I have fallen behind on book recommendations here, so here are ten books that I recommend and haven't already mentioned. Michel Callon, ed, The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. This formidable book is based on field studies of the processes by which new markets get formed. Mainstream economics is remarkably uncurious about the actual, detailed mechanics of market-making, but the authors in this volume start from Michel Callon's difficult but important theories of entrepreneurship to show how market-makers weave together the necessary social networks. They also emphasize the role of economic theories in market-making: the market-makers take the very theories that are supposed to describe the aggregate behavior of markets and turn them into templates for the design of new market institutions. The theories are not for the faint of heart, but they provide an important bridge between the emphasis on "embeddedness" in the sociological literature that descends from Karl Polanyi and the sort of neoclassical theory of market-making found in Dan Spulber's (also valuable) book about market microstructure. Christian Heath and Paul Luff, Technology in Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. This book comes from a strong tradition of detailed qualitative studies of people using information and communication technologies. The idea is to draw pictures of the microsociology of computer use that are complex enough to explain the phenomena while also being geared to the needs of designers. Studies in this book include medical clinics, news reporting, architecture, and control rooms of the London Underground. Particular attention is paid to the fine-grained interactional work through which the system users make the moment-to-moment decisions that their jobs require. Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Princeton University Press, 1998. Conservatism originated in elite fears of popular democracy in 18th century England, and this entertaining social history recounts the cultural combat that ensued. The topics investigated in depth include conservative campaigns (in reaction to the immense fashion for newspapers being read and discussed in coffee houses) to prevent the common people from learning how to read, and the poetics of conservative terror of common people and disgust at their culture. It's funny and sad to see these same conservative theorists cited today as the supposed friends of the common people against elite liberals, given the actual substance of their theories and the historical context in which those theories arose. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Tom Paine lived just about the most amazing life in human history, and this page-turning biography provides a vivid narrative from his childhood in an backward English village through his emergence as a polemicist in Lewes (I once lived a few blocks from Paine's lodgings there) to his career as the leading populist philosopher of the American Revolution and his membership in the moderate wing of the Revolution in France. Although John Keane is a distinguished political philosopher in his own right, his biography is concerned mainly with the facts of Paine's life, and less with his theories. This is too bad at times. When the Terror was closing in on him in France, for example, Paine decided to spend what was very nearly his last days writing "The Age of Reason". Why, exactly? One can perhaps surmise from Keane's narrative, but it would be largely that. More importantly, it seems to me that Keane pushes into the background the central theme of Paine's life: the revolution in consciousness by which a generation threw off the mental chains of conservatism and began thinking and acting for themselves. In Keane's defense, though, it had taken shockingly long for anyone even to establish the facts of Paine's life, and astounding facts they certainly are. The next step is to draw out their significance. Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Doubleday, 2001. IDEO, as you surely know by now, is the leading industrial design firm. This book is a how-to derived from its celebrated techniques of innovation. It is not perfect -- to benefit from it, you have to cut through its Tom Peters turbo-charged gee-whiz writing style. And on first reading, much of its advice will seem like common sense. But persevere. Ask yourself: if this stuff is such common sense, why aren't you doing it? There are just some things that we all need to be told: put together an interdisciplinary team of fun people who respect one another, go looking at what people actually do, brainstorm a hundred ideas, shoot the bad ones, build dozens of prototypes, and keep everyone in the loop until it's a real manufactured product. The stories are great, and to really appreciate them you should keep handy a copy of IDEO's coffee-table book: Jeremy Myerson, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, King, 2001. In a sense you only learn this material through stories: you need conceptual frameworks, but the conceptual frameworks themselves are rather simply and become alive only in the process of applying them to real cases. On the other hand, because it claims to package IDEO's skills for other companies to use, the book underplays the skills of IDEO's own employees, particularly the ones that they brought with them from innovative academic design schools such as the Royal College of Art. But okay, if the stories get you motivated to try the methods for yourself, then they've done their job. Paul Luff, Jon Hindmarsh, and Christian Heath, eds, Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. This is another volume of very strong qualitative studies of information system users along the same lines as Heath and Luff. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, New York University Press, 2000. Anthropologists have historically, really since Herder in the 19th century, had an organic understanding of culture: a culture saturates every single thing within it, making everything into an expression of the whole. This is the approach that Miller and Slater bring to their ethnography of the Internet in Trinidad. You would think that the Internet, the very symbol of universalism, would be impossible to dissolve in any culture -- or at least any culture but that of the United States. But their argument is that the people in Trinidad have very happily taken hold of the Internet and made it into something totally congruent with their own meanings, practices, and identities. This might be going a bit far, but it is a valuable antidote to the technological determinism (explicit or accidental) of too much writing about the Internet as a social phenomenon. Annelise Riles, The Network Inside Out, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. This is an anthropological study of NGO activists in Fiji who spend their lives participating in an endless global cycle of meetings, largely funded by foundations in the first world, that are aimed at producing consensus documents at UN conferences. It is an much more sophisticated work of anthropology than Miller and Slater's, and it shares many of the virtues of the Callon book about markets. It confronts what, for anthropologists, is a serious problem: modern "natives" are fully conversant with the sociological theories through which the participants in first-world institutions understand themselves. In the old days, supposedly, one could describe the natives as, for example, building "networks". Now, though, the "natives" already understand themselves in just those terms, and so any responsible ethnography must reconstruct the "natives'" own understanding of this ethnographic concept, and the role that their understanding plays in reflexively organizing the activities that the ethnographer studies. Other problems abound as well: whereas old-fashioned "natives" supposedly lived lives of great intimacy, the global networks of NGO activists are spread thinly and organized loosely, and everyone takes this distinctly untraditional way of life for granted. Riles confronts all of these difficulties and develops a very complex meditation on the nature of networks, as well as the nature of knowledge in and about networks. Oz Shy, The Economics of Network Industries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. This is a textbook of the economics of network effects: the very strange economic effects that arise when the value of a good to a consumer depends on the number of other consumers who have it. Standard examples include almost anything having to do with information and communications technology. Network economics is absurdly counterintuitive, and so it's unusually rewarding to work through the models in Shy's book to reconstruct the logic behind his results. The models are mathematical, but no calculus is required and the non-mathematically inclined can mostly follow the argument from the text. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, andthe Public Sphere in Early-Modern England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. In this serious and methodically argued history, David Zaret argues two claims: first, that the modern sphere of public debate arose as a direct consequence of the printing press, and second, that the people who made this revolution did not think of themselves as revolutionaries; quite the contrary, they were tradition-minded people who thought of themselves as upholding invariant values. The argument proceeds through detailed examination of several genres of political tract that were common in early modern England. The Internet has nothing on the complexity of these textual practices, such as the (clearly pre-copyright) method of reprinting someone else's political pamphlet bound with one's own response to it. end
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