This is a strange, brilliant, infuriating book. Weick develops a theory of people and organizations as entities that make sense of their word through stories, and the kinds of dsyfunction that can happen when those stories no longer match reality. People only know what they're thinking once they say it, and honest and open communication is a key element of success.

I'll admit that as a social constructivist, this makes a lot of sense to me. I particularly like the way that Weick neatly skewers the canard of 'shared values' as implying 'collective values' when it more often tends to mean 'values distributed from management', and the call for drawing on as rich of pool of language as possible.

What makes this book infuriating is that I'm not quite sure who it's for. It's very abstract, and a manager interested in improving their organization would not find many useful tips. For researchers, it mostly points towards "do ethnography, be a participant." We make sense of the world through stories, but I'm not sure how, or which stories.

Science in Action is one of the most influential books in STS, and for good reason. Actor Network Theory as laid out here is a powerful description of how scientists make claims about reality, using technical rhetoric to shift claims between 'true' facts and 'falsified' artefacts. Latour moves smoothly from the level of the scientific paper, to researchers, labs, disciplines, and the immense network of technoscience that girdles and organizes the world. Rarely is a theory so useful at every scale.

For high theory, this is a relatively accessible book (relative being a relative term). I'd recommend it to everybody, if I thought they had the stomach for it, and if I thought they wouldn't use post-modern theory for evil.

Steven Shapin attempts a grand project to examine the role of moral virtue in science over 200 years of history. This book is deeply researched, unfortunately it is frequently boring and trivial. There are really 3 books contained within The Scientific Life, and none of them get quite the attention that they deserve.

The first book is about the transition from the calling of natural philosophy to the career of science over the 19th century to the second World War, and the question of whether or not scientists had any special prerogative to speak for Truth as compared to non-scientists. This is the most deeply researched part of the book, and I'd easily believe that Shapin read literally everything that anybody of note said about scientists during the period, but I also found it the most tedious. And for a person who's not an expert on the political conflicts of the period, the arguments about scientists seem disconnected and irrelevant.

The second book is about the growth of big science in post-WW2 America, in corporate labs and on Federally funded projects, and the conflict between return on investment and the freedom required for scientific inquiry. Here, Shapin cites many leading thinkers of the period, but he doesn't really delve into the specifics of how an emerging financial infrastructure of peer review grants and corporate management supports and/or stifled research.

The final and most interesting section of the book is about the scientist-as-entrepreneur. In this section, Shapin does anthropological research on the start-up culture, from both the scientific and investment side. While this is a fascinating and under-explored area in the scholarship, this section is the least analytically, and draws broad generalities about the need for 'passion' and 'drive' instead of novel insights.

If you're looking to source a quote from some famous figure out science in their time, it is almost certain to be in this book. If you want to know if science requires something above and beyond the ordinary, and what that might be, keep looking.

Atkinson attempts a balanced, considered account of supply-side economics, and why it is not effective policy. He offers a good synthesis of the core beliefs of supply-side economics, as it focuses on the micro-level incentives of individuals to act productively, and how it has allied itself with a libertarian, small-government ideology. Much of the book then concerns the impact of the Reagan revolution, and the lack of evidence for the success of these policies. Of course, since this book was published in 2006, it doesn't include anything on the financial crisis, but the analysis can easily be extended. Atkinson says he wants to replace the insults and invective of liberal critics with scholarly analysis, and he does (AFAIK) a good job of summarizing the scholarly literature. But on the balance, it's hard to look at supply-side doctrine and rhetoric without shouting, "You lie! You lying liars lie!"

The final section, on innovation economics, is far less satisfying. Personally, I'm with Atkinson in that neo-classical and Keynesian explanations of wealth and growth are fundamentally inadequate to describe the 21st century. But the innovation economics he offers is more a grab bag of interesting ideas than a coherent theory. What would it really mean to make Schumpeter's creative destruction the center of our economic policy?

Sheer gonzosity can make up for a lot of flaws. This book is exactly what it says on the back, strange characters and spiky technologies. Mostly, it reminds me of The Illuminatus Trilogy, but taking itself a little more seriously. Not great lit by any standard, but fairly fun.

You know what, I just love JG Ballard beyond any rhyme or reason. In his spare sentences and stoic-psychotic characters, I see a tiny simulacra of our technological civilization, as it teeters on the brink of some awful revelation. High-Rise takes place in an immense self-contained apartment complex, where the minor inconviences of a a poorly designed infrastructure collide with the anomie of 20th century professional life, resulting in a total social collapse. It's a sharp, savage, dystopic satire, and an example of Ballard at the peak of his abilities.

