Zoekresultaten

A philosophy of weaving the web

Different hands

This book is about markets for intermediate skills. It is also about the coordination within and between the (vocational) education system and the (sub-baccalaureate) labor market, and the institutions that govern them. Our goal was to improve our understanding of how particular governance regimes influence the operation of vocational education and training (VET) markets. We conducted an international comparison of three different governance regimes of VET markets in Germany, the Netherlands and the American state of Wisconsin. The central question underlying the national analyses and comparisons is: How do markets for intermediate skills operate in Germany, the Netherlands, and the American state of Wisconsin?

Reconsidering democracy. History of the Human Genome Project.

What options are open for people—citizens, politicians, and other nonscientists—to become actively involved in and anticipate new directions in the life sciences? In addressing this question, this article focuses on the start of the Human Genome Project (1985-1990). By contrasting various models of democracy (liberal, republican, deliberative), I examine the democratic potential the models provide for citizens' involvement in setting priorities and funding patterns related to big science projects. To enhance the democratizing of big science projects and give citizens opportunities to reflect, anticipate, and negotiate on newdirections in science and technology at a global level, liberal democracy with its national scope and representative structure does not suffice. Although republican (communicative) and deliberative (associative) democracy models meet the need for greater citizen involvement, the ways to achieve the ideal at a global level still remain to be developed.

Events in the network society : the role of pulsar and iterative events

This conceptual article argues for a broader view of the role of events in social systems. When analyzed as social phenomena, events can be seen as social actors that have the potential to both sustain and transform social systems. The maintenance of social systems is often reliant on iterative events, regularly occurring celebrations that tend to confirm social structures. In contrast, pulsar events have the potential to transform social structures. In this sense events can be seen as actors that have important influences on social systems, particularly in linking localized small world networks with the global space of flows. These ideas are explored through the case of Barcelona, which illustrates the interplay between these different types of events in their total portfolio, and how the extension of ritual in the sense of Collins can also contribute to the generation of new relationships and practices in the contemporary network society. Barcelona is examined as an eventful city in which the alternation of continuity through iterative events and change through pulsar events contributes to increasing the network effects of events.

Extinction internet

Extinction Internet is not merely an end-of-the-world phantasy of digital technology that one day will be wiped out by an electromagnetic pulse or the cutting of cables. Rather, Extinction Internet marks the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. During the internet’s Lost Decade, we’ve been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic under the inspirational guidance of the consultancy class. What’s to be done to uphold the inevitable? We need tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize. Join the platform exodus. It’s time for a strike on optimization. There is beauty in the breakdown.Extinction Internet is Geert Lovink’s inaugural lecture, held on November 18, 2022 as Professor of Art and Network Cultures, within Modern and Contemporary Art History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.

‘New’ Dutch Civic Integration: learning ‘Spontaneous Compliance’ to address inherent difference

In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis aims to understand the discourse in the texts, which actors are mobilized by them, and the role these texts and these actors play in processes of governmental racialization. The analysis demonstrates shifting complex assemblages are brought into cascades of governance in which all actors are disciplined to accept the problem of integration as a problem of cultural difference and distance, and then furthermore disciplined to adopt new practices deemed necessary to identify and even ‘objectively’ measure the inherent traits contributing to this problematic. Lastly, the analysis displays that all actors are disciplined to accept the solution of ‘spontaneous compliance’; a series of practices and knowledges, which move the civic integration programme beyond an aim of responsibilization, into a programme of internalization, wherein newcomers are expected to own and address their problematic ‘nature’, making ‘modern’ values their own.