Search Results

If ‘open source’ is taken as a practice employed in organizing human knowledge-related activities, it may be applied more broadly than just with software. Wherever it is used this chapter contends that processes of negotiation and governance will emerge as means to deal with conflicting interests and visions of community purpose (or epistemic identity). A variety of possible institutional designs for these negotiation and governance processes are possible and each will be tested by the problems of sustaining participation, the growth of the community to include more diverse participants and contests over the paths of development of collective effort. These designs and their subsequent tests are examined empirically for the Debian open source software distribution and Wikipedia open source encyclopaedia creation communities. Conclusions regarding the significance of the initial choice of rules, the processes available to alter these rules, and the potential for dissipation or disruption of efforts are reached, and a proposal to conceive of open source activities as having important parallels to the management of museums rather than bazaars is advanced.

The importance of what was argued in the book was evaluated, with comments on which elements are of lasting significance for epistemology as a discipline. Notions treated include epistemic deference, liveness of hypotheses, mere mortality with respect to a hypothesis, epistemic superiority, responsibility to one’s epistemic community, the epistemic significance of expert disagreement, epistemic externalism, and content externalism.

This chapter addresses the question of how communities of different types, such as communities of practice and epistemic communities, relate to the task of organizations to combine exploitation and exploration. A key issue is how this relates to ‘cognitive distance’ within and between communities and organizations, and the cognitive ‘focus’ of organizations.

This chapter argues that the standard epistemological requirements of impartiality on the part of the knower, and passivity on the part of the thing under investigation, exclude from the purview of epistemology a very important kind of knowledge, namely: knowledge of persons. Feminist philosophers have focused on problems in explaining knowledge of other persons, but the same considerations require a reorientation in the way we think of knowledge of oneself. Because of the subjectivity of the knower and reflexive nature of the investigation involving self-knowledge, one's inquiry is affected in a way that challenges the accuracy of what is learned. The chapter's response is to treat the procedural methods used to obtain knowledge of oneself as continuous with the methods of acquiring knowledge of other persons via knowing their moral and cognitive characters. It highlights the intersection between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

Epistemic norms are norms of responsible epistemic agency. They are the norms that would emerge from the deliberations of legislating members of a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends. Such legislators must be, in a political sense, free and equal in their deliberations.

This chapter introduces the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (MBRS), a delicate system of coral reefs and mangroves along the coastline of Quintana Roo state in Mexico, threatened by overfishing and large-scale tourist development. It shows how a transnational advocacy network became an epistemic community by generating a shared understanding of the MBRS through transnational workshops held as part of the planning process for a GEF funded project. Although the epistemic community was able to generate a scientific consensus on reef degradation, they were only able to influence new regulations adopted by policymakers in agencies with which they socialized, namely in federal environmental and fishing agencies. Policymakers in the state government of Quintana Roo, and managers in hotelier associations actively resisted new protection adopted by federal agencies. Although the epistemic community attempted to use economic arguments to support conservation, these actors asserted that economic development could best be promoted by continued large-scale tourist development along the coast. However, when local actors and the mass public, alarmed about resource overexploitation and concerned about local justice issues, demanded new regulations to conserve biodiversity, policymakers acquiesced.

This chapter employs principal-agency theory to analyze the crafting of the Treaty's rules on budgetary reference values and the actual delegation of surveillance authority to the European Commission. Within the Commission, Eurostat emerged as the lead agency in the surveillance after its entrepreneurial leadership fought a successful bureaucratic battle with the Commission's Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs. To fulfil its organizational task, Eurostat mobilized the member states' participation in the surveillance procedure, incorporated them into its decision-making process, and helped build the institutional capacity of the EU's epistemic statistical community. At the same time, Eurostat took action to gain the political and bureaucratic independence it required to gain status as a largely autonomous, trustee-like, supranational monitoring agency.

