Doing Things with Things

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.

Alan Costall is Professor of Ecological Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Ole Dreier is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Introduction, Alan Costall, Ole Dreier; Part I Intentionality and the Functionality of Things; Chapter 1 The Case of the Recalcitrant Prototype, Beth Preston; Chapter 2 Use Plans and Artefact Functions: An Intentionalist Approach to Artefacts and their Use, Pieter E. Vermaas, Wybo Houkes; Part II Things in the World of the Child; Chapter 3 Autism and Object Use: The Mutuality of the Social and Material in Children's Developing Understanding and Use of Everyday Objects, Emma Williams, Linda Kendell-Scott; Chapter 4 Object Use in Pretend Play: Symbolic or Functional?, Ágnes Szokolsky; Chapter 5 *The study was supported by Aarhus University, Denmark, the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and by Inge Lehmann's Scholarship of 1983., Kristine Jensen de López; Part III Transformation and Things; Chapter 6 The Cognitive Biographies of Things, David de Léon; Chapter 7 1With apologies to Oliver ., Hysse Birgitte Forchhammer; Chapter 8 1I would like to thank the editors of this volume and several authors, who have been very helpful with comments on this chapter, as well as Jeannette Pols, John Law and Lucy Suchman, who have commented on earlier versions of the chapter., Estrid Sørensen; Part IV Organisation and Things; Chapter 9 Working with Material Things: From Essentialism to Material-Semiotic Analysis of Sociotechnical Practice, Finn Olesen, Randi Markussen; Chapter 10 Words and Things: Discursive and Non-Discursive Ordering in a Networked Organisation, Steven D. Brown, David Middleton; Chapter 11 Learning to Do Things with Things: Apprenticeship in Bakery as Economy and Social Practice, Klaus Nielsen; Chapter 12 Urban Makings and the Formalisation of Informal Settlements, Gustavo Ribeiro;