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Networks have rapidly become the dominant trope in governance theory and practice. While scholarship highlights important benefits, there has been insufficient systematic interrogation of the potential pathologies in network governance. This paper addresses the lacuna. We begin by discussing different kinds of network analysis and distinguishing the specific claims of network governance theory. We then pull together the scattered critically oriented literatures on the topic, identifying major problems with network modes of governance: hypocrisy, distrust, marketization, subjugation, antiproceduralism, fragmentation, and 'netsploitation'. We finally argue for a more agnostic approach to governance research, capable of taking account of these pathologies and thereby putting networks in their place. This means avoiding the fetishization of particular modes of governance and giving more careful attention to the settings in which they each can be useful.

This paper attempts to facilitate conversation among organization scientists by advancing a philosophical perspective (agnosticism) that has been ignored in the recent subjective-objective debate. As agnostics, we suggest that the controversy may not be resolvable and that organization science can carry on in the absence of such resolution. We propose a series of concepts to guide the "post-debate" field, emphasizing that mutual striving for a "sense of accurate reception" (SOAR) can provide a crossroads for conversation among students of organizations. Suggestions for achieving SOAR are proposed.

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public's perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants "confer" and "retract" in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public's expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes. ; QC 20200319

Technological and social evolutions have prompted operational, phenomenological, and ontological shifts in communication processes. These shifts, we argue, trigger the need to regard human and machine roles in communication processes in a more egalitarian fashion. Integrating anthropocentric and technocentric perspectives on communication, we propose an agent-agnostic framework for human-machine communication. This framework rejects exclusive assignment of communicative roles (sender, message, channel, receiver) to traditionally held agents and instead focuses on evaluating agents according to their functions as a means for considering what roles are held in communication processes. As a first step in advancing this agent-agnostic perspective, this theoretical paper offers three potential criteria that both humans and machines could satisfy: agency, interactivity, and influence. Future research should extend our agent-agnostic framework to ensure that communication theory will be prepared to deal with an ostensibly machine-inclusive future.

Some experts contend that nuclear proliferation is fully compatible with international political stability, and others insist that the spread of nuclear weapons will undermine stability. Realists are optimistic about the implications of nuclear weapons spread because, in a rational world, nuclear weapons favor the defender over the attacker, making war less probable. Other schools of thought suggest that nuclear weapons are either irrelevant, because not actually useful in combat, or dangerous, in that they can be the instruments of inadvertent escalation to wars of unprecedented destruction. The perspective of nuclear agnosticism, admittedly characterized by diversity, offers a more plausible prospectus for the role of nuclear weapons in the new world order than does the realist view based on misreading of Cold War experience.

While some experts insist that the spread of nuclear weapons will undermine world stability, others contend that this path is fully compatible with international political stability. Realists are optimistic about the implications of nuclear weapons spread because, in a rational world, nuclear weapons favor the defender over the attacker, making war less probable. Others suggest that nuclear weapons are either irrelevant, because they are not actually useful in combat, or dangerous, in that they can inadvertently escalate wars to levels of unprecedented destruction. The perspective of nuclear agnosticism, admittedly characterized by diversity, offers a more plausible prospectus for the role of nuclear weapons in the new world order than does the realist view based on misreading of Cold War experience. Adapted from the source document.

