INTRODUCTION

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF METHODS: Devices

Introduction
First there was the earthquake and then came the tsunami. Hours passed and stories
about the Fukushima nuclear plant started: no power; no cooling; overheating; hydrogen
explosions and fires; off-site radiation spikes; an evacuation zone. So here is the question
how far do devices extend? How large or small can they be? Is a nuclear reactor a device? Or
a water pump? And how about the radiation monitors catching those spikes? Or the
International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale? (Fukushima started at level 4 and like
Chernobyl now ranks at 7). Is this a device as well?
Here is where we start. Devices do not have to be pieces of kit. They do not have to be
big or small technologies. Rather, they are material and social. The dictionary suggests that
we might think of them as patterned teleological arrangements. The Concise Oxford
Dictionary mentions heraldic designs and mottos, but its primary definition talks of ‘plan,
scheme, trick; contrivance, invention, thing adapted for a purpose or designed for a
particular function’. So the Fukushima nuclear plant is a teleological arrangement. But so,
too, is the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Or, if we want to think ‘social’
or ‘economic’, then the 2011 UK census, the Eurobarometer survey, the first-pastthe-post
electoral system, the sociological interview, the historians’ witness seminar, the collateralised
debt obligation, and a royal wedding, all of these are devices; all are more or less patterned
teleological arrangements.
Perhaps, then, almost everything of human interest is a device? A newspaper. An app.
An identity card and the state apparatus of surveillance that goes with it. A supermarket’s
logistical track-and-trace system. The supermarket itself, the shop. The Lord Mayor’s Dinner.
The British Museum. The Annual Meeting of the British Sociological Association. There is an
argument for saying that the world is substantially structured by devices. But to think about
this, it is useful to first reflect on the key terms here, teleology and arrangement.

Teleology
As the dictionary reminds us, teleology leads to purpose and to functionality. Devices
do things. But what do they do? Fukushima has been generating electricity, local
employment, and fission products for decades, but now it has done other things too. It has
emitted radiation, polluted its surroundings, and is having unpredictable effects on the
future of nuclear power. But the same logic works for ‘social’ devices as well. In the UK,
censuses have been enumerating populations since 1801. But as they count, censuses are
doing other things too (Ruppert 2007). They may be creating national identities and
 # 2013 Taylor & Francis
national exclusions. They may be helping to build nation-states. They may be generating
controversies; with the rise of the digitisation of government records are they really
necessary any longer? And (another ‘social’ device) focus groups have been used by
marketers to explore attitudes to products. That is what they have been doing routinely since
the Second World War. But quite differently and more recently they have been used by
critical social scientists to lay bare rhetorical positions and social tensions on matters of
contestation indeed including nuclear power (Waterton & Wynne 1998).
That is the first lesson we want to take away. If devices are patterned teleological
arrangements, then they do things. Press on this thought a little, and it becomes tempting to
suggest that devices assemble and arrange the world in specific social and material patterns.
References might include: Fukushima, where what was being assembled and distributed
changed dramatically in March 2011; the census, which turns self-elicited identifications and
categories into populations with rates and regularities; the London Congestion charge zone,
which regulates and configures patterns of traffic and travel decisions; and the first-past-the-
post electoral system, which organises the political and geographical distribution of
parliamentary seats, and in the UK usually secures a majority in the House of Commons for a
single party. We may imagine, then, that devices like these are social operators; that they all
do social work; and that (we have already said this) each of them is doing this in patterned
ways that are multiple and diverse.
But there is an obvious corollary. What devices are doing is not necessarily written on
the package. And this is often what the stuff of political and social contestation not to
mention critical social science is about. It airs what has not been written on the package, or
it adds its own health warnings. Does the first-past-the-post system help to keep the
Conservative party in power in a nation that has a ‘natural’ radical or at least liberal
majority? Yes, said the critics, at least until the hung parliament of 2010. Did collateralised
debt obligations help banks to securitise themselves with AAA investments? This is what was
written on the package. Only after the 20072008 crash did it become clear that local security
might lead to global instability. Is nuclear power a safe carbon-free source of electricity? No,
say the critics (and they have been saying this since before the Three Mile Island incident in
1979 [Perrow 1999]). Did the question ‘what is your religion?’ in the 2011 UK Census
encourage a positive response that will result in a misleading measure of religious affiliation?
