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No abstract

We are grateful to Michael Lynch for his very helpful comments and suggestions.

This paper explores the concepts of knowledge culture and epistemic culture against the background of contemporary transformations in global society. Studies of knowledge culture came to prominence in the 1970s, with the trend towards laboratory fieldwork and direct observation in the new sociology of science. If the focus in such early studies was on knowledge construction, the focus in an epistemic culture approach by contrast is on the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction, relocating culture in the micropractices of laboratories and other bounded habitats of knowledge practice. Not all places of knowledge, however, are bounded spaces, and there is a case to be made for including in the empirical agenda more distributed locations. This is done here by introducing the concept of ‘macro-epistemics’, to describe wider networks of knowledge generation such as what is often known as ‘the global financial architecture’. The discussion concludes by moving out from macro-epistemic circuits to questions of the cultural environment of epistemic settings, and of the more general knowledge culture in which specific knowledge processes are embedded.

Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 2008, this article rethinks central assumptions of the interaction order as conceptualized by Goffman and others with respect to global domains of activity. 1 It proposes two new concepts, that of the synthetic situation and that of time transactions. Synthetic situations are situations that include electronically transmitted on-screen projections that add informational depth and new response requirements to the "ecological huddle" (Goffman 1964:135) of the natural situation. Global situations invariably include such components; we also find that temporal forms of integration may substitute for joint territoriality of copresence in the natural situation. Based on research on global currency trading and other empirical examples, I identify four types of synthetic situations and describe the synthetic situation's informational character, its ontological fluidity, and the phenomenon that synthetic situations may become role-others for participants. I outline the response system of synthetic situations, sketching out the concepts of response presence and its implications in this context as well as the importance of embodiment. I also discuss time transactions and the idea of fatefulness as a symbolic charge linked to the synthetic components of the situation.