the social sciences toward "pragmatic inquiry," reflecting a twenty-first century concern with particular problems and themes rather than grand theory.

Taking a transnational and transdisciplinary approach, the collection demonstrates a shared commitment to using analytical concepts for empirical exploration and a general orientation to research that favors an attention to objects, techniques, and practices. The chapters draw from broad-based and far-reaching social theory in order to analyze new, specific challenges, from grasping the everyday workings of markets, courtrooms, and clinics, to inscribing the transformations of practice within research disciplines themselves. Each contributor takes a key concept and then explores its genealogies and its circulations across scholarly communities, as well as its proven payoffs for the social sciences and, often, critical reflections on its present and future uses.

This carefully crafted volume will significantly expand and improve the analytical repertoires or toolkits available to social scientists, including scholars in sociology or anthropology and those working in science and technology studies, public health, and related fields.  

Table of Contents

Introduction, The Editors

Part 1. Institutions

1. Fields, Tim Bartley

2. Ecologies of Institutions, Daniel Cefaï

Part 2. Complex Objects

3. Dispositif, Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot

4. Assemblage, Anthony Stavrianakis

5. Market Device, Olav Velthuis

6. Complexity, Talia Dan-Cohen

Part 3. Framing Stances

7. Justification, John Bowen

8. Narrative, James Wertsch and Nutsa Batiashvili

9. Qualification, Giselinde Kuipers and Thomas Franssen

Part 4. Practices

10. Demonstrating, Claude Rosental

11. Caring, Annemarie Mol and Anita Hardon

12. Making Home, Paolo Boccagni and Jan Willem Duyvendak

Postface

13. Making Sense of Reality Together: Interdisciplinary "Ways of Seeing", Michèle Lamont