Andrew Pickering
Biographic Data
| ID | 3605334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Pickering |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Pickering |
| SIGNATURE | PICKERING A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1545-2192 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 718 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene
The Rise of the English Poltergeist, c .1590– c. 1720
Another future
This essay discusses the macrodynamics of cultural change. Drawing on the history of science, I offer an analysis of revolutionary transformation in terms of the waxing and waning of traditions of practice, in which marginal traditions become mainstream and vice versa. I apply this model to the Anthropocene, identifying dualist traditions of mastery and domination as currently mainstream and nondualist traditions of acting-with, exemplified by in…
Acting with the World: Doing without Science
In this paper I contrast two systematically different patterns of acting in the world via the concepts of enframing and poiesis. Enframing is the usual stance of dualistic domination that we can associate with the Anthropocene, and I focus here on the contrast class, poiesis. To bring out its key features I discuss a form of natural farming developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, emphasising the way in which Fukuoka's poetic approach foregrounds …
New Ontologies
The Economic Consequences of Political Donation Limits
The economic consequences of limits on political donations depend on the degree of political competition. Donors, who are ideologically aligned with candidates, decide how much to contribute to their own candidate. They may benefit from rent‐seeking by their own candidate but dislike rent‐seeking by the opposition. Increased rent‐seeking by politicians thus generates campaign contributions for themselves but also mobilizes donations to the opposi…
The Ontological Turn: Taking Different Worlds Seriously
In this article I discuss different scientific and non-modern worlds as they appear in a performative (rather than representational) idiom, situating my analysis in relation to the recent ontological turns in science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology. I propose an ontology of decentered becoming that can help us take seriously the multiplicity of 'found' ontologies. A key concept is that of 'islands of stability', which enables a comp…
In Our Place
This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance, understood in its simple ur-sense of "doing things" in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice (1995), of cultural evolution as a "dance of agency": a performative, decentered, and emergent back-and-forth between a multiplicity of actors, variously human and nonhuman. The author's concern in this new essay is with apparently stable and dependable te…
Science as It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Cybernetics
Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making
An investigation into what happens in creative practice when the materials of art and research behave and perform in ways beyond the creators' intentions. In Alien Agency, Chris Salter tells three stories of art in the making. Salter examines three works in which the materials of art—the “stuff of the world”—behave and perform in ways beyond the creator's intent, becoming unknown, surprising, alien. Studying these works—all three deeply embroiled…
The Next Macy Conference: A New Interdisciplinary Synthesis [Keynote]
Reports on the significance of the Macy Conferences in the field of cybernetics. These were a series of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York from 1941 through 1960. The aim of the Macys was not to exterminate modern science but to set alongside it another way of understanding the world, one centered on unknowability instead of knowability. If we could reproduce this doubling of perspectives, we could come at this problem…
Voting and the economic cycle
Cybernetic Futures: Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae
This essay reviews the English translation of Stanislaw Lem's book on the philosophy of technology, Summa Technologiae , first published in Polish in 1961. The Summa is a distinctive work of scientific futurology, and the review explores connections between Lem's thought and the cybernetics of Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, including Lem's discussions of the inevitability of life, the distribution of life across the universe, evoluti…
Being in an environment: A performative perspective
This essay lays out my general perspective on human relations with the environment. The central thread is a conviction that our thinking on this topic should start from a concern with performance and agency—the actions of people and things—rather than from scientific knowledge as a given point of departure. My approach is ontological rather than epistemological. It grows out of my earlier work in science studies, and I begin by reviewing some con…
Ideology and the size of US state government
The world since Kuhn
Ideology and the Growth of Government
We analyze the impact of ideology on the size of government. In a simple model, the government sets redistribution and provision of public services according to the preferences of the median voter. Ideology is defined in terms of preferences for public services, and the impact of ideology on the size of government is shown to increase with mean income. This idea is tested using measures of ideology based on party manifestos. We show that the inte…
The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future
New Ontologies
Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology
Beyond design: Cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism
The Politics of Theory: Producing Another World, With Some Thoughts on Latour
