Steve G Hoffman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve G Hoffman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve G |
| FAMILY NAME | Hoffman |
| SIGNATURE | HOFFMAN S G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Five Big Ideas About AI
Massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a renewed debate over its impact on how we live, learn, and work. The last few years have also seen a burst of critical sociology about AI, pushing the conversation toward a deeper understanding of structural and intersectional inequalities. Here, we offer five big ideas that highlight what is distinctive about the emerging sociology of AI
A story of nimble knowledge production in an era of academic capitalism
Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe
The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery
Scientific expertise and the free press have come under sustained partisan attack with the political ascendance of right-wing nationalism. This has put some science and technology studies (STS) scholars in the difficult position of defending the legitimacy of science while maintaining a characteristic agnosticism toward “the facts.” In this essay, inspired by a reading of Noortje Marres’s (2018) critique of fact-checking services, I seek to relie…
The Shelf Life of a Disaster: Post‐Fukushima Policy Change in The United States And Germany
How can large‐scale disasters prompt policy change beyond the local environment in which they occurred? Working at the intersection of political sociology, disaster studies, and cultural sociology, we introduce the concept of the shelf life of a disaster to analyze the short and limited impact of Fukushima Daiichi on U.S. nuclear energy policy and its vitality within Germany. American media, nuclear industry representatives, regulators, and polic…
Managing Ambiguities at the Edge of Knowledge: Research Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Labs in an Era of Academic Capitalism
Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizat…
Respecifying Lab Ethnography: An Ethnomethodological Study of Experimental Physics
The Practical Use of Other Realities: Taking Berger and Luckmann into the Wild
The sociology of knowledge that followed The Social Construction of Reality shifted from the study of rarified ideas to practical activity, focusing on the stabilization of a sense of shared reality. The opposite side of this shift in emphasis has received much less attention - activities that place reality into a state of play and, in so doing, call attention to its ephemerality. I discuss three empirical areas where the practical use of other r…
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
Thinking science with thinking machines: The multiple realities of basic and applied knowledge in a research border zone
Some scholars dismiss the distinction between basic and applied science as passé, yet substantive assumptions about this boundary remain obdurate in research policy, popular rhetoric, the sociology and philosophy of science, and, indeed, at the level of bench practice. In this article, I draw on a multiple ontology framework to provide a more stable affirmation of a constructivist position in science and technology studies that cannot be reduced …
Who Needs a General Theory of Social Reality
Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation
A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encou…
The new tools of the science trade: Contested knowledge production and the conceptual vocabularies of academic capitalism
Over the last three decades, scientists at research universities have responded in a wide variety of ways to the pressures of academic capitalism. Institutional research has under theorised this trend by assuming entrepreneurialism passively follows formal organisational change. In contrast, I treat academic capitalism not as but as a complex field characterised by contested knowledge production. An increased emphasis on knowledge capitalisation …
On the metaphors and losers of academic capitalism: A response to Shore and Marcus
First of all, I would like to thank Mark Maguire for initiating this exchange and Cris Shore and George Marcus for their thoughtful comments. This is the sort of academic practice that makes scholarly work inherently valuable and that is in jeopardy of disappearing when pecuniary interests trump academic engagement within our professional vocabularies of motive. In a famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, made even more famous on…
The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class 1
White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is …
There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of 'challenge interviews' on a sample …
How to Punch Someone and Stay Friends: An Inductive Theory of Simulation
One way to study ontology is to assess how people differentiate real activities from others, and a good case is how groups organize simulation. However, social scientists have tended to discuss simulation in more limited ways, either as a symptom of postmodernism or as an instrumental artifact. Missing is how groups organize simulations to prepare for the future. First, I formulate a definition of simulation as a group-level technique, which incl…
The Scholar's Body: Mixing It Up with Loïc Wacquant
Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation
A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encou…
There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of 'challenge interviews' on a sample …
The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class 1
White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is …
How to Punch Someone and Stay Friends: An Inductive Theory of Simulation
One way to study ontology is to assess how people differentiate real activities from others, and a good case is how groups organize simulation. However, social scientists have tended to discuss simulation in more limited ways, either as a symptom of postmodernism or as an instrumental artifact. Missing is how groups organize simulations to prepare for the future. First, I formulate a definition of simulation as a group-level technique, which incl…
Managing Ambiguities at the Edge of Knowledge: Research Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Labs in an Era of Academic Capitalism
Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizat…