Yes, say the lobbyists.
This suggests that any social analysis of devices will be marked by a degree of critical
suspicion. Of course there is no harm in reading what is on the package to start with.
‘Security cameras reduce theft’. No doubt they do in many circumstances. But then critical
social science will go on to look at the small print. ‘Security cameras move theft around to
places without such cameras’. Or ‘security cameras erode privacy’. And it will seek to add to
the small print. ‘Security cameras erode civil liberties too’. And finally it will argue that what
seemed to be small print is not small print at all: that (for instance) the erosion of civil
liberties should be shouted from the rooftops. In short, like all good social sciences, the
social analysis of devices will go looking for agendas that are not obvious and that are
nonetheless embedded in their practices. It will go looking for what we might think of as
‘collateral realities’ (Law 2011) distributive effects that are being done incidentally and along
the way.
 And then, as a part of this, it will ask about effects that are not intentional. For the
teleologies of the patterned arrangements we are calling devices may be indeed very often
are implicit. In ways that interestingly overlap, R.K. Merton talked of the
importance of what he called ‘latent functions’ (unrecognised and unintended social
consequences (Merton 1957)), while Michel Foucault became preoccupied with implicit
strategies, pointing to forms of ordering such as normalisation (Foucault 1979). The latter, he
observed, are not the product of centralised deliberation. Instead they spread themselves
through and pattern the fabric of the social to operate as a microphysics of power. The well-
worn but nonetheless crucial lesson is that devices and their teleologies do not depend
primarily upon strategic subjects. As a generation of feminist and race theory has taught us,
the devices of gendering and racialising (if that is what we call them) are all the more
powerful for being inexplicit, naturalised, embedded and endlessly reproduced in the
strategically ordered networks of the social (on racial inscription, see M’Charek 2010). Here,
then, the onus is on the analyst. Perhaps there are arrangements that are not interestingly
teleological for critical social science, but if we cannot see implicit effects when we start
looking at practices then we would suggest that this constitutes a failure in our critical
faculties.

Arrangements
So much for the teleology; but what of the patterned arrangements part of our
definition of the device?
There is one way in which the point we need to make is banal. Everything that holds
together more than briefly can be understood as a patterned arrangement. The Fukushima
nuclear plant is an arrangement that combines pieces of material technology with a range of
different forms of expertise, and legislative, economic, and political relations; and natural
relations too (for instance, radiation). We may think of it as a web that has been arranged
(and now disturbed). Coming closer to home, Mike Savage explores the working of the UK’s
Government Social Survey in the 1950s and the 1960s (Savage 2010). This made use of the
(then unusual) technique of sampling and anonymous interviewing to represent the views of
particular groups in the population. It was a technique popular with a rising technocratic
middle class, which thereby distinguished itself from the upper class gentlemanly
intellectuals. And it was used in the 1960s by a modernising government to frame (for
instance) a more egalitarian educational policy. Again this counts as a patterned
arrangement. It was an arrangement of material elements (including clipboards, calculators
and statistical tables), forms of expertise, and professional and political relations. First off,
then, the point is banal, but we make it because we want to press two further points.
First, the patterned arrangements that constitute devices are materially
heterogeneous. Devices may and often do include pieces of kit. More generally, patterned
arrangements include materials that may but do not need to be high-tech (clipboards and
pencils are just as material as nuclear reactors, radiation monitors or computers). But they
are heterogeneous because they (usually) include people too (technicians, evacuees,
electricity users, members of the technocratic middle class, interviewees). We might add that
they typically include texts, inscriptions, representations or symbols too (sample statistics,
temperature readings and graphs revealing radiation spikes). But if devices are materially
heterogeneous arrangements, then this suggests that it is important to find ways of tracing
the patterning of relations as these pass through and order different kinds of materials,
human, social and otherwise. It calls for thinking about how devices are active, alive and
lively. It becomes important to understand that how they establish relations, how they play
out, and who and what they mobilise are to a large extent indeterminate and contingent.
