The logic of strategic ignorance

Abstract

Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas. This article disputes this, exploring the ways that ignorance serves as a productive asset, helping individuals and institutions to command resources, deny liability in the aftermath of crises, and to assert expertise in the face of unpredictable outcomes. Through a focus on the Food and Drug Administration's licensing of Ketek, an antibiotic drug manufactured by Sanofi-Aventis and linked to liver failure, I suggest that in drug regulation, different actors, from physicians to regulators to manufacturers, often battle over who can attest to the least knowledge of the efficacy and safety of different drugs - a finding that raises new insights about the value of ignorance as an organizational resource.

The IMF failure that wasn’t: risk ignorance during the European debt crisis

“…Risk ignorance can only work if it is carefully wrought by experts (Heimer ; McGoey ). From that point of view, IMF expertise was a work of craftsmen.…”

Unmasking the enterprising nurse: migrant care workers and the discursive mobilisation of productive professionals

“…Although care workers' knowledge might help them improve care work (and the quality of care), remaining ignorant to such knowledge may be surprisingly pragmatic for care work managers (cf. McGoey ): ignorance enables them to cherish the impression that all problems in care work can be solved by cultivating care workers' agential abilities.…”

Plausible folk theories: throwing veils of plausibility over zones of ignorance in global governance

“…Thus, folks’ acceptance of a PFT does not rest on the kind of ignorance that Robert Proctor (: 5) calls ‘selective ignorance’ – for example, the kind of ignorance that is tolerated by scientists who willingly or unwillingly have to accept that any increment of empirically demonstrable knowledge comes with the acceptance of limitations – which is also related to what McGoey () calls ‘liminal ignorance’. Nor can we say that their acceptance of a PFT’s validity follows the strategic logic of cynical operators (Mallard ; McGoey ) who purposefully lie to the public. In fact, most governance experts who ‘talk the talk’ in the international organizations where PFTs are widespread seem generally to ignore the fact that their supposedly empirically demonstrated beliefs have never been put to the test.…”

“…Thus, while it may be impossible to determine conclusively whether policymakers deliberately sought to obscure the reality of their own flimsy evidence base from outsiders, it is also true that obscuring this reality was a strategically advantageous position for IO staff to maintain. In other words, we can see the utility of a third category of ignorance: strategic ignorance , defined as a form of ignorance that can confer advantages on particular groups even if those groups have not consciously or wilfully cultivated an unknown in the first place (McGoey , ).…”