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Hammersley asserts that "radical" strands of ethnomethodology and constructionism in science and technology studies (STS) take an anti-representationalist approach which denies that "science produces representations referring to objects or processes that exist independently of it." In this 'Comment,' I argue that ethnomethodology is distinct from both constructionist and post-constructionist research programs in STS, and that Hammersley presents a binary choice between being for or against the general proposition that scientific representations correspond to independent realities. He suggests that STS studies should "suspend" the philosophical question of whether scientific representations correspond to their worldly referents. Perhaps this is good advice for proponents of STS who promote a "turn to ontology" or propose to do "empirical philosophy," but ethnomethodologists take a deflationary approach to the topics of philosophical inquiry.

The chapters incorporate into their narrative the major debates surrounding Hitler's ideas, behaviour and historical significance. Particular attention is paid to his experience as a soldier in 1914-18 and to the reasons why his original left-wing sympathies transmuted into Nazism. Arguments over the real character of Hitler's dictatorship are analysed and a measured assessment is offered on the disputed issues of how far Hitler initiated the Third Reich's domestic and foreign policies himself and to what extent he was controlled by events. His destructive leadership of wartime Germany is now a subject of close scrutiny among historians and the book's final chapters deal with this theme and offer a set of reflections on Hitler's relationship with the German people and his legacy to the German nation. Adapted from the source document.

This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel's contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of the production and coordination of 'methods' in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyday activities, Garfinkel and his students also investigated practices in the natural and social sciences that elude formal methodological prescriptions and reports. Garfinkel's work sometimes is acknowledged as a precursor to early ethnographies of scientific laboratories, but this essay argues that his conceptual and methodological innovations continue to have a pervasive, though often unacknowledged, place in science and technology studies and related fields.

This paper half-seriously considers a negative answer to the thematic question of whether science and technology studies (STS) `means business'. The question addresses whether or not STS research can be translated, applied, or otherwise made useful. It is easy enough to affirm that such research can be translated, or as I would prefer to say accommodated, to various local organizational environments, but this begs questions about just what is translated, for what purpose, and for whom. Is the resulting knowledge indicative of STS or something else? Problems associated with efforts to engage with institutions whose members have their own epistemic agendas and conceptions of what STS has to offer them, suggest that STS might aim for something other than the serious job of doing business, and that research in this field requires leisure from both the workaday world of the university and the organizational work that STS scholars study.

'Die Reflexivität ist ein bekanntes theoretisches und methodologisches Konzept in den Humanwissenschaften, welches dennoch in verwirrend unterschiedlicher Weise verwendet wird. Die Bedeutung von 'Reflexivität' und die Verdienste, die diesem Konzept zugeschrieben werden, stehen im Zusammenhang mit bestimmten theoretischen und methodologischen Überzeugungen. Der hier abgedruckte Aufsatz betrachtet verschiedene Versionen des Reflexivitätskonzepts und fokussiert kritisch den Umgang mit Reflexivität als Unterscheidungskennzeichen oder als Quelle methodologischen Vorteils. Obwohl Reflexivität oft mit radikalen Epistemologien verknüpft wird, betrachten häufig auch Sozialwissenschaftler mit eher konventionellem Hintergrund Reflexivität als methodologisches Werkzeug, als substantielle Eigenschaft sozialer Systeme oder als Quelle individueller Erleuchtung. Ebenso wie radikale Sozialwissenschaftler betonen gleichermaßen auch konventionelle Sozialwissenschaftler die Bedeutsamkeit, reflexiv zu sein, in der Gegenüberstellung zu: nicht reflexiv zu sein. Also sie teilen kein genaueres und stimmiges Verständnis davon, was 'reflexiv sein' bedeutet und nach sich zieht. Als eine Alternative zum reflexiven Sich-Selbst-Privilegieren schlage ich eine ethnomethodologische Konzeption vor, die Reflexivität als ein normales, unbedeutendes und unvermeidliches Kennzeichen von Handlungen betrachtet. Meine ethnomethodologische Konzeption favorisiert keinen bestimmten theoretischen oder methodologischen Standpunkt, der durch die Kontrastierung mit einem 'unreflexiven' Gegenstück privilegiert wäre. Die Konzeption hat kaum Wert als kritische Waffe oder Quelle epistemologischen Vorteils, was im gegenwärtigen Diskurskontext der Humanwissenschaften seine Vorteile haben kann, um Frieden und epistemische Demokratie zu fördern.' (Autorenreferat)