That is not to say that the ways they are initially configured, strategically ordered, and
organised are inconsequential, but it may be that they are only provisional. (Think, for
instance, of the sheer heterogeneity of census practices.) And this in turn suggests that it
might be wise to avoid a narrow definition of ‘the social’. Contra Durkheim, it might be better
not to think of ‘the social’ as a separate realm, but instead to imagine it as patterns of
association that come in a variety of material forms (Latour 2001).
Second, we want to argue that there is no reason to suppose that devices that
patterned teleological relations are internally consistent and coherent. We have already seen
that they have multiple effects: that they do a range of different things. We have also, and
similarly, argued that they embed or are shaped by a range of different strategies or agendas,
and that as they are played out can gather together other devices or enrol different elements
and purposes not ‘originally’ envisaged. All this tells us that devices multitask, that they
embed more or less uncertain (and often implicit) compromises, and that if they appear to
be coherent then this is a contingent achievement. Always subject to centrifugal forces, they
are potentially fragile (Fukushima, the NHS National Patient Record system, the financial
system). This means that if we look inside and turn up the critical magnification, we are likely
to discover that in practice they are more or less messy patchworks or assemblages rather
than perfectly crafted working arrangements. It follows that any claims of perfection by their
authors need to be treated with a pinch of salt. They need to be understood as accounts of
devices as they were conceived rather than practised. It also, and interestingly, tells us that
since non-coherence is a chronic condition what might otherwise be denounced as a ‘mess’
is not necessarily undesirable, a suggestion that in turn carries its own political-cum-
analytical lesson (Law 2004). This is why tinkering may be a better model for thinking about
how devices work in practice, rather than measuring or trying to understand them in terms
of the extent to which they approximate a logic of perfect design (Mol 2008). We are saying,
then, to put it differently, that it is better to think of devices as rough and ready assemblages,
rather than as well-oiled systems or networks, social or otherwise.

Boundaries
How far, then, do devices extend? Do we want to say that Fukushima includes all the
agendas about civil nuclear power, for and against? Do we want to argue that sample surveys
include all the concerns of those who have built and contributed to the apparatuses of
sampling statistics? To what extent do we want to include the interests of the banking system
or sub-prime mortgage-seekers within the device of the collateralised debt obligation? How
far do we want to load events such as royal weddings with agendas, national, monarchical,
religious, hierarchical, political, military and patriarchal? (e.g., see Tett’s (2011)
anthropological analysis of the royal wedding). Are there any boundaries to devices once we
start to think of these as patterned teleological arrangements? And if so, then how would we
set those boundaries?
These are questions that are partially, but only partially, empirical. Looking to see, for
instance, how collateralised debt obligations work will lead us relatively easily to discover
specific relational patterns for instance, to do with the repackaging of debt by banks to
reduce exposure to, and therefore the cost of financing, what would otherwise be low quality
and high risk lending. Clearly, then, in the first instance the empirical clearly needs to be
respected, and looking to see what is written on the package is not a bad place to start if we
want to do this. But then looking to see what others including especially sceptics are saying
is not a bad follow-up move for those aspiring to a critical social science. So, for instance,
those who have explored the technical default calculations of derivatives such as
collateralised debt obligations have discovered that under certain circumstances these
predict total default. In this way, we start to learn about other plausible teleological patterns
embedded in the arrangements of the social. Then, and still in the business of rewriting the
small print or perhaps of blazoning it we have critical traditions in social science that lead us
to look for the operation of systematic but concealed or implicit strategic agendas. So, and
still sticking with the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, an analysis informed by the concerns
of political economy suggests that while each transaction in the financial system was clever,
these were not only chained together in ways that were dumb (and therefore catastrophic),
but that the inquiries into banking regulation blinded themselves to the larger consequences
and risks of such arrangements by excluding dissenting voices (CRESC 2009).
