This thesis develops an ecological perspective devoted to the question of what, if anything, it means to speak of music ‘itself’. As such it seeks to enrich and further develop music-centred perspectives in the sociology of music. To this end, the thesis uses and develops a sociology of mediations designed to specify empirically the constituents of localized, emergent and performed configurations of “music” within the ‘classical’ music world. An ethnographically informed and practice-driven case study of viola and viola playing is used as a means to gain insight into the avant-garde of viola playing today and to follow the ways in which different protagonists constitute viola aesthetics. Considering the viola’s identity historically, in terms of both reproduction and change (specifically, the instrument’s shift from a marginal status to a position nearer the centre within ‘classical’ music), the study addresses instrument materiality and technologies, sound playing techniques, as well as, more globally, viola identities in relation to the instrument’s sonic features, repertoire, psycho-cultural and affective associations and meaning making in interpretation and performance. It is also shown how musicians deal with and ‘erase’ ‘limitations’ formerly attributed to the viola and make the instrument ‘work’ (through technological calibration in collaboration with instrument-makers as well as playing techniques) and thus correspond the requirements of contemporary music performance. Aiming to be a useful resource for violists, this thesis traces change but also identifies potential constraints produced by the past history of the viola upon the ways the instrument is seen, used and explored. The data for this study was collected through audio/video-recorded interviews with eight widely recognized highly-skilled violists, video-recorded performance and observations of viola lessons, and documentary analysis. This thesis highlights the importance of intermediate mediations that, situated in-between score and performance, affect how music comes to sound when played. It also outlines a grounded theory of the affordances of couplings made between players and instruments, so as to develop a performative idiom that considers representations, discourses and social construction, but also materiality, bodies and minds, internalization processes, practices. The thesis concludes by suggesting that a ‘strong’ cultural and musical sociology requires a relational and transdiciplinary approach and that this approach in turn helps to articulate an eclectic and hybrid sociology of imbrications, one that challenges intra-disciplinary divides.

Cette thèse examine l’imagination des systèmes de mesure de la performance au sein de l’industrie pharmaceutique. Par une observation participante étendue dans une grande entreprise pharmaceutique et des entretiens dans cette industrie, les trois articles de cette thèse explorent les influences intra et extra-organisationnelles qui agissent sur la forme et les raisons des systèmes de rémunération que les sociétés pharmaceutiques utilisent pour leur force de vente. Le premier article considère que les systèmes comptables émergent d’un ensemble d’inscriptions dramatisées qui mettent en scène, encadrent et médiatisent l’interaction entre les différents acteurs, internes et externes à l’organisation, qui participent à la fabrication d’un algorithme de rémunération. Le deuxième article théorise de quelle manière moral imaginaries sont constitués en objets comptables et comment les instruments comptables agissent comme médiateur moral. Il présente les systèmes émergents de mesure de la performance en tant que dispositifs de calcul moral façonnés par les imaginaires moraux contrastés de concepteurs hétérogènes. Le troisième article se concentre sur la manière dont les systèmes de mesure de la performance émergent et se stabilisent dans le contexte des marchés, afin d'explorer les infrastructures comptables au niveau de l’industrie que permettent aux acteurs organisationnels de visualiser, rendre compte et agir sur le marché lorsque ce dernier est invisible à pour ses participants. Pour que les systèmes de mesure de la performance fonctionnent sur un marché, il est nécessaire d’avoir une collaboration au sein du secteur, des opacités construites et des processus de (de)commercialisation de l’identité des acteurs. / This thesis examines the field-level imagining of Performance Measurement Systems in the pharmaceutical sector. By means of an extended participant observation in a Big Pharma company and interviews in the pharmaceutical sector, the three articles of this thesis explore the intra- and extra-organizational influences that act upon the shape and rationales of the compensation systems pharmaceutical companies operate for their sales-force. The first article explores accounting systems as emerging from a set of dramatized inscriptions that stage, frame, and mediate interaction among the different actors, internal and external to the organization, that participate in the fabrication of a compensation algorithm. The second article theorizes in what way moral imaginaries are constituted into accounting objects, and how accounting acts as a moral mediator. It shows emergent performance measurement systems as moral calculating devices that are shaped by, and engage with, the contrasting moral imaginaries of heterogeneous designers. The third paper brings the concern with how performance measurement systems emerge and stabilize in the context of markets, to explore the field-level accounting infrastructures that enable organizational actors to visualize, account for, and act upon the market when the market is invisible to its participants. For performance measurement systems to work in a market, it is suggested, they require field-level collaboration, constructed opacities, and processes of marketization and de-marketization of actors’ identities.

