This article uses the moralized markets and markets as politics literatures in economic sociology to explore the emerging industry of private consultants who produce ‘democratic’ dialogues for organizational clients from all sectors. In multi-method field research, we (a) trace moralized processes by which market activity and political process are distinguished in an era of financial crisis, an...

Humanitarian aid's psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relatio...

The United States Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) requires advisory committees to be “fairly balanced.” By examining legislative, judicial, and administrative interpretations of FACA’s balance requirement, this article identifies a prevailing double standard: public officials assess committee members classified as experts in terms of their professional competence, while they assess those ...

When contemporary commentators decry what they describe as growing threats to “judicial independence,” they typically invoke “judicial independence” as a normative ideal—an institutional virtue. That virtue is the capacity of courts to protect individual rights, to police structural limits on governmental power, and to decide individual disputes based solely on the applicable law and the factua...

Anyone who is inclined to think that the " Reading Wars " are over, or that the main warriors in these wars are only professional educators and researchers who support either whole language or phonics approaches to reading will continuously rethink their views during the reading of Reading across International Boundaries: History, Policy, and Politics. Openshaw and Soler have compiled a collect...

What is negative about negative data? Scientists understand negative data from our training in data analysis and statistics, where we use a positive concept of negative data. Negative data are data that do not enable us to reject our null hypothesis. Such data are often difficult to publish because it is not possible to prove the null hypothesis. Every active research scientist has a large draw...

Professor James T. O’Reilly’s article Losing Deference in the FDA’s Second Century: Judicial Review, Politics, and a Diminished Legacy of Expertise is a sweeping critique of the decline of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which until recently was considered one of the world’s premier health and safety agencies.1 According to Professor O’Reilly, the FDA’s decline, resulting in what he con...