One therefore looks, and in some measure one discovers, the patterns that one is
searching for. And this tells us in turn that the boundaries of patterned teleological
arrangements are flexible. It tells us that where we set the boundaries is an analytical and
political matter. It tells that that where we set the boundaries of devices depends on our own
questions, and our own agendas. It also tells us that whatever the stories that we tell,
whatever it is that we seek to inscribe on the package, these will only ever be partial. There
can be no exhaustive analysis of devices. There is always more to be told, more and different,
about the work that they do, and about what and how they assemble, distribute and operate
upon, the social. So how do we decide where we want to set our boundaries?
Clearly there can be no single answer to this question. It will precisely depend on our
own concerns and agendas. And of course those concerns and agendas are often related to
the analytic framings that we take up, such as actornetworktheory (ANT), Foucauldian
dispositifs and apparatuses, Deleuzian assemblages or Bourdieusian fields. While each of
these also faces questions about arrangements and boundaries, they open up kinds of worlds
to us that other analytic methods may foreclose. But we want to elaborate this point by
reflecting briefly on the devices of professional social science: on our interviews, our surveys
and our focus groups; on the devices that we use as we seek to understand and represent
the social. This is important because everything that we have said about devices in general
applies just as much to those of social science. Indeed, we have said this above: social
science methods are more or less precarious patterned teleological arrangements. Possessed
of a double social life, they are shaped by the social, and in turn they act as social operators
to do the social (Law et al. 2011). But what follows from this?
One answer is that it will not do to treat social research methods as techniques alone.
Of course, it is right to think of them in part in this way. This is the writing on the package or
perhaps better the small print. If you want to set up a focus group or run a survey it is indeed
important to do this properly. But we should not stop there. Recognising that we can never
find exhaustive answers, we should nevertheless also be asking: what is it that our methods
are doing? What do they imply? What kinds of worlds are they opening up to us? And what
kinds of worlds are they closing off? So, for instance, if we were to ask about the strategies
and assumptions embedded in that iconic social research tool, the sample survey, we might
want to ask about what it sometimes makes explicit but often implies or takes for granted
about

. the character of the social; where the putative response might be that the social is a particular
collection of people, such as a population;
. the character of the elements that make up the social; where the response is likely to be that
these are people;
. the particular attributes of those people; which probably include linguistic skills, and the
assumption that these skills may be mobilised or probed to discover somewhat consistent
attitudes that (in turn) relate to their behaviour;
. the character of representation; where the answer would be that it is possible, within certain
statistically bound limits of reliability, to assume that a properly chosen sample can stand
for an entire population, and that this (as it were ‘democratic’ version of the social) is
‘properly representative’; and
. the character of social science research; where a possible response might be that it is about
collecting linguistic responses from individual people about their attitudes, life conditions,
or experiences that may then be grouped together and classified into separate sub-
populations.

Do not misread what we have just written as an attack on the device of the sample survey.
Our concern is analytical rather than normative, and a similar list might be generated for any
social research method, quantitative or qualitative. But what it does reveal is that like any
other research method the sample survey is a device that is shaped by and reproduces a
version of the social (Law et al. 2011). It is a patterned teleological arrangement that makes
assumptions about the character of the social as a collectivity, the components of that
collectivity, the attributes of those components, and how best these might be researched.
This tells us that it is not naive, and neither is it neutral. So while it teaches us about the
social (for instance, about people’s attitudes to matters of the day) it also carries and
rediscovers a set of more or less implicit framing assumptions that we earlier characterised
as ‘collateral realities’. In short, it necessarily rests in and reproduces a set of often implicit
strategies.
Such strategies may or may not be important. If we want to know how people are likely
to vote in an election or about their experiences of educational opportunity and social
mobility then we do not necessarily need to concern ourselves too much about them. The
device of the sample survey no doubt does its job very well. On the other hand, once we
start to think about research methods as devices, it also becomes interesting and important
to think about and explore the social work that they are doing. This is because it is not
impossible that we might want to do it differently.
Such, then, is the importance of the device, in sociology, and elsewhere. It is not simply
a matter of critically exposing explicit and implicit strategies, and of being reflexive about the
work being done by our devices. It is equally important to attend to how we make normative
and political choices, and the ways in which these have consequences for how our disciplines
intervene in the social worlds of which they form a part.
