Peripheral recovery: ‘Keeping safe’ and ‘keep progressing’ as contradictory modes of ordering in a forensic psychiatric unit

Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in the UK, comprising 20 staff interviews and 20 photo production interviews with patients. We use John Law’s ‘modes of ordering’ to explore how the materials, relations and spaces are mobilised in everyday processes of living and working on the unit. We identify two ‘modes of ordering’: ‘keeping safe’, which we argue tends towards empty, stultified and static spaces; and ‘keep progressing’ which instead requires filling, enriching and ingraining spaces. We discuss ways in which tensions between these modes of ordering are resolved in the unit, noting a spatial hierarchy which prioritises ‘keeping safe’, thus limiting the institutional capacity for engendering progress and change. The empirical material is discussed in relation to the institutional and carceral geography literatures with a particular focus on mobilities.

Consumption logistics and the ordering of market systems

This article argues that consumption logistics are fundamental modes of ordering markets. Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) and Market System Dynamics (MSD) approaches improved our understanding of, respectively, the practical and symbolic processes of market organization. On this backdrop, previous research has predominantly framed logistics as a practical performance of this organization. Conversely, we argue that logistical performances are as much practical as they are symbolic. Drawing on both CMS and MSD research, we therefore conceptualize consumption logistics as the system of interrelated practices ordering the heterogeneous entities of consumption in space and time. Put differently, by integrating market and consumption practices, consumption logistics recursively (per)form the context of markets, that is, the situated conditions affording subjects the possibility to consume and objects to be consumed within specific markets. Our theorization brings forward the complex practical-symbolic ordering of markets, with implications for discussions of spaces, subjects and meanings of market phenomena.

Helping or intervening? Modes of ordering in public sector digitalization

PurposeThis paper examines how digital reforms affect the relationship between frontline workers and citizens in Danish public sector institutions. Using ethnographic research in two branches of public administration, the study highlights how frontline workers act in accordance with seemingly contradictory modes of ordering. Their acts problematize linear conceptualizations of change that often prevail in digital reforms.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of frontline workers in the Danish tax and customs administration and municipal citizen service centers. The concept of modes of ordering is used to highlight new tensions that arise as frontline workers adapt to make digital reforms work.FindingsFrontline workers act according to two different modes of ordering based on the separation between helping citizens help themselves and helping citizens directly. National policies and strategies promote the underlying rationale of the first mode but, as this paper shows, this mode is sustained by a second mode, which involves the intervention of professionals when citizens cannot be helped to help themselves.Originality/valueThe paper, which contributes to our understanding of how digitalization is changing public administrations and the relationship between frontline workers and citizens, challenges applying a linear, technocratic focus in discourses on public sector digitalization and highlights the contradictory practices of frontline work. It demonstrates the necessity of going beyond policy narratives and calls for increased attention to how frontline workers adapt to make reforms work.

Respect for Numbers

This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at and received as numbers, by people who work together to achieve a particular goal. The events happened in Singapore, in 2012-2013, as part of periodic reporting on diabetic retinopathy screening in the context of efforts to innovate such screening. I tell of two parties at odds over how to engage numbers accountably. This question of ‘engagement’, of what can and should be done with numbers to secure their participation in organizational affairs, is worked out in how numerical forms are performed and sustained as working numbers. Using three STS analytics to analyse the episode – Helen Verran’s (2001) work on number as a relation of unity/plurality, John Law’s (1994) work on modes of ordering, and Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland’s (2013) work on mundaneity and accountability – I argue that numbers are brought to life in very different ways, each mobilizing a certain recognition of what numbers are and what it takes to respect this. In the conclusion, I comment on the article’s use and juxtaposition of these STS analytics, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.

Repelling neoliberal world-making? How the ageing–dementia relation is reassembling the social

Growing old ‘badly’ is stigmatizing, a truism that is enrolled into contemporary agendas for the biomedicalization of ageing. Among the many discourses that emphasize ageing as the root cause of later life illnesses, dementia is currently promoted as an epidemic and such hyperbole serves to legitimate its increasing biomedicalization. The new stigma however is no longer contained to simply having dementia, it is failing to prevent it. Anti-ageing cultures of consumption, alongside a proliferation of cultural depictions of the ageing–dementia relation, seem to be refiguring dementia as a future to be worked on to eliminate it from our everyday life. The article unpacks this complexity for how the ageing–dementia relation is being reassembled in biopolitics in ways that enact it as something that can be transformed and managed. Bringing together Bauman’s theories of how cultural communities cope with the otherness of the other with theories of the rationale for the making of monsters – such as the figure of the abject older person with dementia – the article suggests that those older body-persons that personify the ageing–dementia relation, depicted in film and television for example, threaten the modes of ordering underpinning contemporary lives. This is not just because they intimate loss of mind, or because they are disruptive, but because they do not perform what it is to be ‘response-able’ and postpone frailty through managing self and risk.

Perfect etiquette

As a starting point for this article, the concept of diplomatic ethnography inspired by the work of Bruno Latour is presented as an ideal: a model for ‘good anthropology’, which truthfully follows members’ actions and the associations they form with others, simultaneously respecting their values. The workability of this ideal is then ethnographically tested in a research setting where direct communication with actors about the results of the researcher’s work is inescapable, while arriving at a common description of networks and values is difficult, as one group of actors routinely disqualifies members of another group by including them in the strongly naturalised category of ‘people with mental impairment’. How to understand and interpret the life of Pete, a resident of a ‘home for persons with health impairment’, who strives to rein in his hearty appetite while those taking care of him describe him as a ‘wicked child’ whose actions reflect only his syndrome? On the basis of my negotiations about his case, I come to the conclusion that the project of diplomatic ethnography is viable, if the obduracy of the ordering arrangements is duly taken into account and values are honoured, and, while arguing with members is inevitable under given circumstances, it is potentially productive for envisioning change in existing modes of ordering.

Between coordination and regulation: Finding the governance in Internet governance

Following recent theoretical contributions, this article suggests a new approach to finding the governance in Internet governance. Studies on Internet governance rely on contradictory notions of governance. The common understanding of governance as some form of deliberate steering or regulation clashes with equally common definitions of Internet governance as distributed modes of ordering. Drawing on controversies in the broader field of governance and regulation studies, we propose to resolve this conceptual conundrum by grounding governance in mundane activities of coordination. We define governance as reflexive coordination – focusing on those ‘critical moments’, when routine activities become problematic and need to be revised, thus, when regular coordination itself requires coordination. Regulation, in turn, can be understood as targeted public or private interventions aiming to influence the behaviour of others. With this distinction between governance and regulation, we offer a conceptual framework for empirical studies of doing Internet governance.