This chapter describes how the Cockpit Country, a mountainous limestone forest region in the northwestern section of the island, was threatened by the possibility of bauxite mining, which would displace local residents and degrade natural resources. It then traces how a transnational network participated in the creation and implementation of the GEF project titled the Project on Sustainable Conservation of Globally Important Caribbean Bird Habitats. It shows how the network developed a scientific consensus after members held a series of transnational workshops and knowledge building exercises on bird habitat management in Cockpit Country, thus becoming an epistemic community. Despite having a consensus, the network could only persuade those policymakers with whom they socialized in the Forestry Department and the Ministry of Environment to adopt new environmental regulations. Moreover, although the network initially used economic justifications to argue for conservation, policymakers in the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and the Ministry of Agriculture rejected these, asserting the importance of short-term economic exploitation. Only when the network was able to mobilize the mass public around justice claims was the network able to generate sufficient political will to curb bauxite mining in Cockpit Country.

This chapter discusses the mobilization of management knowledge in healthcare, drawing on six qualitative case studies in a diverse range of settings. Drawing on theory about management knowledge and practices’ “fit,” and emergent theory about “epistemic stances,” it explains how cultural/institutional, political, and epistemic fit and clashes between the norms, interests, and epistemic stances of different communities affected knowledge mobilization in these settings. It also highlights the key role of knowledge brokers in “fitting” knowledge within contexts as part of their own identity work. Yet it also notes that knowledge brokers’ ability to mobilize and fit knowledge depended on having a senior role or senior level support, and credibility/legitimacy with dominant communities. It suggests that the novel concepts of “epistemic fit” and “fitting” are useful in explaining the process of knowledge mobilization, particularly in complex pluralistic healthcare contexts containing multiple epistemic communities which produce, use, and value knowledge in different ways.

This chapter introduces the theories and concepts that are applied to the case studies of Spain and Great Britain and develops a series of hypotheses regarding the role of ideas and knowledge in policy change. It features different models or approaches to the policy process and policy change that are applicable to the two case studies in this volume. These are the Epistemic Communities Hypothesis (ECH), the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), and Discourse Coalitions (DC) approach.

Globalization is part of a contemporary trend toward adopting a planetary scale as a means of emancipation from a primarily national representation of issues. Chapter 8 focuses on how mountains came to be identified as a global issue. The introduction of the mountain into organizations and international conferences has been a major innovation of the last twenty years. It was the result of a reconfiguration of stakeholders: the initiative fell to a heterogeneous group of individuals, organizations, and institutions that included scientists, national administrations, and various international organizations. It proceeded to recompose the levels of analysis and recommendation and called for a redefinition of the category of the mountain and of the objects that compose it. This global recognition of mountain which led to significant initiatives had to overcome the diversity of environmental, socioeconomic, and political situations of the various mountain ranges throughout the world. Therefore, the still-decisive weight of the actors at intermediate levels and the extreme diversity of mountain situations throughout the world require a multiscalar approach to each of the problems and a multi-level approach to the modalities for solving them.

This chapter considers Marxist dreams in a capitalist world. It then considers a balance sheet of the impact of “new thinking” on Vietnam's political and social realities after two decades of reform. How much of the substructure of the “old thinking” and the political assumptions of the past remains today? How has Vietnam adapted its thinking and politics to the realities of integrating into a single world system which does not fit well with fundamental assumptions of Marxism-Leninism, which Vietnam's leaders profess is still the guide to Vietnam's future? Can Vietnam find a way of retrofitting this ideational structure which is central to legitimating the regime onto the realities of the world system, perhaps by redefining Marxism-Leninism in the blander and more pragmatic guise of Ho Chi Minh thought? How have globalization and economic reform led to a revival of localism and familism, which have (re)created a blend of identities that are unique to Vietnam, rather than the feared homogenization of Vietnamese economic, cultural life into a Western-dominated model? In the short run, this has reinforced interest-group politics and corruption in a way that suggests a continuation of authoritarian rule, coupled with increasing space for the pursuit of private interests. In the longer term, it may be that deep engagement with globalization may have allowed Vietnam to rediscover its distinctive identity.

While genuine conservation measures tend to be a last resort the increasing number of fisheries crises in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century led to numerous innovations in fisheries management and the establishment of relatively effective institutions. This chapter describes the forces that fostered increased political action by non-commercial forces, the resulting period of conflict and gradual formation of coalitions to solve major problems in specific fisheries. It covers the politics of protecting charismatic megafauna, “rationalizing” fisheries through establishment of property rights, and the development of alternatives to MSY. Legitimacy and the need for co-management are also discussed in the final section.