 The Articles
The articles in this special issue take up many of these questions.
A good place to start is with Candea for he directly interrogates our definition of a
device as a ‘patterned teleological arrangement’ to think about two possible and interrelated
devices. The first is a biological field site, the Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP), whose main
purpose is to collect observational data on meerkat behaviour and ecology in the field
instead of the laboratory. The other is his anthropological field site, which only partly
overlaps with the KMP. He notes that both are made up of particular patterned arrangements
but rather than holding steady, with each visit he discovers that both shift and change
(leading him to state ‘you never step twice into the same fieldsite’). Through a series of
vignettes he complicates what changes: not only are new elements introduced into the KMP
but his ‘outlook’ also changes and he sees thing that hither to fore were not ‘obvious’ to him
such as experimental interventions. He also complicates the boundaries of his field site (and
the archetype of a single, neatly bounded ethnographic location) by describing its
multisitedness, which extends spatially from the Kalahari to seminars and libraries in
Cambridge and temporally from his discontinuous co-presence to the comings and goings of
people, animals and things.
Candea (2013) then returns to the definition of a device and concludes that both the
biological and anthropological field sites are patterned arrangements and that their
difference is matter of emphasis: the latter has a flexible, open-ended approach to location
and the job is to find the pattern and arrangement ‘out there in the world’; biologists make
explicit their research design and painstakingly define the pattern and arrangement of their
field site according to their interests. That point brings Candea to the question of teleology:
he counterpoises the KMP as a ‘single-mindedly purposeful device’ against the
ethnographer’s openness to the unexpected where aims, purposes and interests get partly
redirected. Therefore, while both field sites can be understood as devices they are quite
differently so.
Through his account, Candea (2013) highlights that how we conceptualise a device
interacts with how we come to ‘know’ it. As Donna Haraway has put it, we are not simply
describing or reflecting what a device is, but ‘diffracting’, that is, interfering with it. If multiple
interferences are possible and productive of multiple differences then the question is: what
interferences do we choose? In some ways this is a point taken up in the next article where
Law and Singleton (2013) also engage with a field site and juxtapose two devices in their
ethnography of beef cattle farming practices. In some respects, their formulation provides
another way to think about Candea’s question concerning the differences between devices.
They explore a purposeful, patterned, teleological and ordered device, the Cattle Tracing
System (CTS) of the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS) and how it exists in relation to a
second, that of the ‘farming work’ of a particular farmer called Michael. For them, the
question is, how are the colonising and imperialist ambitions of the CTS resisted by the
subordinated practices of Michael?
They start by arguing that it is through a series of repetitive, recurring, materially
heterogeneous practices on the farm that the CTS is enacted. But rather than being stable, its
repetitions are malleable and variable, which they argue is what the CTS and any device is.
They then describe Michael’s farming work as a patterned craft of care that is less explicit
and preformatted and more fluid and unfolding, though like Candea they temper their
comparison to note that the CTS also enacts a version of fluidity. The two devices are two
versions and styles of ‘malleable repetition’ that they call rituals and refrains for holding
things steady (perhaps a useful term for thinking about Candea’s changing field sites).
Michael’s skilled craftwork is locally passed down and learned through daily situated
practices while the CTS is transmitted through disciplinary and generalised practices such as
universal prescriptions. Rather than drawing a sharp line between the two, Law and
Singleton (2013) describe the former less as permissive and the latter less tolerant of other
realities and practices.
What to make of this asymmetry? The CTS dream of control works by disconnecting
from that which does not fit (or disciplines it). But, in an interesting twist, they argue that
Michael also disconnects: for example, he sets aside the CTS during the hours that he
practices his craft. Keeping some things ‘outside’ (such as the CTS preference for artificial
insemination instead of bulls) they suggest constitutes a form of resistance against being
‘captured’, of creating a breathing space such that quite different practices can coexist. They
conclude by nuancing Stengers’ argument that other worlds are possible and observing that
many quietly permissive local devices create many more or less different realities alongside
colonising ones.
