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"Since the 1990s, there has been an increasing trend in developing countries to shift from state driven approaches to Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). In order to ensure sustainability of resources, the need for creating and maintaining clear resource use boundaries has been emphasised, both theoretically and in practice. However, there has been less attention to the varied social consequences for involved villages (whose inhabitants can access resources within the new boundaries) and for excluded villages (whose inhabitants are prevented from accessing resources due to these boundaries). Drawing on a case study of three villages affected by the Joint Forest Management project in Andhra Pradesh, India, this article shows how resource use boundaries interact with social categories such as caste, gender and livelihood occupation in ways that facilitate asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits among local people. The article calls for more consultative processes in constituting new resources use boundaries and for flexible interventions to reconcile conflicts arising from boundary-making."

Throughout its history, science and technology studies (STS) have been inspired by continental philosophy in various guises. In this essay we argue that inspiration does not have to be one-way but that philosophy might likewise learn from STS. Engaging philosophy through STS enables us to develop the notion of empirical philosophy proposed by STS scholar Annemarie Mol (2002). Empirical philosophy takes seriously the ways in which actors deal in practice with what are usually considered philosophical concerns: what is good, what is right, what is true, and so on. Thus John Law and Annemarie Mol have argued that: Most everyday practices make use of, or try to create, scales to measure or contrast ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. This opens a space for an empirical philosophy. An ethnographic interest in practice can be combined with a philosophical concern with ‘the good’ to explore which ‘good/bad’ scale is being enacted, and how this is being done. (Law and Mol, 2002, p. 85)

Power, dominance, and hierarchy are prevalent analytical terms in social studies of health care. Power is often seen as residing in medical structures, institutions, discourses, or ideologies. While studies of medical power often draw on Michel Foucault, this understanding is quite different from his proposal to study in detail the "strategies, the networks, the mechanisms, all those techniques by which a decision is accepted" [Foucault, M. (1988). In Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-84 (pp. 96-109). New York: Routledge]. This suggestion turns power into a topic worth investigating in its own right rather than a basic analytical resource. It also suggests that technologies form an integral part of the networks and mechanisms, which produce and redistribute power in medical practice. The paper first engages critically with a number of recent discussions of technology and power in health care analysis. It then formulates an alternative conception of this relationship by drawing on Foucault and historian of science and technology Geoffrey C. Bowker's notions of infrastructural inversion and information mythology. Illustration is provided through a case study of a wireless nursing call system in a Canadian hospital.

In this paper, we discuss the challenges of altering computer systems that are increasingly characterized by high degrees of system configurability for use in complex organizational and technological work contexts. We suggest that configurable systems are often accompanied by additional system intermediaries, which in turn introduce new challenges for users' ability to adequately configure systems in practice.

The relationship between the supposedly small—the micro—and the supposedly large—the macro—has been a long-standing concern in social theory. However, although many attempts have been made to link these two seemingly disjoint dimensions, in the present paper I argue against such an endeavour. Instead, I outline a fractal approach to the study of space, society, and infrastructure. A fractal orientation requires a number of related conceptual reorientations. It has implications for thinking about scale and perspective, and (sociotechnical) relations, and for considering the role of the social theorist in analyzing such relations. I find empirical illustration in the case of the development of electronic patient records in Danish health care. The role of the social theorist is explored through a comparison of the political and normative stance enabled, respectively, by a critical social theory and a fractal social theory.

Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's fractal analyses, this article develops the notions of domain and scale making as a way of conceiving the Mekong uncommons. Juxtaposing the perspectives and activities of community forestry and ecotourism in Kratie Province with policy controversies concerning dam development on the Laos-Cambodia border, I depict each domain as an ontological test site that scales reality in its own distinctive way. Despite their incongruence, these scales gradually become interwoven due to the interactions of domains. These interactions make up the continuous actual becoming of Mekong realities. Rather than conforming to any general ontological schema, however, the outcome is the emergence of divergent, only partly commensurable, practical ontologies. Instead of adding up to a “whole” Mekong, what comes into view is the proliferation of the Mekong uncommons.