Risk, Reflexivity and Democracy

Goffman, Action, and Risk Society: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Late Modernity

When I decided to write about edgework over twenty-five years ago, I had no idea that I had put myself on a pathway of sustained engagement with one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. As an academic sociologist in the early stages of my career, I felt that I had a good general understanding of Erving Goffman’s most important ideas and a proper appreciation of his uniqu...

Contexts, Biases, and Reflexivity

In a recent, welcome contribution, Predelli (2013) presents a fruitful and powerful framework on how truth-conditional semantics can deal with non-truth-conditional meaning. One of the gifts of Predelli’s contribution is that it presents a unifying theory dealing with seemingly various phenomena often relegated to the pragmatics dustbin. Thus, nicknames, slurs, answering machines/post-its, voca...

Environmental health, risk assessment, and democracy.

Fight risk with risk: reflexivity of risk and globalization in IS

In this paper, we address the following research question: “How can we understand the nature of risk in IS projects in the context of globalization?” Based on a case study conducted over a period of two years in a Norwegian hospital on the development and implementation of a Electronic Patient Record (EPR), the paper contributes to the current discussion on the conceptualization of risk in IS p...

Online Community and Democracy

The debate over the contribution of the Internet to democracy is farfrom settled. Some point to the empowering effects of online discussionand fund raising on recent electoral campaigns in the US to argue thatthe Internet will restore the public sphere. Others claim that the Internetis just a virtual mall, a final extension of global capitalism into everycorner of our lives. This paper argues f...