Lezaun et al. (2013) take us into laboratory-like spaces instead of ‘raw’ or ‘anti-lab’ field
sites to think about controlled experiments in the post-war period as demonstration devices
that create ‘pure’ realities through ‘provocative containment’. Perhaps like the purposeful
disconnections of the KMP, CTS and farming work, controlled experiments seek to create
bounded spaces. But by interrogating ‘provoking’ and ‘containing’ in albeit experimental
settings the authors open up broader questions about the ‘reality making’ of devices more
generally. Provocative containment is described as performative and intentional: it seeks to
‘trigger an effect, to produce, and to do so in a defiant manner’ by containing what is inside
the space of an experiment, a definition that certainly echoes the teleology of devices we
have suggested above. These effects are explored by drawing on examples such as Kurt
Lewin’s dramatisations of democratic and autocratic politics and Stanley Milgram’s
psychological experiments in obedience. Through these they identify five traits at work in
provocative containments: trauma, distillation, incitement, technology and expressionism.
While much criticised for being ‘artificial’ set-ups, the authors argue that experiments
powerfully reveal and make explicit how social realities are incited and enacted by devices.
They provocatively suggest that it ‘is the reality of society ‘‘out there’’, the realism of the
phenomena purported to exist ‘‘in the wild’’, that warrants skepticism’. Lewin’s
dramatisations, for example, challenged the ‘reality of the democracies people claimed
existed’ by ‘realising’ a democratic atmosphere experimentally. In this way, they echo
Sloterdijk’s techniques of making explicit the ‘atmospheric conditions’ enrolled in knowing
something, and suggest that ‘to see or to know something means actually to ‘‘do it’’’. What
devices ‘do’ is enact realities and more explicitly in the controlled experiment.
While not in a laboratory or controlled experiments, the devices explored by Harvey et
al. (2013) also seek to contain, format and stabilise arrangements through specific
technologies: the UK’s open government platform, Kyrgyzstan’s conflict maps and Peru’s
national system of public investment bureaucratic protocol. The authors compare how these
purposeful teleological arrangements anticipate moral failure and pursue certainty but in the
process generate unintended effects and affects. For one, while seeking a technical
settlement by establishing boundaries on what is included and made explicit in a device
(transparency), the devices displace rather than erase what is implicit, and by their very
make-up constantly push the boundaries of what is made explicit (which is the tyranny of
transparency). Devices, they say, are thus always and already partial, provisional and
destabilising.
But to pursue moral certainty their three transparency devices need witnesses and
they meet this need by calling forth and multiplying ‘active’ publics, which they argue are not
the same as, for example, the credentialed elites of Boyle’s seventeenth-century experiments
in pneumatics who were engaged to legitimise ‘matters of fact’. The publics of their
transparency devices are less reliable, more unstable and variable and thus a source of
uncertainty. While seemingly calling forth rational and calculative subjects, their devices are
generative of affective and uncertain subjects with a greater awareness of that which is not
yet explicit and that which is yet to be revealed. Formed in anticipation of moral failure and
called upon to identify what might happen such as corruption, wrong doing or inter-ethnic
conflict, they suggest that ‘contemporary transparency devices’ are ‘potentially generative of
hypervigilant, suspicious and doubtful witnessing subjects, neoliberal subjects who must
keep a watchful eye over the micro doings of the state’.
At the end of their analysis they introduce an interesting twist. While at first glance the
generation of suspicion and anxiety may appear to work against the objective of moral
certainty, they suggest that the generation of uncertainty can be understood as integral to
the workings and purposes of these authoritative devices. Uncertainty and hypervigilant and
doubtful subjects are perhaps effects and affects that affirm the necessity of these governing
devices, feed their perpetuation and call for more of the same. In these ways, the authors
complicate both the presumed purposes of devices but also their ostensible containment
and certainty.
Marres and Weltevrede (2013) turn to a differently configured and purposeful digital
device used in social research ScraperWiki used to extract data generated by online
platforms such as Google and Twitter. More generally, their device opens up questions about
the troubling distinction between social life and social research, and between the real-world
concerns of social actors and the epistemological ones of social scientists. They do this by
making the concerns of the former part of and constitutive of their object. While the data
generated by scrapers are typically problematised because they are not generated or
formatted by the researcher and introduce ‘alien’ assumptions, they turn these features into
a source of social data. In this way, they complicate what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ digital social
research by inviting other agents into their methods rather than attempting to clean or erase
their influence. If the anthropologist is open to definitions and formattings of the worlds of
his/her subjects then so too are these digital sociologists.
