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Accepted Paper:
The abduction of Danish labour market policy: on the interdependency of knowing and acting; what pragmatism teaches us about the validity of our beliefs
Nina Holm Vohnsen
(Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
On the interdependency of knowing and acting; what pragmatism teaches us about the validity of our beliefs
Paper long abstract:
Danish government commissioners rely heavily on statistical material and generalized notions of the persons and societal constellations they aim to affect through employment policies. This paper argues that 'fixed beliefs' about the relevance and validity of certain kinds of knowledge significantly limit the way these commissioners know the world in the moments of crafting their policies and, further, that this reduces or stabilizes the scope of actions they might instigate.
Based on empirical examples from ethnographic research focusing on the realization of a policy addressing recipients of sickness benefits, this paper aims to demonstrate that a pragmatic analytical framework (especially C.S. Peirce and G.H. Mead) can not only help us explain the fixation of beliefs about relevance and validity, but furthermore offers a method for destabilizing such beliefs, thereby broadening the scope of knowing and acting through simple techniques of bringing together what was before separate; the technique of juxtaposition.
Design anthropology: intertwining different timelines, scales and movements
Session 1