Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance

Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEconomy and society Vol. 41; no. 1; pp. 1 - 16
Main Author McGoey, Linsey
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Taylor & Francis Group 01.02.2012
Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis
Subjects
Ambiguity
Citizens
Consumers
Epistemology
Information
Knowledge
Political Power
Power
Resource management
Risk
Social Studies
Sociology
Sociology of ignorance
Sociology of knowledge
Sociology of knowledge and ethics
Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture
strategic unknowns
Uncertainty
Values
Environmental Policy
Gulf War
Illness
Science
International Organization
Strategy
Bureaucracy
Neo-liberalism
Financial crisis
Political Power
ambiguity
Value
sociology of ignorance
risk
strategic unknowns
uncertainty
Knowledge
Liberalism
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Summary:Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the importance of strategic unknowns resists the tendency to value knowledge over ignorance or to assume that the procurement of more knowledge is linked in an automatic or a linear fashion to the attainment of more social or political power. Refining and challenging the assumption that modern liberal societies inevitably thrive on the accumulation of information about the public personas, private psyches, consumer habits or political proclivities of citizens, the papers in the special issue explore how the cultivation of strategic unknowns remains a resource - perhaps the greatest resource - for those in a position of power and those subject to it.
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ISSN:0308-5147
1469-5766
DOI:10.1080/03085147.2011.637330