The authors complicate what ScraperWiki ‘is’ and ‘does’: rather than simply collecting
data, it extracts already ordered and ‘structured information’. But, ‘metaphorically speaking’,
it also involves a ‘distillation process’ that culls ‘formatted data from a relatively opaque,
under-defined ocean of available online materials’ (perhaps not too unlike the encounter
with a field site that presents a flood of heterogeneous data that researchers also distil). But
it is these very distillations that they suggest can become social data and objects of research
and thereby force the question of ‘how we establish the difference between researching the
medium and researching the social’. That is, repurposing data or devices designed for ‘other’
purposes (e.g., commercial) is a way to both do social research and to critically understand
how research is being socially and technically redistributed in more implicit ways by digital
technologies. Thinking of scrapers as devices draws attention to these entanglements
between objects and methods and the impossibility of making distinctions between the
instruments, methods and objects of digital social research, as has been argued in philosophy
and sociology of science and technology. So rather than problems, they turn features such as
the uneven temporalities and ‘real time’ character of some online data into a ‘virtue’ through
what they term ‘live social research’, which makes productive the formatted, dynamic
character of digital networked data.
Finally, in their article on devices in finance, Erturk et al. return us directly to the
question of power. Earlier we noted that what it is that devices do is not necessarily written
on the package, and we added that if they may be understood as patterned teleological
arrangements, then how we draw boundaries around them is an analytical and political
matter: that in some measure we discover the patterns that we are looking for. Erturk et al.
(2013) argue that the social studies of finance (SSF) have chosen to frame their analysis of
financial devices in a very particular and indeed narrow way by treating these as an
expression of the performativity of economic theory. No doubt this has its merits, but also it
means that almost everything not written on the package is simply excluded. Thus, they
argue that devices do not simply or perhaps even primarily format. More importantly, they
are used in strategic ways by powerful actors. Drawing, like Singleton and Law, on the
dictionary definition of devices, they observe that the latter are linked to desires and indeed
to dark desires. Their argument is thus that financial devices are marshalled, controlled and
deployed by those that are powerful with the strategic aim of creating flows of income. The
shift these authors make leads them to Deleuze and to the metaphor of the war machine. In
this way of thinking, devices turn from tools into opportunistic weapons that are being
deployed by financial nomads. Indeed actors such as hedge funds precisely fit Deleuze’s
analysis of the nomad. They are war machines that are unregulated, pivot around star actors,
operate by making unexpected and opportunistic strategic or perhaps better tactical moves,
and exist in an ambivalent relation with states, which they simultaneously serve and raid.
But how has this worked in the context of finance? The authors answer this by briefly
sketching conjunctural changes in the conditions of financial possibility (including the
deregulation of flows of international capital and the growth of capital in the form of pension
funds). Then they describe how this has led to chains of transactions that offer many
individual opportunities for profit. But, and as a part of the same nomadic logic, these chains
are opportunistically cobbled together, and lack any overall rationale. Neither, as we learned
in 2008, are they necessarily stable: there is always the possibility of catastrophic collapse. In
short, in finance, devices have become weapons within a war machine, and the tactics of
actors such as hedge funds are those of opportunistic bricolage. The consequence is that
there is no larger structure or rationality. Overall cohesion is of no concern at all to the
financial nomads.
In the end, then, these authors are warning us that a focus on devices is all very well,
but that the latter need to be placed in context, and that context takes us back to the
concerns of a critical social science. This is because, as we have just noted, it unsurprisingly
turns out that it is those who are powerful who are best able to manipulate a portfolio of
tools and turn these into weapons or war. It is those with power that have the capacity to do
so tactically and opportunistically. This is the reason why, five years on from the subprime
crisis, we are in a position where major reforms in finance still elude political grasp, while
levels in inequality in developed Western countries are progressively increasing as wages,
salaries and the provisions of the welfare state are all being squeezed for those who do not
belong to the elite.