In this book, Collins and Pinch explore several scientific controversies, ranging from settled historical examples like the non-spontaneous generation of life in sterilized mediums, and various proofs of relativity, to modern examples of experimenter's regress in the detection of gravity waves, solar neutrinos, and cold fusion. They amply show that science is a human endeavor, and at the cutting edge it is the human qualities and foibles that matter. As an exploration of relatively non-political controversies, this would make a great introduction to the messiness of real science in an intro STS course (which is in fact where I read it). A deserved classic.

On the good side, more Laundry Files! On the downside, more Laundry Files. Bob Howard is back, and this time he's facing off against American Evangelists/Cthulhu Cultists who have very serious plans towards the End Times. But unlike the previous Laundry books, which took used Stross's deep knowledge of various arcana (bureaucratic IT, 20th century occultism, James Bond movies) to add depth to the high concept premise of the series, The Apocalypse Codex is just kinda... generic. It's not at all bad, (particularly compared to books where Stross is really rushed), but central Colorado is an endless series of suburban motels and mega-church complexes (note: this may be accurate...) rather than a coherent locale, and for insane cultists, the villains don't inspire much dread or revulsion, or even unfamiliarity. This might just be an example of Poe's Law, since to this liberal atheist, normal Evangelicals are already indistinguishable from Cthulhu Cultists, but either way, for a horror series un-horrifying villains are a fatal flaw.

Hopefully book 5 will have Bob returning to Merry England, and to an enemy that Stross is intimately familiar with.

This is the Real Deal. Pure uncut Bruce Sterling without any of those messy complications of plot or character or setting. The Chairman just sits down and tells you what he thinks The Future is going to look like. If you don't have the right constitution for it, you might OD and throw the book across the room with a cry of "What pretentious shit!" But if your mind is open and flexible (and you've already drunk the kool-aid), this book will rock your socks.

Sterling structures this book around the soliloquy of the Melancholy Jacques from As You Like It, the one that begins "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." And goes on to discuss the seven stages of life. He covers topics from basic human biology, to education, to gadgets, war, government, business, and finally the fate of the planet, all with the Sterling-esque eyeballs kicks. This is a great book for polemical passages, curt sentences, looping elliptical paragraphs which describe our Present Reality so well that you know instantly that there is no other way to see it.

Now, as a genre futurism tends not to age well. Tomorrow Now is the exception. The book was published in 2002, and while the "predictions" are for 50 years out, we're far enough along to do some preliminary analysis, and despite the hyperactive paranoia of the early millenium Sterling gets it right. The War on Terror was a bust, because fanatical cultists/drug dealing mobs are lousy at governing. Speaking of governing, the contemporary political conflict is between people who want to keep the networks open and flowing and people who want to grandstand, which is a more apt description of the 2012 Presidential Election than anything else I've seen. Technology is not about solving your problems, but about locking you into a relationship with a company, frequently an abusive relationship (hello Facebook!). Sterling's insights are based around a depiction of human nature as messy, complicated, uncertain, torn between transcendence and banality. Everything shiny inevitably is covered in smudges and dust.

This isn't a description of The Future As a Place to Go To, or a blueprint for how to build A Future to Live In. This book is a raft for sailing the vast and chaotic sea of the present. I'm proud to call Bruce Sterling my captain, even if he would deny any such role.

Tom Wolfe should probably tattoo "I'm a lover not a hater, baby" on the inside of his eyelids. The problem with being a hater is that it's just so much fun. In this book, Wolfe goes after two of the more hilariously misguided White Guilt efforts of the late 60s; the brief fling between the Black Panthers and New York's society elite, and various Community Development programs in San Francisco.

There's actually some decent journalism in here about conflicts between charismatic and bureaucratic styles of leadership, the romance of revolution and the hard work of hustling money from people who have and are willing to turn it over. Sure, it's a little racist, but at least Wolfe digs that it's all a game, that's there's a fundamental symmetry between New York society and SF Mission pimps. Unfortunately, this is buried under a lot of swipes at society wives for being useless and ornamental, which is kinda the point of society wives. At this point, a good 40 years removed from the subject matter, it's easy to see what parts of the 60s endured and which parts faded. The Black Panthers are far more interesting than Unfortunately, Wolfe treats it all with the same level of excited derision. Well, at least it's short and moderately sparky; Wolfe would have to hate a lot harder than he does here to be boring.