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Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Translated by Graham Burchell. Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, 298 pp. $US 35.00 hardcover (978-0-262-03382-4)
Michel Callon, first author and presumably the driving intellectual force behind Acting in an Uncertain World, has a well-earned reputation as one of France's leading contemporary sociologists. While his work is often linked to that of Bruno Latour, his friend and (until recently) colleague at the École des Mines de Paris, Callon has tended toward more applied and less abstract questions than Latour. This book, first published in French in 2001, is a notable attempt to link real-world developments in the politics of knowledge - particularly the tensions between citizens and authorities that are most frequently expressed on environmental and health issues - to some of the more academic concepts developed in actor network theory (ANT) and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), including hybridity, translation, the social construction of knowledge, and the increasingly problematic divide between expert and "lay" ways of knowing and acting politically.
While the topic is not new, the approach of Callon and his colleagues is provocative. In the book's opening pages, they point out that their discussion begins where most accounts end: with the stubborn and increasingly problematic stalemate between different claims to knowledge and authority. They argue against Ulrich Beck's implicit conclusion that the collapse of the progress narrative and the rise of uncertainty as the predominant political worldview leads to diverging understandings of risk and the formation of competing interest...