This PhD seeks to explore the development of a bio-molecular (i.e., genomic) map as a sovereign resource in Mexico. The basic analytical thread of the dissertation is related to the circulation of genomic variability through the policy/legal and scientific social worlds that compose the Mexican medical-population genomics arena. It follows the construction of the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), the notion of genomic sovereignty, and the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP).The key argument for the construction of the INMEGEN relied in a nationalist policy framing, which considered the Mexican genome as a sovereign resource, coupling Mexican “uniqueness” to the very nature of genomic science. Nevertheless, the notion of genomic sovereignty was nothing similar to a paradigm, and was not based on shared visions of causality, since the very “nature” of the policy object —Mexican Genome— was, and still is, a disputed reality. It was through the rhetoric upon independence, emancipation and biopiracy: i.e. experiences of dispossession “in archaeology, botany or zoology” (IFS 2001: 25) that the novelty of population genomics became amenable to be understood as a sovereign matter. Therefore, the strategic reification of Mexicanhood fuelled the whole policy and the legal agenda of the INMEGEN as well, which permitted cooperation without consensus and opened the process of policy innovation. Conversely, scientists considered genomic sovereignty an unfounded exaggeration, but anyhow they cooperated and even created a new policy and scientific enterprise. Genomic sovereignty exemplifies the process of cooperation without consensus on its most extreme version .So, as the notion circulated and gradually became a law to protect Mexican genomic patrimony, the initial coalition of scientists, lawyers and policy makers disaggregated. Many of the original members of the coalition now think of genomic sovereignty as a strategy of the INMEGEN to monopolise genomic research in the country. This dissertation additionally explores the way in which the MGDP is constructed in mass media, in INMEGEN´s communication and in the laboratory practices. These different dimensions of the MGDP depict the difficulties that emerge between the probabilistic, relative and multiple constructions of population genomics and the rhetorical strategies to continually assert the existence of the unique “Mexican Genome”. I argue that the Mexican case study provides an entry point to what I and others (Benjamin 2009; Schwartz-Marin 2011) have identified as a postcolonial biopolitics in which the nation state is reasserted rather than diluted. However the relation between sovereignty, race and nation is not mediated by the biological purification of the nation (Agamben 1998; Foucault 2007), or the active participation of citizens looking to increase their vitality (Rose 2008, Rose & Rabinow 2006), but on an awareness of subalternity in the genomic arena and a collective desire to compete in the biomedical global economy.

Novelty is a widespread notion that has not been given commensurate critical attention. This research is an ethnographically-inclined exploration of practices surrounding the accomplishment of novelty in an institution for which novelty is a central notion: the patent system of the United Kingdom. The research is based on interviews with patent examiners at the UK patent office, interviews with patent attorneys at various legal firms, and documentary analysis of legislation and numerous legal judgments. The thesis brings to bear themes from Science and Technology Studies and ethnomethodology to assess the extent to which they can account for the practices surrounding novelty in the UK patent system. As a fundamental legal requirement for the patentability of inventions, novelty is a central part of the practices of patent composition, assessment and contestation. Rather than being a straightforward technical criterion, however, novelty is shown to be a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon emerging from interwoven legal, bureaucratic and individual practices. The local resolution of whether or not a given invention is new, and the cross-institutional coherence of novelty as a practicable notion, raise questions concerning ontology, accountability, scale and inconcludability, and provide an opportunity for empirically grounded engagement with these longstanding analytical concerns.