This essay explores the politics of theory and how theoretical analysis in science and technology studies might inform real-world conduct. I focus on objects and projects that can serve as ‘ontological theatre’ for a nonmodern perspective -- that both evoke and act out the ontology that I associate with my analysis of ‘the mangle of practice’. These are my models for ‘producing another world’. In conclusion, I contrast this proposal with Latour's…
Culture: Science Studies and Technoscience
Teaching against the grain: Multi‐disciplinary teamwork effectively delivers a successful undergraduate unit in sustainable development
A team‐taught interdisciplinary undergraduate unit in Sustainable Development has been developed and run over the past two years at the University of Bristol. This has been a unique initiative for this university to take. As in most other research‐intensive higher education institutions, teaching generally follows rather traditional disciplinary conventions, operating within departmental bounds. The initiative was unusual – and indeed ambitious –…
The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science
Some difficult but important issues have arisen in recent social studies of science concerning temporally emergent phenomena and the decetering of the human subject in scientific practice. This essay seeks a constructive clarification of the issues, and links them together, by delineating and exemplifying a view of science as a field of emergent human and material agency reciprocally engaged by means of a dialectic of resistence and accommodation…
The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming
In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, this collection aims to extend the mangle’s reach by exploring its application across a wide range of fields including history, philosoph…
Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science
Schools of Thought brings together a cast of prominent scholars to assess, with unprecedented breadth and vigor, the intellectual revolution over the past quarter century in the social sciences. This collection of twenty essays stems from a 1997 conference that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science. The authors, who represent a wide range of disciplines, are all associated with the …
Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask
This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians - W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask - paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice - the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work - and to the worldly projects they pursued - scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, politica…
The Hunting of the Quark
Constraints on Controversy: The Case of the Magnetic Monopole
This paper presents a case-study of the controversy in experimental physics which followed the contentious observation of a novel entity - a magnetic monopole. The debate about the validity of the monopole experiment ranged over both its instrumental foundation and its interpretation, and was structured at both levels by the attempts of participants to maintain prior agreements concerning the validity of other experiments. These prior agreements …
Ideology and the size of US state government
Teaching against the grain: Multi‐disciplinary teamwork effectively delivers a successful undergraduate unit in sustainable development
A team‐taught interdisciplinary undergraduate unit in Sustainable Development has been developed and run over the past two years at the University of Bristol. This has been a unique initiative for this university to take. As in most other research‐intensive higher education institutions, teaching generally follows rather traditional disciplinary conventions, operating within departmental bounds. The initiative was unusual – and indeed ambitious –…
The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
Voting and the economic cycle
Beyond design: Cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism
The Politics of Theory: Producing Another World, With Some Thoughts on Latour
This essay explores the politics of theory and how theoretical analysis in science and technology studies might inform real-world conduct. I focus on objects and projects that can serve as ‘ontological theatre’ for a nonmodern perspective -- that both evoke and act out the ontology that I associate with my analysis of ‘the mangle of practice’. These are my models for ‘producing another world’. In conclusion, I contrast this proposal with Latour's…
In Our Place
This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance, understood in its simple ur-sense of "doing things" in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice (1995), of cultural evolution as a "dance of agency": a performative, decentered, and emergent back-and-forth between a multiplicity of actors, variously human and nonhuman. The author's concern in this new essay is with apparently stable and dependable te…
Political Business Cycles and Central Bank Independence
This paper develops a dynamic model of Rational Partisan Business Cycles in which wage contracts overlap elections and wage setters have to make a prediction about the election result. Empirical analysis of 20 OECD countries supports the theoretical implication that left wing incumbents increase output, but increased expectation of a left wing regime reduces it. The model is extended to incorporate the effects of alternative measures of Central B…
The Objects of Sociology: A Response to Breslau's “Sociology after Humanism”
Daniel Breslau's essay opens up a valuable space in seeking to align the sociologically impure objects explored in science studies with the practice of a pure sociology. I challenge Breslau's conclusion that the latter can swallow the former and proceed with business as usual. Contrary to Breslau, I argue that confronting head-on the impure objects of science studies can indeed represent a new beginning in sociology as a discipline. I also correc…
Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War
Nuclear Rites:. Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xviii. 351 pp., figures, notes, bibliography, index
