Brian P Bloomfield
Biographic Data
| ID | 274017 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian P Bloomfield |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian P |
| FAMILY NAME | Bloomfield |
| SIGNATURE | BLOOMFIELD B P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6006-6111 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 121 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Limitless? Imaginaries of cognitive enhancement and the labouring body
This article seeks to situate pharmacological cognitive enhancement as part of a broader relationship between cultural understandings of the body-brain and the political economy. It is the body of the worker that forms the intersection of this relationship and through which it comes to be enacted and experienced. In this article, we investigate the imaginaries that both inform and are reproduced by representations of pharmacological cognitive enh…
Licence to kill? On the organization of destruction in the 21st century
War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going “asymmetric wars” increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of in…
Landfarming: A contested space for the management of waste from oil and gas extraction
The extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons, particularly through hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), has generated both support and opposition in many countries around the globe. Along with arguments about economic benefits, decarbonisation, transition fuels and groundwater contamination, etc., the rapid expansion of this industry presents a pressing problem as regards the disposal of the resultant waste - including drilling and cutting materia…
Fit for work? Redefining ‘Normal’ and ‘Extreme’ through human enhancement technologies
This article focuses on how the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognit…
On the naming of monsters: Organization, (in)equality and diversity in the age of technological reproduction
Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The researc…
Symbolic Communication in Public Protest Over Genetic Modification: Visual Rhetoric, Symbolic Excess, and Social Mores
This article considers the protests through which a group of New Zealand women—MAdGE (Mothers Against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment)—enacted a campaign against genetic modification in food. Referring to the predominant visual/symbolic makeup of its efforts to communicate an alternative perspective on the research involved, the article examines the theatrics, posters, and disruptive protest of MAdGE’s campaign. A major feature of…
Imagination and technoscientific innovations: Governance of transgenic cows in New Zealand
This paper examines a controversial research programme aimed at the production of transgenic cows in New Zealand. It emphasizes the contested representation of the research, in its promotion, in its governance, and in the opposition sparked amongst environmentallanti-genetic modification groups and within the Māori community. The paper contends that the case of New Zealand's genetically modified cows certainly reveals some unique features of the …
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements
This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen a…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
In the Right Place at the Right Time: Electronic Tagging and Problems of Social Order/Disorder
This paper explores the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and 'virtuality'. The emphasis is on understanding the connections between technology and social relations in areas where issues of social order/disorder are a prominent feature of concern and where one can identify the emergence of new regimes of virtual control which are directed at solving the (supposed) d…
The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and the Writing of Displacement
This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view const…
Information Technology and Organizations: Strategies, Networks, and Integration
This book is concerned with the ways in which organizations design, build and use information technology (IT) systems. In particular it looks at the interaction between these IT-centred activities and the broader management processes within organizations. The authors adopt a critical social science perspective on these issues, and are primarily concerned with advancing theoretical debates on how best to understand the related processes of technol…
Power, Machines and Social Relations: Delegating to Information Technology in the National Health Service
This article considers the implications of Latour's notions of durability and delegation for theorizing the relationship between technology and organization. Two central themes are the heterogeneous character of the fabric of organizational life which interweaves both humans and non-humans (including machines and inscriptions); and the question of power/domination in matters technological. To contextualize the discussion, the paper reflects on so…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
Management Consultants: Systems Development, Power and the Translation of Problems
This paper aims to shed light on the exercise of power during the development and implementation of organisational information systems. Considering the use of Information Technology (IT) to help solve organisational problems, we employ the concept of the 'sociology of translation' to theorise the process by which the organisational problem is constituted and for which the appropriate IT solution is proposed. Discussing the nature of the power rel…
Information technology and control in organisations: The case of the NHS
The Role of Information Systems in the UK National Health Service: Action at a Distance and the Fetish of Calculation
This paper examines some fundamental issues pertaining to the use of, as well as to the distinctive characteristics of, information technology in relation to the development of information systems within the UK National Health Service (NHS). The paper refers to the current Resource Management Initiative in the NHS, which involves the fabrication of information systems to connect medical activity to resource usage, and thus to costs. Examining the…
What Can We Learn about Modeling Social Systems
On Speaking about Computing
This paper explores the connection between language and our thought and beliefs about computers. In particular it considers how certain features of language - such as verbal habits, or the traces in language due to social interests and power - help to shape particular reports and interpretations of the behaviour of computer programs and thereby sustain or reinforce beliefs about the organisational role of computers and even their status vis-a-vis…
