TIK Center for Innovation, Technology and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.
Soc Stud Sci. 2020 Apr;50(2):252-270. doi: 10.1177/0306312720902847. Epub 2020 Jan 31.
Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber's accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work - on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS's accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about 'opening up' an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber's work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion.
在科学技术研究(STS)中,普通政治机构(如议会)仍然没有得到充分的研究,而用于研究政治的概念资源也远不如用于科学的资源发达。但像议会这样的场所远比人们通常认为的有趣。本文认为,STS 中议题文献与德国学者马克斯·韦伯(Max Weber)关于议会和客观性的著作的新颖组合,可以为我们提供用新视角把握议会政治的分析资源。事实上,根据议题文献来解读韦伯,可以更好地理解他的作品,并指出韦伯的论述是如何关键地与议会政治——作为对问题和手头事务的工作——有关。此外,韦伯可以通过将议题政治的有序和程序性方面纳入其中,来改进 STS 对政治的论述:议题政治既涉及“打开”一个问题,也涉及做出决策和采取行动。本文通过讨论韦伯作品中一个经常被误解的部分,即他关于客观性的作品,强调了这一点,并指出政治程序是他理解和发展这一概念的关键灵感来源。