Die Entstehung des Planungsrechts und die Verrechtlichung der Planung in Deutschland folgten historisch keiner planerischen Theorie, sondern einer Eigenlogik des Rechtsstaats. Nur vereinzelt haben der Gesetzgeber oder die Rechtsprechung Elemente der meist deutlich später entwickelten Planungstheorien rezipiert. Das Recht definiert sich durch seinen strikten Befolgungsanspruch. Die Vorgaben des Planungsrechts können daher mit den Vorgaben normativer Planungstheorien in Widerspruch treten und beanspruchen dann Vorrang gegenüber diesen. Für die Realisierbarkeit mancher Vorschläge der agonistischen Planungstheorien ergeben sich daher rechtliche Grenzlinien. Diese werden im vorliegenden Beitrag aufgezeigt. Allerdings trifft sich die Zielrichtung agonistischer Planungstheorien im Ausgangspunkt mit dem Grundanliegen der rechtsstaatlichen Planung, konfligierende Interessen zu befrieden und akzeptablen Lösungen zuzuführen. Den Gegnerinnen und Gegnern hoheitlicher Planungen eröffnen sich dadurch Beteiligungsrechte in den Planverfahren und umfassende Klagemöglichkeiten. Das Recht setzt legitimen Widerständen gegen demokratische Planungen jedoch auch Grenzen und kann nicht darauf verzichten, rechtmäßige und rechtswidrige Formen der Ablehnung zu unterscheiden.

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public's perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants "confer" and "retract" in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public's expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

In this paper, we reflect upon our experiences taking a graduate qualitative methodol­ogy course with Dr. William (Billy) Shaffir. We highlight Billy's approach to ethnographic research and his declaration to "just do it." Rather than just absorbing theoretical knowledge from the liter­ature, Billy taught us to be wary of the dangers of a prior theorization and how it can distort rather than shed light on empirical investigations. Despite his belief that sociological theory is far too often abstract and removed from real-world contexts, he nevertheless provided us with a latent theoreti­cal commitment to concept formation, modification, and testing in the field that guides our research to this day. We explore Shaffir's agnostic and at times ironic approach to theory and demonstrate how his specific type of theory-work, derived from Everett Hughes' and Howard Becker's interac­tionist perspective on "people doing things together," influenced how many of his students study occupations and organizations via sensitizing concepts. Billy managed to get us to think differently about how we theorize in the field and how to cultivate a playful and healthy skeptical attitude towards its application. This type of agnostic-interactionism does not dismiss theory outright, but is always vigilant and mindful of how easy it is for practitioners of theory to slip into obfuscation and reification. We conclude with a Shaffir inspired theory-work that argues for the continuing sig­nificance of an agnostic stance towards ethnographic and qualitative inquiry; one that continues to sensitize the researcher to generic social processes through which agency-structure is mediated and accomplished.

This book explores how dementia studies relates to dementia's growing public profile and corresponding research economy.

The book argues that a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia positions dementia as a syndrome of cognitive decline, caused by discrete brain diseases, distinct from ageing, widely misunderstood by the public, that will one day be overcome through technoscience. This biopolitics generates dementia's public profile and is implicated in several problems, including the failure of drug discovery, the spread of stigma, the perpetuation of social inequalities and the lack of support that is available to people affected by dementia. Through a failure to critically engage with neuropsychiatric biopolitics, much dementia studies is complicit in these problems.

Drawing on insights from critical psychiatry and critical gerontology, this book explores these problems and the relations between them, revealing how they are facilitated by neuro-agnostic dementia studies work that lacks robust biopolitical critiques and sociopolitical alternatives. In response, the book makes the case for a more biopolitically engaged ""neurocritical"" dementia studies and shows how such a tradition might be realised through the promotion of a promissory sociopolitics of dementia.

This article works across disciplines: politics, geography and social and cultural theory. Issues of space and body are brought to bear on how we think about the question 'making a difference'. By considering difference in terms of the socio-spatial impact of the presence of hitherto socially excluded groups, such as women and racialised minorities, the gendered and racialised nature of the body politic and most specifically its 'elite' positions is brought into focus. The co-existence of women and 'black' and Asian MPs in Westminster demonstrates how these 'groups' are both historically and conceptually 'space invaders'. This positionality underlies a series of social processes which illustrate how their very presence is a disruption as well as a continual negotiation. While accepting the agnostic perspective that there are 'no guarantees' that the arrival of these 'new' bodies will articulate a different politics, in terms of policy outcomes and political debate, this article asserts that the sociological terms of their presence deserves in-depth attention.