Expert systems and human knowledge: A view from the sociology of science
Modelling the World: The Social Constructions of Systems Analysis
This dissertation is concerned with a case study of system dynamics, a well-known simulation modelling methodology, and its implicit theory of social system behaviour. System dynamics is policy oriented and is directed towards the control and management of social systems. It originally evolved in the context of military systems and then the application of systems engineering to the problems of corporate management, but was later expanded to tackl…
The Test-Tube Baby Debate: An Anthropological View
Article Commentary: The Test-Tube Baby Debate: An Anthropological View
In the ongoing debate about the fate of 'surplus' human embryos in the test-tube baby programme, technically referred to as blastocysts, arguments continue as to how these early forms of life are to be treated. Some support research on these entities because of the potential benefits that might accrue, while other groups vehemently oppose any research at all because they would see it as a violation of the sanctity of human life. And earlier this …
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
The Role of Information Systems in the UK National Health Service: Action at a Distance and the Fetish of Calculation
This paper examines some fundamental issues pertaining to the use of, as well as to the distinctive characteristics of, information technology in relation to the development of information systems within the UK National Health Service (NHS). The paper refers to the current Resource Management Initiative in the NHS, which involves the fabrication of information systems to connect medical activity to resource usage, and thus to costs. Examining the…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
Imagination and technoscientific innovations: Governance of transgenic cows in New Zealand
This paper examines a controversial research programme aimed at the production of transgenic cows in New Zealand. It emphasizes the contested representation of the research, in its promotion, in its governance, and in the opposition sparked amongst environmentallanti-genetic modification groups and within the Māori community. The paper contends that the case of New Zealand's genetically modified cows certainly reveals some unique features of the …
Management Consultants: Systems Development, Power and the Translation of Problems
This paper aims to shed light on the exercise of power during the development and implementation of organisational information systems. Considering the use of Information Technology (IT) to help solve organisational problems, we employ the concept of the 'sociology of translation' to theorise the process by which the organisational problem is constituted and for which the appropriate IT solution is proposed. Discussing the nature of the power rel…
On Speaking about Computing
This paper explores the connection between language and our thought and beliefs about computers. In particular it considers how certain features of language - such as verbal habits, or the traces in language due to social interests and power - help to shape particular reports and interpretations of the behaviour of computer programs and thereby sustain or reinforce beliefs about the organisational role of computers and even their status vis-a-vis…
Symbolic Communication in Public Protest Over Genetic Modification: Visual Rhetoric, Symbolic Excess, and Social Mores
This article considers the protests through which a group of New Zealand women—MAdGE (Mothers Against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment)—enacted a campaign against genetic modification in food. Referring to the predominant visual/symbolic makeup of its efforts to communicate an alternative perspective on the research involved, the article examines the theatrics, posters, and disruptive protest of MAdGE’s campaign. A major feature of…
In the Right Place at the Right Time: Electronic Tagging and Problems of Social Order/Disorder
This paper explores the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and 'virtuality'. The emphasis is on understanding the connections between technology and social relations in areas where issues of social order/disorder are a prominent feature of concern and where one can identify the emergence of new regimes of virtual control which are directed at solving the (supposed) d…
Modelling the World: The Social Constructions of Systems Analysis
This dissertation is concerned with a case study of system dynamics, a well-known simulation modelling methodology, and its implicit theory of social system behaviour. System dynamics is policy oriented and is directed towards the control and management of social systems. It originally evolved in the context of military systems and then the application of systems engineering to the problems of corporate management, but was later expanded to tackl…
Article Commentary: The Test-Tube Baby Debate: An Anthropological View
In the ongoing debate about the fate of 'surplus' human embryos in the test-tube baby programme, technically referred to as blastocysts, arguments continue as to how these early forms of life are to be treated. Some support research on these entities because of the potential benefits that might accrue, while other groups vehemently oppose any research at all because they would see it as a violation of the sanctity of human life. And earlier this …
Anomalies and Social Experience: Backcasting with Simulation Models
This paper applies Bloor's extension of Douglas's grid/group theory to a novel case-namely, a debate which took place concerning the `retrodiction' or `backcasting' of system dynamics global simulation models. The paper has two aims: first, in terms of understanding this debate, it seeks to link the different treatments of anomalies within it both to the strategies for dealing with mathematical counter-examples described by Lakatos, and to the so…
The Test-Tube Baby Debate: An Anthropological View
Article Commentary: The Test-Tube Baby Debate: An Anthropological View
In the ongoing debate about the fate of 'surplus' human embryos in the test-tube baby programme, technically referred to as blastocysts, arguments continue as to how these early forms of life are to be treated. Some support research on these entities because of the potential benefits that might accrue, while other groups vehemently oppose any research at all because they would see it as a violation of the sanctity of human life. And earlier this …
Modelling the World: The Social Constructions of Systems Analysis