We Have Never Been Modern (review)
Reviewed by: We Have Never Been Modern Andrew Pickering We Have Never Been Modern. Bruno LaTour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 157. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1987) was the most important book on science, technology and their intertwining with society published in the 1980s. Latour argued that by following scientists and engineers around one could …
Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Science Past and Present: A Research Annual, Vol. 8
The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies. Gerald Holton
Constraints on Controversy: The Case of the Magnetic Monopole
This paper presents a case-study of the controversy in experimental physics which followed the contentious observation of a novel entity - a magnetic monopole. The debate about the validity of the monopole experiment ranged over both its instrumental foundation and its interpretation, and was structured at both levels by the attempts of participants to maintain prior agreements concerning the validity of other experiments. These prior agreements …
The Hunting of the Quark
Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics
Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Science Past and Present: A Research Annual, Vol. 8
Science as Practice and Culture
Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice--the work of doing science--and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on. Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists …
The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science
Some difficult but important issues have arisen in recent social studies of science concerning temporally emergent phenomena and the decetering of the human subject in scientific practice. This essay seeks a constructive clarification of the issues, and links them together, by delineating and exemplifying a view of science as a field of emergent human and material agency reciprocally engaged by means of a dialectic of resistence and accommodation…
The Professional Quest for Truth: A Social Theory of Science and Knowledge.Stephan Fuchs
We Have Never Been Modern (review)
Reviewed by: We Have Never Been Modern Andrew Pickering We Have Never Been Modern. Bruno LaTour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 157. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1987) was the most important book on science, technology and their intertwining with society published in the 1980s. Latour argued that by following scientists and engineers around one could …
Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
Explanation, Agency, and Metaphysics: A Reply to Owen Flanagan
Research Article| April 01 1995 Explanation, Agency, and Metaphysics: A Reply to Owen Flanagan Andrew Pickering Andrew Pickering Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 475–480. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-475 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Pickering; Explanation, Agency, and Metaphysics: A Reply to Owen F…
Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life
Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs
Concepts and the Mangle of Practice: Constructing Quaternions
Research Article| April 01 1995 Concepts and the Mangle of Practice: Constructing Quaternions Andrew Pickering Andrew Pickering Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (2): 417–465. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-2-417 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Pickering; Concepts and the Mangle of Practice: Constructing Quater…
The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
Author’s response
Sociology of knowledge and the sociology of scientific knowledge
L'A. examine de facon critique les conceptions de H.-H. Kogler, de P. Bourdieu et de K. Mannheim en ce qui concerne la sociologie de la connaissance. Il montre comment Kogler critique les analyses du rapport entre connaissance et contexte social developpees par les autres derniers auteurs. Il souligne que Kogler met en exergue l'autonomie de la connaissance et de la pensee et estime que Kogler a neglige les facteurs technologiques et materiels da…
The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory
Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume…
Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War
Nuclear Rites:. Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xviii. 351 pp., figures, notes, bibliography, index
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and: Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (review)
Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, by Stefan Helmreich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xii+314; illustrations, notes/references, bibliography, index. $29.95
The Objects of Sociology: A Response to Breslau's “Sociology after Humanism”
Daniel Breslau's essay opens up a valuable space in seeking to align the sociologically impure objects explored in science studies with the practice of a pure sociology. I challenge Breslau's conclusion that the latter can swallow the former and proceed with business as usual. Contrary to Breslau, I argue that confronting head-on the impure objects of science studies can indeed represent a new beginning in sociology as a discipline. I also correc…
Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science
Schools of Thought brings together a cast of prominent scholars to assess, with unprecedented breadth and vigor, the intellectual revolution over the past quarter century in the social sciences. This collection of twenty essays stems from a 1997 conference that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science. The authors, who represent a wide range of disciplines, are all associated with the …
Sociology (30 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Cybernetics and Technology in Society (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Social science (10 works)