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Ontologies for Developing Things offers a series of conceptually inventive analyses of
the future-making processes put in motion in contemporary health care systems with
the introduction of electronic patient records and other communication technologies.
The book shows how such technological development and implementation processes are
bound up with multiple other issues: professional, social, economic and political. Through
such processes health care ontologies gradually change, often with unanticipated effects.
In analyzing these effects, Jensen offers a highly innovative interpretation of where
science and technology studies could be headed - towards performative, non- humanist
modes of inquiry.
Casper Bruun Jensen is one of the most intellectually accomplished and creative theorists
of second-generation Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as one of the most
active and productive researchers in the field. In Ontologies for Developing Things, he offers
a series of highly original delineations and vigorous defenses of recent developments--or,
as he calls them "dispositions"--in STS (ontological, performative, pragmatist, and so
forth) through a series of parallel narrations of his own onsite studies of the introduction
of new medical-information technologies in Denmark and Canada.
Ontologies for Developing Things is a work of unflagging intelligence and intellectual
energy, spilling over with new ideas, surprising angles, sharp perceptions and interesting
juxtapositions, and written with correspondingly attractive punch and force. Readers
interested in information technologies, contemporary developments in social studies of
science, and related cultural and political theory will find the book immensely engaging
and endlessly useful. - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University and Brown University
[author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science Truth and the Human and Natural Reflections:
Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion]
This superb book is all of empirically rich, politically engaged, ontologically profound
and lucid. Any three of the four makes a very good book; all four makes an outstanding
one. - Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburg (Author
of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (With Susan Leigh Star) and
Memory Practices in the Sciences).
