On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy

McGoey, Linsey

doi:10.1080/03085140701254282

Cited by 138 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Secrecy and non-knowledge are indispensable to the operation of power, 'Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter' (Taussig, 1999: 57). In debates over the efficacy of antidepressants, strategic ignorance has been useful to a range of parties, from researchers to manufacturers, and, thinking back to Lewis Wolpert's certainty of what a study such as Kirsch's could not know: his own personal reaction to antidepressants, to patients alike (for further discussions of the political uses of ignorance and secrecy, see Barry, 2006;Lamble, 2009;McGoey, 2007;Proctor, 1995).…”

Section: Antidepressant Efficacy and The Methodological Limitations Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

McGoey

2010

History of the Human Sciences

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Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues' controversial 2008 article in PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Power, that it is the very limitations of RCTs -their inadequacies in producing reliable evidence of clinical effects -that help to strengthen assumptions of their superiority as methodological tools. Finally, I suggest that the case of RCTs helps to explore the question of why failure is often useful in consolidating the authority of those who have presided over that failure, and why systems widely recognized to be ineffective tend to assume greater authority at the very moment when people speak of their malfunction.

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Section: Antidepressant Efficacy and The Methodological Limitations Omentioning

confidence: 99%

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

McGoey

2010

History of the Human Sciences

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“…So what are the implications of such propositions for universities in their pursuit of rising up sustainability league tables. For Hodson et al (2013a) the problem is not, an absence of rules as much as it is a lack of accountability (McGoey, 2007). They argue that successfully regulating organizations may require a certain degree of internal democracy, not just externally imposed rules (Braithwaite, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opening up the Pandora's box of sustainability league tables of universities: a Kafkaesque perspective

Jones

2015

Studies in Higher Education

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“…After the database has been created, its contents can be forgotten because the database promises the possibility of retrieval. In that way, forgetting is as much a motivation for the creation of databases as memorizing, albeit a more implicit one, and the pursuit of ignorance goes hand in hand with the pursuit of knowledge (McGoey 2007). A high-modernist, aesthetic ideal is present here that envisions a global network of completely interoperable and accessible databases containing data of all life on earth.…”

Section: Databases Standards and Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Databases, Scaling Practices, and the Globalization of Biodiversity

Turnhout¹,

Boonman‐Berson²

2011

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Since the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, biodiversity has become an important topic for scientific research. Much of this research is focused on measuring and mapping the current state of biodiversity, in terms of which species are present at which places and in which abundance, and making extrapolations and future projections, that is, determining the trends. Biodiversity databases are crucial components of these activities because they store information about biodiversity and make it digitally available. Useful biodiversity databases require data that are reliable, standardized, and fit for up-scaling. This paper uses material from the EBONE-project (European Biodiversity Observation Network) to illustrate how biodiversity databases are constructed, how data are negotiated and scaled, and how biodiversity is globalized. The findings show a continuous interplay between scientific ideals related to objectivity and pragmatic considerations related to feasibility and data availability. Statistics was a crucial feature of the discussions. It also proved to be the main device in up-scaling the data. The material presented shows that biodiversity is approached in an abstract, quantitative, and technical way, disconnected from the species and habitats that make up biodiversity and the people involved in collecting the data. Globalizing biodiversity involves decontextualization and standardization. This paper argues that while this is important if the results of projects like EBONE are to be usable in different contexts, there is a risk involved as it may lead to the alienation from the organizations and volunteers who collect the data upon which these projects rely.

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On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy

Cited by 138 publications

References 24 publications

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

Opening up the Pandora's box of sustainability league tables of universities: a Kafkaesque perspective

Databases, Scaling Practices, and the Globalization of Biodiversity

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