This dissertation is concerned with a case study of system dynamics, a well-known simulation modelling methodology, and its implicit theory of social system behaviour. System dynamics is policy oriented and is directed towards the control and management of social systems. It originally evolved in the context of military systems and then the application of systems engineering to the problems of corporate management, but was later expanded to tackl…
Expert systems and human knowledge: A view from the sociology of science
What Can We Learn about Modeling Social Systems
On Speaking about Computing
This paper explores the connection between language and our thought and beliefs about computers. In particular it considers how certain features of language - such as verbal habits, or the traces in language due to social interests and power - help to shape particular reports and interpretations of the behaviour of computer programs and thereby sustain or reinforce beliefs about the organisational role of computers and even their status vis-a-vis…
Information technology and control in organisations: The case of the NHS
The Role of Information Systems in the UK National Health Service: Action at a Distance and the Fetish of Calculation
This paper examines some fundamental issues pertaining to the use of, as well as to the distinctive characteristics of, information technology in relation to the development of information systems within the UK National Health Service (NHS). The paper refers to the current Resource Management Initiative in the NHS, which involves the fabrication of information systems to connect medical activity to resource usage, and thus to costs. Examining the…
Management Consultants: Systems Development, Power and the Translation of Problems
This paper aims to shed light on the exercise of power during the development and implementation of organisational information systems. Considering the use of Information Technology (IT) to help solve organisational problems, we employ the concept of the 'sociology of translation' to theorise the process by which the organisational problem is constituted and for which the appropriate IT solution is proposed. Discussing the nature of the power rel…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
Power, Machines and Social Relations: Delegating to Information Technology in the National Health Service
This article considers the implications of Latour's notions of durability and delegation for theorizing the relationship between technology and organization. Two central themes are the heterogeneous character of the fabric of organizational life which interweaves both humans and non-humans (including machines and inscriptions); and the question of power/domination in matters technological. To contextualize the discussion, the paper reflects on so…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
Information Technology and Organizations: Strategies, Networks, and Integration
This book is concerned with the ways in which organizations design, build and use information technology (IT) systems. In particular it looks at the interaction between these IT-centred activities and the broader management processes within organizations. The authors adopt a critical social science perspective on these issues, and are primarily concerned with advancing theoretical debates on how best to understand the related processes of technol…
The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and the Writing of Displacement
This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view const…
In the Right Place at the Right Time: Electronic Tagging and Problems of Social Order/Disorder
This paper explores the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and 'virtuality'. The emphasis is on understanding the connections between technology and social relations in areas where issues of social order/disorder are a prominent feature of concern and where one can identify the emergence of new regimes of virtual control which are directed at solving the (supposed) d…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements
This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen a…
Imagination and technoscientific innovations: Governance of transgenic cows in New Zealand
This paper examines a controversial research programme aimed at the production of transgenic cows in New Zealand. It emphasizes the contested representation of the research, in its promotion, in its governance, and in the opposition sparked amongst environmentallanti-genetic modification groups and within the Māori community. The paper contends that the case of New Zealand's genetically modified cows certainly reveals some unique features of the …
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
Symbolic Communication in Public Protest Over Genetic Modification: Visual Rhetoric, Symbolic Excess, and Social Mores
This article considers the protests through which a group of New Zealand women—MAdGE (Mothers Against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment)—enacted a campaign against genetic modification in food. Referring to the predominant visual/symbolic makeup of its efforts to communicate an alternative perspective on the research involved, the article examines the theatrics, posters, and disruptive protest of MAdGE’s campaign. A major feature of…
On the naming of monsters: Organization, (in)equality and diversity in the age of technological reproduction
Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The researc…
Fit for work? Redefining ‘Normal’ and ‘Extreme’ through human enhancement technologies
This article focuses on how the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ in the context of work might be renegotiated through the development of human enhancement technologies which aim to enable the human body to be pushed beyond its biological limits. The ethical dimensions of human enhancement technologies have been widely considered, but there has been little debate about their role in the broader world of employment—nor, conversely, the recognit…
Licence to kill? On the organization of destruction in the 21st century
War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going “asymmetric wars” increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of in…
Landfarming: A contested space for the management of waste from oil and gas extraction
The extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons, particularly through hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), has generated both support and opposition in many countries around the globe. Along with arguments about economic benefits, decarbonisation, transition fuels and groundwater contamination, etc., the rapid expansion of this industry presents a pressing problem as regards the disposal of the resultant waste - including drilling and cutting materia…
Sociology (23 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Business (6 works)