Ontologies for Developing Things

Ontologies for Developing Things offers a series of conceptually inventive analyses of the future-making processes put in motion in contemporary health care systems with the introduction of electronic patient records and other communication technologies. The book shows how such technological development and implementation processes are bound up with multiple other issues: professional, social, economic and political. Through such processes health care ontologies gradually change, often with unanticipated effects. In analyzing these effects, Jensen offers a highly innovative interpretation of where science and technology studies could be headed - towards performative, non- humanist modes of inquiry. Casper Bruun Jensen is one of the most intellectually accomplished and creative theorists of second-generation Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as one of the most active and productive researchers in the field. In Ontologies for Developing Things, he offers a series of highly original delineations and vigorous defenses of recent developments--or, as he calls them "dispositions"--in STS (ontological, performative, pragmatist, and so forth) through a series of parallel narrations of his own onsite studies of the introduction of new medical-information technologies in Denmark and Canada. Ontologies for Developing Things is a work of unflagging intelligence and intellectual energy, spilling over with new ideas, surprising angles, sharp perceptions and interesting juxtapositions, and written with correspondingly attractive punch and force. Readers interested in information technologies, contemporary developments in social studies of science, and related cultural and political theory will find the book immensely engaging and endlessly useful. - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University and Brown University [author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science Truth and the Human and Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion] This superb book is all of empirically rich, politically engaged, ontologically profound and lucid. Any three of the four makes a very good book; all four makes an outstanding one. - Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburg (Author of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (With Susan Leigh Star) and Memory Practices in the Sciences).