This chapter explores how the wide range of interpreters in international law affects interpretation. Understanding the role of interpretive communities in the interpretive process—an influence that is routinely underappreciated—is crucial. To look only at interpretive directions, such as the provisions on interpretation found in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, is insufficient. Any account of interpretation is incomplete without the sociological dimension of interpretive communities. The meaning of international law norms hinges on background principles shared by interpreters who form part of one or several interpretive communities. The chapter begins by discussing the character of interpretive communities. It then goes on to show how practices and shared understandings within those interpretive communities shape interpretation. It suggests that interpretive debates in international law are part of a contest between various actors over diverse normative visions of international law.

The shift from an international to a global world order has substantially transformed how health is produced at the global level and, consequently, how health can be regulated at the global level. This entails that analysts concerned with global health need new sets of theoretical tools to analyse global health governance. This chapter presents three different case studies (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, trade agreement on intellectual property rights in relation to access to medicines and national policies on global health) analyzing major governance issues through different theoretical perspectives (implementation theories, a critical discourse analysis, theories on the formulation and circulation of policy ideas). This chapter ends with a tentative way to make sense of global health governance research that accommodates different research questions and theoretical perspectives.

This chapter analyzes how topics are identified for the SDGs, the prospects for effective linkages between the individual topics, and longer term learning about managing complex issues. It compares the logics of substantive and tactical issues linkage. Empirically it looks at the presence or absence or epistemic communities as factors contributing to the identification of SDGs, and in particular which individual SDGs are compatible to build a more integrated approach to governing sustainability.

This chapter critically maps the global landscapes of the politics of ageing and later life. This is important because any understanding of the relationship between globalization and ageing needs also to address the political dimensions that are specific to each polity. Three key emerging epistemic communities around ageing and later life are identified in this chapter. These are 1) the anti-ageing enterprise, 2) the new pension orthodoxy and 3) the active ageing epistemic community. Their existence once again questions the dominance of methodological nationalism in the formulation of both the policies and the cultures of old age. They also challenge the too simplistic notion that globalization is an unstoppable juggernaut with its own deterministic logic. Instead, the chapter reveals that no one spatial logic is dominant, but that in order to be successful these communities must align groups across a wide range of spatialities.

This chapter provides a conceptual framework for the following contributions to this edited book; and outlines the linkages between them. It introduces the role of neoliberal ideology and practice in shaping the institutional context of research production. In outlining the role of epistemic communities in the production of knowledge the reader is introduced to the utility of employing the concept of communities of practice in order to critically explore the situational context of research activity. This analysis is complemented by a discussion of the relevance of typologies of knowledge production. The chapter signals the significance of the political erasure of racisms, the role of counter-narratives to multiculturalism, and the logics of neo-liberalism in framing the field of research and policy to be discussed in this book.

In this chapter, Karen Frost-Arnold provides a close analysis of the epistemological challenges posed by context collapse in online environments and argues that virtue epistemology provides a helpful normative framework for addressing some of these problems. “Context collapse” is the blurring or merging of multiple contexts or audiences into one. Frost-Arnold identifies at least three epistemic challenges posed by context collapse. First, context collapse facilitates online harassment, which causes epistemic harm by decreasing the diversity of epistemic communities. Second, context collapse threatens the integrity of marginalized epistemic communities in which some types of true beliefs flourish. Third, context collapse promotes misunderstanding, as understanding relies on background knowledge which, in turn, is often context sensitive. Frost-Arnold then argues that we can cultivate and promote the epistemic virtues of trustworthiness and discretion in order to address some of these problems.

This chapter considers how social communities arise which are committed to a specific way of understanding or investigating our world, and how they transmit their ideas and values. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘epistemic communities’, and how they are able to communicate with each other, despite their different understandings of what it means to be ‘reasonable’. The concept of tradition—meaning a settled understanding of how the world is to be understood and explored—is considered, particularly in relation to the challenge this poses to the idea that reason is something that is historically and culturally invariant.