David J. Hess

In Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry, David Hess examines how social movements and other forms of activism affect innovation in science, technology, and industry. Synthesizing and extending work in social studies of science and technology, social movements, and globalization, Hess explores the interaction of grassroots environmental action and mainstream industry and offers a conceptual framework for understanding it. Hess proposes a theory of scientific and technological change that considers the roles that both industry and grassroots consumers play in setting the research agenda in science and technology, and he identifies "alternative pathways" by which social movements can influence scientific and technological innovation. He analyzes four of these pathways: industrial opposition movements, organized against targeted technologies (as in the campaign against nuclear energy); technology- and product-oriented movements, which press for alternatives (as does the organic food movement); localism, which promotes local ownership (as in "buy-local" campaigns); and access pathways, which support a more equitable distribution of resources. Within each pathway, Hess examines reforms in five different areas: agriculture, energy, waste and manufacturing, infrastructure, and finance. The book's theoretical argument and empirical evidence demonstrate the complex pattern of incorporation (of grassroots innovations) and transformation (of alternative ownership structures and the alternative products themselves) that has characterized the relationship of industry and activism. Hess's analysis of alternative pathways to change suggests ways economic organizations could shift to a more just and sustainable course in the twenty-first century.

Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalizaztion

Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry

Roberto da Matta

Roberto DaMatta

How do Brazilians think about their own culture in comparison with those of North America and Western Europe? The Brazilian Puzzle provides a unique picture of everyday life in Brazil viewed from a comparative perspective. Brazilian scholars and Brazilianists explore a range of topics in everyday life in Brazil, including sports, music, voluntary associations, religion, political practices, race and gender, and poor neighborhoods. The authors show how Brazilian culture involves a complex negotiation in which the traditional values of hierarchy and personalism permeate even the most modern institutions. The Brazilian Puzzle is emblematic of the new era in Brazilian studies in which Brazilian scholars are leading the way. Many of the authors draw on the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Robert DaMatta, who has questioned the perspective of observers from developed Western countries. DaMatta argues that they often project their own categories onto Brazilian society, and instead he suggests that Latin Americans and other peoples develop their own theories rooted in their own unique experiences. In this way The Brazilian Puzzle contributes to the end of an era of Brazilianists and the decolonizing of area studies.

Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World

The Brazilian Puzzle

This new approach to the study of multiculturalism focuses on its applications to science and technology. It explores new studies that describe the role of culture and power in the making of theories, facts and machines.

The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts

Science and Technology in a Multicultural World

Documents the work of alternative cancer researchers--which, the author charges, has been ignored or suppressed by the medical establishment--on a possible link between bacteria and cancer and on alternative treatments for the disease. UP.

Alternative Medicine Confronts Big Science

Can Bacteria Cause Cancer?

A theoretical integration of science and technology studies and social movement studies that finds both common ground and "undone" research.

Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions

Undone Science

Professor David J Hess

In Science in the New Age, David Hess explores ideologies of the paranormal in the United States. He offers a map of the labyrinth of views put forward by parapsychologists and skeptical debunkers, spirit channelers and crystal healers, Hollywood poltergeist scripts, and prophets of the New Age. Adopting a cultural perspective, Hess moves beyond the question of who is right or wrong to the cultural politics of how each group constructs its own boundaries of true and false knowledge. Hess begins by looking at each group's unique version of knowledge, science, and religion and at its story about the other groups. Comparing the various discourses, texts, writers, and groups as cultures, he shows how skeptics, parapsychologists, and New Agers may disagree vehemently with each other, but end up sharing many rhetorical strategies, metaphors, models, values, and cultural categories. Furthermore, he argues, their shared “paraculture” has a great deal in common with the larger culture of the United States. The dialogue on the paranormal, Hess concludes, has as much to do with gender, power, and cultural values as it does with spirits, extrasensory perception, and crystal healing.

David J. Hess

Books

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