To conclude, the papers in this special issue are diverse. But the focus on ‘the device’
reminds us that methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life.
Indeed, it reminds us that they have a double or even a triple social life. First, they are
shaped by the social. We know enough to know that the tools to hand are never innocent.
Second, they work to format social relations, for it is indeed clear that they operate in ways
that tend to enact particular structures or forms of organisation. But then, and third, they are
also used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic
and cultural advantage. How these three dynamics intersect with one another is a crucial
question. It is crucial substantively, but also counts as a profound theoretical puzzle. This is
because it takes us to a set of unresolved questions at the heart of social theory. The issue is
how to think well in the space defined by the intersection between the intuitions of: social
constructivism; the microphysics of the Foucauldian tradition with its successor projects such
as ANT; and the critical concern of radical social theory with institutionalised inequalities. If
we want to understand how devices work we will need to draw on all three traditions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful for the advice and input of the Editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy
and our contributors who responded to our initial provocation and through their diverse
articles enlarged our thinking on devices and the social life of methods. We wish to also
acknowledge our colleagues in and beyond CRESC for extended reading group and
workshop reflections on the character of devices. We would particularly like to thank:
Michelle Bastian, Francis Dodsworth, Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox, Adrian Mackenzie, Ruth
McNally, Andy Miles, Niamh Moore, Madeleine Reeves, Mike Savage, Alban Webb and Karel
Williams.

REFERENCES
CANDEA, M. (2013) ‘The Fieldsite as device’, Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 241257.
CRESC. (2009) An Alternative Report on Banking Reform, CRESC, Manchester.
ERTURK, I., LEAVER, A. & WILLIAMS, K. (2013)
‘(How) do devices matter in finance?’, Journal of Cultural
Economy, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 335351.
FOUCAULT, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin, London.
HARVEY, P., REEVES, M.
& RUPPERT, E. (2013) ‘Anticipating failure’, Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 6,
no. 3, pp. 293311.
LATOUR, B. (2001) ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the Social’, in The Social in Question. New Bearings
in History and the Social Sciences, ed P. Joyce, Routledge, London, pp. 117132. Available at:
http://www.ensmp.fr/latour/articles/article/082.html.
LAW, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Routledge, London.
LAW, J. (2011) ‘‘Collateral realities’’, in The Politics of Knowledge, eds F. Dom´ınguez Rubio & P.
Baert, Routledge, London, pp. 156178.
LAW, J., RUPPERT, E. & SAVAGE, M. (2011) The Double Social Life of Methods, Working Paper 95, CRESC,
Manchester. Available at: http://bit.ly/14Ruh3u
LEZAUN, J., MUNIESA, F. & VIKKELSØ, S. (2013) ‘Provocative containment and the drift of socialscientific
realism’, Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 277292.
MARRES, M. & WELTEVREDE, E. (2013) ‘Scraping the social?’, Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 6, no. 3,
pp. 312334.
M’CHAREK, A. (2010) ‘Fragile differences, relational effects: stories about the materiality of race and
sex’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 307322.
MERTON, R. K. (1957) ‘Manifest and latent functions’, in Social Theory and Social Structure, ed R. K.
Merton, Free Press, New York, pp. 6069.
MOL, A. (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, Routledge, London.
PERROW, C. (1999) Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies, 2nd edn, Princeton
University Press, Princeton and Chichester.
RUPPERT, E. (2007) Producing Population, Working Paper 37, CRESC, Manchester. Available at:
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/producing-population
SAVAGE, M. (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940: The Politics of Method, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
SINGLETON, V. & LAW, J. (2013) ‘Devices as rituals’, Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 6, no. 3, pp.
258276.
TETT, G. (2011) ‘Subtexts of the wedding script’, Financial Times, FT Weekend Magazine, 30 Apr.
WATERTON, C. & WYNNE, B. (1998) ‘Can focus groups access community views?’, in Developing Focus
Group Research: Politics, Theory and Practice, eds R. Barbour & J. Kitzinger, Sage, London,
pp. 127143.