Thinking science with thinking machines: The multiple realities of basic and applied knowledge in a research border zone
Some scholars dismiss the distinction between basic and applied science as passé, yet substantive assumptions about this boundary remain obdurate in research policy, popular rhetoric, the sociology and philosophy of science, and, indeed, at the level of bench practice. In this article, I draw on a multiple ontology framework to provide a more stable affirmation of a constructivist position in science and technology studies that cannot be reduced …
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
The Scholar's Body: Mixing It Up with Loïc Wacquant
The Shelf Life of a Disaster: Post‐Fukushima Policy Change in The United States And Germany
How can large‐scale disasters prompt policy change beyond the local environment in which they occurred? Working at the intersection of political sociology, disaster studies, and cultural sociology, we introduce the concept of the shelf life of a disaster to analyze the short and limited impact of Fukushima Daiichi on U.S. nuclear energy policy and its vitality within Germany. American media, nuclear industry representatives, regulators, and polic…
A story of nimble knowledge production in an era of academic capitalism
The Scholar's Body: Mixing It Up with Loïc Wacquant
How to Punch Someone and Stay Friends: An Inductive Theory of Simulation
One way to study ontology is to assess how people differentiate real activities from others, and a good case is how groups organize simulation. However, social scientists have tended to discuss simulation in more limited ways, either as a symptom of postmodernism or as an instrumental artifact. Missing is how groups organize simulations to prepare for the future. First, I formulate a definition of simulation as a group-level technique, which incl…
The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class 1
White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is …
There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of 'challenge interviews' on a sample …
The new tools of the science trade: Contested knowledge production and the conceptual vocabularies of academic capitalism
Over the last three decades, scientists at research universities have responded in a wide variety of ways to the pressures of academic capitalism. Institutional research has under theorised this trend by assuming entrepreneurialism passively follows formal organisational change. In contrast, I treat academic capitalism not as but as a complex field characterised by contested knowledge production. An increased emphasis on knowledge capitalisation …
On the metaphors and losers of academic capitalism: A response to Shore and Marcus
First of all, I would like to thank Mark Maguire for initiating this exchange and Cris Shore and George Marcus for their thoughtful comments. This is the sort of academic practice that makes scholarly work inherently valuable and that is in jeopardy of disappearing when pecuniary interests trump academic engagement within our professional vocabularies of motive. In a famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, made even more famous on…
Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation
A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encou…
Who Needs a General Theory of Social Reality
Thinking science with thinking machines: The multiple realities of basic and applied knowledge in a research border zone
Some scholars dismiss the distinction between basic and applied science as passé, yet substantive assumptions about this boundary remain obdurate in research policy, popular rhetoric, the sociology and philosophy of science, and, indeed, at the level of bench practice. In this article, I draw on a multiple ontology framework to provide a more stable affirmation of a constructivist position in science and technology studies that cannot be reduced …
The Practical Use of Other Realities: Taking Berger and Luckmann into the Wild
The sociology of knowledge that followed The Social Construction of Reality shifted from the study of rarified ideas to practical activity, focusing on the stabilization of a sense of shared reality. The opposite side of this shift in emphasis has received much less attention - activities that place reality into a state of play and, in so doing, call attention to its ephemerality. I discuss three empirical areas where the practical use of other r…
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
Managing Ambiguities at the Edge of Knowledge: Research Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Labs in an Era of Academic Capitalism
Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizat…
Respecifying Lab Ethnography: An Ethnomethodological Study of Experimental Physics
The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery
Scientific expertise and the free press have come under sustained partisan attack with the political ascendance of right-wing nationalism. This has put some science and technology studies (STS) scholars in the difficult position of defending the legitimacy of science while maintaining a characteristic agnosticism toward “the facts.” In this essay, inspired by a reading of Noortje Marres’s (2018) critique of fact-checking services, I seek to relie…
The Shelf Life of a Disaster: Post‐Fukushima Policy Change in The United States And Germany
How can large‐scale disasters prompt policy change beyond the local environment in which they occurred? Working at the intersection of political sociology, disaster studies, and cultural sociology, we introduce the concept of the shelf life of a disaster to analyze the short and limited impact of Fukushima Daiichi on U.S. nuclear energy policy and its vitality within Germany. American media, nuclear industry representatives, regulators, and polic…
Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe
A story of nimble knowledge production in an era of academic capitalism
Five Big Ideas About AI
Massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a renewed debate over its impact on how we live, learn, and work. The last few years have also seen a burst of critical sociology about AI, pushing the conversation toward a deeper understanding of structural and intersectional inequalities. Here, we offer five big ideas that highlight what is distinctive about the emerging sociology of AI
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Politics (5 works)