Marketing as disentanglements... (Don Slater 2003)

"Marketing, I want to argue, is a framing process, and one that involves strategic
disentanglements, but it is based on quite other kinds of knowledges. These are
interpretative, cultural knowledges that should look and behave more as in Miller’s
examples, yet also have to be understood within a framework of instrumental
rationality. My example is about marketing strategies (Slater 2002, 2003)."

Slater 2003

"In the course of a single day we enter into an immensely wide variety of exchange relationships, with complex relations between them (Carrier 1994; Carrier and Miller 1998; Slater and Tonkiss
2001)."  Slater (2003).

STS and Neoliberalism - 2011 - 2010

"Indeed, the forces bearing down upon the economists, the philosophers, and
the science studies scholars must have been considerable, given that they all
ended up saying pretty much the same things about science by the turn of the
millennium. The neoliberals had won: Science no longer qualified as a
public good." Mirowski, 2011, Science-Mart

" Last widely noted impact of the neoliberal science management regime is the aggressive promotion and protection of intellectual property in hopes of gaining com-mercial value from knowledge. There is an intimate connection between the neoliberal recasting of the market as an information processor, and the growth of the conviction that knowledge should be commodified. This connection seems all the stronger when one considers that, as several recent studies have pointed out, for the vast majority of universities patenting has been a losing financial proposition (Geiger & Sa, 2008; Greenberg, 2007; Newfield, 2008: ch. 12; Powell et al., 2007). Insisting upon the commercialization of knowledge has, so far at least, proven more ideologically effective than economically practical"

Rebecca Lave, Philip Mirowski and Samuel Randalls - Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science (2010)

Less citation, commercial availability - Manufacture of Ignorance .

"Yet, in Science of all places, there is evidence to the contrary: Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005) … as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles … the number of years of commercial availability [of a journal online] appears to significantly increase concentration of citations to fewer articles within a journal … These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature … If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. (Evans 2008, 395, 398)"


"This is just Definition I (vacuum theory) and is a perfectly healthy phenomenon, a prophylactic for the besetting sin of hubris so common among intellectuals. Likewise, the exponential growth of scientific publication renders it impossible to aspire to the status of true polymath and stay on top of everything. This is Definition 2 (bounded rationality) and is just one important aspect of our cognitive predicament, that attention and memory are limited. Of course, we are impelled to develop rules of thumb (and computer prosthetics) in order to navigate our way through a world far richer than our paltry abilities to grasp it. Who would argue otherwise? Yet, beyond those two phenomena, when whole sets of institutions are deliberately bent to sow doubt, to spew out a fog of contrarian results, to reassure the uneducated that the truth is whatever they want it to be,7 to treat the unequal distribution of knowledge as the natural dictate of freedom of choice and simultaneously to praise the innate “wisdom of crowds,” then a surfeit of ignorance is the inevitable intentional consequence. This is Definition 3, the manufacture of ignorance."


Science Mart 2011 - Mirowski

Junk Science - Philip Mirowski (2011)

The key tenets were to promote otherwise isolated scientific spokespersons (recruited from gold-plated universities, if possible) who would take the industry side in the debate, manufacture uncertainty about the existing scientific literature, launder information through seemingly neutral third-party fronts, and wherever possible recast the debate by moving it away from aspects of the science that it would seem otherwise impossible to challenge. As one famous tobacco company memo put it:

"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”… Truth is our message because of its power to withstand a conflict and sustain a controversy. If in our procigarette efforts we stick to well documented fact, we can dominate a controversy and operate with the confidence of justifiable self-interest"

Science Mart 2011 - P Mirowski

Naivite : Contando papers VS Reales objetivos

One relatively unnoticed consequence of this arrangement is that, against
conventional economic wisdom, the industrialists-and the general public-
came to believe that the sheer stockpiling of advanced weapons was ipso
facto a sign of strength, not weakness. Of course, if one's model of achievement
were a full, albeit unused, library, rather than a cleared warehouse, then
it made good sense. In this respect, endless technoscientific expansion became
both the means and the ends of the Cold War. Moreover, this policy has continued
largely unabated with the fall of the Soviet Union. The only difference
is that the state no longer occupies the role of central planner and coordinator.
Nevertheless, the cross-national metrics of techno scientific achievement
devised in the Cold War remain in place, most notably the Science Citation
Index, only now enhanced by related measures of intellectual property. Yet, as
in the Cold War, there remains an enormous gap between counting articles,
patents, and citations, on the one hand, and measuring the effectiveness of
these quantities vis-a-vis their target realities, on the other ( Fuller 2002a, chap.
l ) . Only the most sociologically naive academic administrator or science
policy manager would presume that there is some straightforward connection
between such counts and measures. Luckily, at least for the employment
prospects of STS researchers, sociological naivete is never in short supply (e.g.,
Etzkowitz et al. 1 998) .

Steve Fullers - 2006 Philophical foundations of sociology of science

Serres 1992 - Dominar Dominio

 Nuestras conquistas van más rápido que nuestras intenciones deliberadas. Miren, en efecto, la aceleración de nuestros avances técnicos. Basta que se anuncie que tal avance es posible, y lo vemos realizado en algún parte del planeta, considerado en seguida como deseable, e incluso necesario… Sí, podremos elegir el sexo de nuestros hijos, sí, la genética, la bioquímica, la nos terminaran dando todos los poderes. Pero ese poder, por el momento, se nos escapa de las manos, ya que va más lejos y más rápido que nuestra capacidad de preveerlo, que nuestra capacidad de gestionarlo, que nuestra voluntad de decidir sobre él, que nuestra libertad para orientarlo. Hemos resuelto la cuestión cartesiana: ¿Cómo someter el mundo, cómo dominar la naturaleza?. Sabremos responder esta otra cuestión: ¿Cómo dominar nuestro dominio? (Serres, 1992, p. 250)

Filosofia Unisinos, 13(2-supplement):266-279, october 2012 - Eduardo Casaroti.