This Article Full Text (OnlineFirst PDF) All Versions of this Article: 0162243908329185v1 34/4/427    most recent Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Boonstra, W. J. Articles by Bock, B. B. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Fallacies of Virtualization: A Case Study of Farming, Manure, Landscapes, and Dutch Rural Policy

¹ Rural Development Group, Department for Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences
² Rural Sociology Group, Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: wijnand.boonstra{at}sol.slu.se.

	Abstract

The recent rapprochement between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Science (PS) is induced by the broadened understanding of political action. The debate concerning the nature of "the political" produces an important question concerning the possibilities of an issue- or object-oriented focus for understanding political action. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate through an analysis of how relations between material and social entities are continuously recontextualized and decontextualized in social and political interaction. The authors discuss established approaches to explain the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is then used in a case study on the implementation of manure regulation in East Fryslân, the Netherlands, to illustrate how cases or issues are virtualized in political decision making, which produces initial presumptions that carry conclusive weight. The authors conclude that a broad understanding of the political in both STS and PS can only be sustained through an understanding of how relations between social and material entities are continuously decontextualized and recontextualized in political and social interaction.

First published on April 14, 2009, doi:10.1177/0162243908329185

Science, Technology & Human Values 2009;34:427.

A more recent version of this article appeared on July 1, 2009


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?