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A fixation on 'scaling up' has captured current innovation discourses and, with it, political and economic life at large. Perhaps most visible in the rise of platform technologies, big data and concerns about a new era of monopolies, scalability thinking has also permeated public policy in the search for solutions to 'grand societal challenges', 'mission-oriented innovation' or transformations through experimental 'living labs'. In this paper, we explore this scalability zeitgeist as a key ordering logic of current initiatives in innovation and public policy. We are interested in how the explicit preoccupation with scalability reconfigures political and economic power by invading problem diagnoses and normative understandings of how society and social change function. The paper explores three empirical sites – platform technologies, living labs and experimental development economics – to analyze how scalability thinking is rationalized and operationalized. We suggest that social analysis of science and technology needs to come to terms with the 'politics of scaling' as a powerful corollary of the 'politics of technology', lest we accept the permanent absence from key sites where decisions about the future are made. We focus in on three constitutive elements of the politics of scaling: solutionism, experimentalism and future-oriented valuation. Our analysis seeks to expand our vocabulary for understanding and questioning current modes of innovation that increasingly value scaling as an end in itself, and to open up new spaces for alternative trajectories of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent work in STS has discussed various forms of ‘political experiments’. But why and how do experiments matter, and for whom? Answering these questions requires that one leave the locality of the experimental site and account for the construction of wider spaces wherein experiments matter. Using examples related to the public debate on, critique and government of nanotechnology in France, the article identifies three of these spaces. The first one is characterized by the replication of technologies of participation, the second by the conduct of radical critique, and the third by the constitution of objects of government. Overall, the description of these spaces helps describe the current (and incomplete) transformation of French democracy, as the public administration attempts to include new elements, such as ‘citizens as locals’ or ‘substances in a nanoparticulate state’, in the French polity. Thus, the study of political experiments proposed here offers analytical entry points for an examination of democratic ordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainability of biofuels has been the subject of heated debates in Europe. The 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) introduced criteria meant to define whether biofuels are sustainable. These criteria, relating to the level of greenhouse gas emissions and the types of land used to produce biofuels, are expected to be implemented through certification schemes associating private companies and public bodies (whether national or European). Using recent works in the sociology of markets, I consider these sustainability schemes as agencements, a lens for the study of the construction of a market in sustainable biofuels and for the analysis of European integration. I focus on the mass balance system, which, meant to track the circulation of biofuels qualified as sustainable, is a compromise, implemented at the price of pervasive uncertainties and difficulties. The European political and economic organisation is at stake in discussions related to the extent of the control exercised through the sustainability schemes by virtue of the mass balance system, and a politics of subsidiarity and a politics of harmonisation are at the heart of the making of a European market for sustainable biofuels. The description of the agencements organising European markets in sustainable biofuels points to the importance of coexistence as an economic and political operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]