Materialising social ontology

Abstract

Social theorists increasingly recognise that material things often play vital roles in the causation of social events. However there is substantial disagreement on how to theorise these roles. Several members of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group have made important contributions in the form of their work on the ontology of technological objects. This paper builds on their work to develop an ontology of socio-technical structures: social entities composed of both humans and technological objects, with causal powers that depend on how these parts relate to, and interact with, each other. The implication is that material things are not just significant in their own right, or as parts of technical complexes, but that they can play a central role in social structures themselves. Indeed many of the most important and consequential social structures in contemporary societies, and in particular in contemporary economies, are socio-technical structures.

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“…Auch in der Europäischen Ethnologie plädierte Manfred Seifert für eine Erforschung der »Umsonst-Ökonomie« wie sie in »einer Sharing-beziehungsweise Tauschökonomie« anzutreffen ist (Seifert 2019: 173; Hervorhebung original). 15 Vermehrt werden ethnografische Perspektiven eingefordert, wo Geschenk und Gabe in datafizierter Art und Weise aufzutauchen scheinen, und eine ethnografisch oder auch praxeografisch angeleitete Forschung die Grenzen des Kapitalistischen ausloten kann (Brandes/Zierenberg 2017;Elder-Vass 2016;Knöbl 2017). Dave Elder-Vass spricht daher auch von einer »lifeworld economy« (2018: 228; Hervorhebung original), die praxistheoretisch untersucht werden kann.…”