Comment penser la relation entre les cultures scientifiques contemporaines et l’usage grandissant de l’ordinateur dans la production des savoirs ? Cette thèse se propose de donner une réponse à telle question à partir de l’analyse historique et sociologique d’un domaine scientifique fondé par le Santa Fe Institute (SFI) dans les années 1980 aux États-Unis : les « sciences des systèmes complexes » (SSC). Rendues célèbres par des publications grand-public, les SSC se répandent au cours des années 1990 et 2000 en Europe et dans d’autres pays du monde. Ce travail propose une histoire de la fondation de ce domaine en se concentrant sur le SFI et sur le Réseau National des Systèmes Complexes français. Avec un regard sociologique ancré dans les Science & Technology Studies et dans le courant pragmatiste, elle pose ensuite des questions sur le statut socio-épistémique de ce domaine, sur les modalités de l’administration de la preuve dans des savoirs fondés sur la simulation numérique et enfin sur les engagements épistémiques tenus par les spécialistes des systèmes complexes. Le matériau empirique – composé d’environ 200 entretiens, plusieurs milliers de pages d’archives et quelques visites de laboratoire – nous amène non seulement à mieux connaître ce champ de recherche – dont le langage est très répandu aujourd’hui, mais peu étudié par les historiens et les sociologues ; il nous porte aussi à questionner trois opinions courantes dans la littérature humaniste à propos des sciences numériques. À savoir : 1) l’ordinateur produit des connaissances de plus en plus interdisciplinaires, 2) il donne vie à des savoirs de type nouveau qui nécessitent une toute autre épistémologie pour être pensés et 3) il fait inévitablement advenir des visions du monde néolibérales. Or, cette thèse déconstruit ces trois formes de déterminisme technologique concernant les effets de l’ordinateur sur les pratiques scientifiques, en montrant d’abord que, dans les sciences computationnelles, les rapports interdisciplinaires ne se font pas sans effort ni pacifiquement ou sur pied d’égalité ; ensuite que les chercheurs et les chercheuses des SSC mobilisent des formes d’administration de la preuve déjà mises au point dans d’autres disciplines ; et enfin que les engagements épistémiques des scientifiques peuvent prendre une forme proche de la vision (néo)libérale, mais aussi des formes qui s’en éloignent ou qui s’y opposent. / How to think the relationship between contemporary scientific cultures and the rising usage of computer in the production of knowledge ? This thesis offers to give an answer to such a question, by analyzing historically and sociologically a scientific domain founded by the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in the 1980s in the United States : the « complex systems sciences » (CSS). Become well-known thanks to popular books and articles, CSS have spread in Europe and in other countries of the world in the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. This work proposes a history of the foundation of this domain, by focussing on the SFI and on the French Complex Systems National Network. With a sociological take rooted into Science & Technology Studies and into pragmatism, it then asks some questions about the socio-epistemic status of such a domain, about the modalities of production of evidence as they are employed in the context of digital simulation and, finally, about the epistemic engagements hold by complexity specialists. Empirical material – composed by circa 200 interviews, several thousands archival pages and a small number of laboratory visits – allows us not only to improve knowledge about this field – whose language is very common today, but little studied by historians and sociologists ; it also brings us to question three current opinions in the human and social sciences literature regarding digital sciences. That is : 1) that the computer produces more and more interdisciplinary knowledge, 2) that it gives birth to a new type of knowledge which needs an entirely new epistemology to be well understood and 3) that it inevitably brings about neoliberal visions of the world. Now, this thesis deconstructs these three forms of technological determinism concerning the effects of computer on scientific practices, by showing firstly that, in digital sciences, the interdisciplinary collaborations are not made without any effort and in a symetrical and pacific way ; secondly, that CSS’ researchers mobilize a kind of evidence production techniques which are well known in other disciplines ; and, thirdly, that scientists’ epistemic engagements can take (neo)liberal forms, but also other forms that depart from neoliberalism or that stand against it.

Cyber attacks by domestic and foreign threat actors are increasing in frequency and sophistication. Cyber adversaries exploit a cybersecurity skill/knowledge gap and an open society, undermining the information security/privacy of citizens and businesses and eroding trust in governments, thus threatening social and political stability. The use of open digital hacking technologies in ethical hacking in higher education and within broader society raises ethical, technical, social, and political challenges for liberal democracies. Programs teaching ethical hacking in higher education are steadily growing but there is a concern that teaching students hacking skills increases crime risk to society by drawing students toward criminal acts. A cybersecurity skill gap undermines the security/viability of business and government institutions. The thesis presents an examination of opportunities and risks involved in using AI powered intelligence gathering/surveillance technologies in ethical hacking teaching practices in Canada. Taking a qualitative exploratory case study approach, technoethical inquiry theory (Bunge-Luppicini) and Weick’s sensemaking model were applied as a sociotechnical theory (STEI-KW) to explore ethical hacking teaching practices in two Canadian universities. In-depth interviews with ethical hacking university experts, industry practitioners, and policy experts, and a document review were conducted. Findings pointed to a skill/knowledge gap in ethical hacking literature regarding the meanings, ethics, values, skills/knowledge, roles and responsibilities, and practices of ethical hacking and ethical hackers which underlies an identity and legitimacy crisis for professional ethical hacking practitioners; and a Teaching vs Practice cybersecurity skill gap in ethical hacking curricula. Two main S&T innovation risk mitigation initiatives were explored: An OSINT Analyst cybersecurity role and associated body of knowledge foundation framework as an interdisciplinary research area, and a networked centre of excellence of ethical hacking communities of practice as a knowledge management and governance/policy innovation approach focusing on the systematization and standardization of an ethical hacking body of knowledge.