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The coronavirus pandemic is witness to a great proliferation of two types of tests. The first type is testing – new medical diagnostic tests as well as epidemiological models that simulate and project the course of the virus. In the second type, actors, organizations, and institutions are being tested in this moment of social and political crisis. This essay analyzes the similarities and differences between these two major types of tests in order to understand their entanglements in the crisis. In the process, we find a great diversity of tests operating in multiple registers, themselves not clearly demarcated, often combining and sometimes conflating, for example, scientific and public discourse. The study opens by identifying three aspects of testing, drawn from the sociology of testing. First, tests are frequently proxies (or projections) that stand for something. Second, a test is a critical moment that stands out – whether because it is a moment deliberately separated out or because it is a puzzling or troublesome "situation" that disrupts the flow of social life. Third, when someone or something is put to the test, of interest is whether it stands up to the challenge. These insights serve as the building blocks for addressing three major issues – representation, selection, and accountability – regarding testing in the time of the coronavirus crisis. In this moment we see a new model of testing: from statistical calculation of risk in a population to algorithmic prediction about the riskiness of particular persons.

Recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging in which actors respond to uncertainty by diversifying assets, redefining and recombining resources. It is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified by more than one legitimating principle. Property transformation in postsocialist Hungary involves the decentralized reorganization of assets and the centralized management of liabilities. Together they blur the boundaries of public and private, the boundaries of enterprises, and the boundedness of justificatory principles. Enterprise-level field research, data on the ownership structure of Hungary's 220 largest enterprises and banks, and an examination of the government's recent debt consolidation programs suggest the emergence of a distinctively East European capitalism that will differ as much from West European capitalisms as do contemporary East Asian variants.

In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evaluate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move tests from the laboratory into social settings. The challenge that a new sociology of testing must address is that ubiquitous testing changes the relations between science, engineering and sociology: Engineering is today in the very stuff of where society happens. It is not that the tests of 21st Century engineering occur within a social context but that it is the very fabric of the social that is being put to the test. To understand how testing and the social relate today, we must investigate how testing operates on social life, through the modification of its settings. One way to clarify the difference is to say that the new forms of testing can be captured neither within the logic of the field test nor of the controlled experiment. Whereas tests once happened inside social environments, today's tests directly and deliberately modify the social environment.

This paper examines the emerging contours of a new organizational form, in which firms move beyond the cooperative pacts of alliances to a radicalized, aggressive co-optation of external assets. Taking our point of departure from the literature on the "networked" firm, we point to an alternative to the make, buy, or cooperate decision: in the Möbius form, firms co-opt resources, unsecured by any alliances, formal or informal. Some companies are brazen in their co-optation, leveraging external assets so thoroughly that they might well be considered a core part of the firm. Enabled by developments in computing technologies, such co-optation challenges traditional models of organizational identity. These fluid boundaries recall the Möbius topological model, which we take as the metaphor for this nascent organizational form. We chart this new behavior by discussing a range of firm activities, including the functions of marketing, research and development, and managerial decision-making, as they are replaced with assets co-opted from other firms in the private sector, government agencies, and lastly the firm's own users.

When policy issues involve complex technical questions, demonstrations are more likely to marshal charts, graphs, models, and simulations than to mobilize popular movements in the streets. This paper analyzes PowerPoint demonstrations, the most ubiquitous form of digital demonstrations. The first set of demonstrations is the PowerPoint presentations made in December 2002 by the seven finalist architectural teams in the Innovative Design competition for rebuilding the World Trade Center. The second case occurred some blocks away, several months later: Colin Powell's PowerPoint demonstration at the United Nations. The authors argue that Edward Tufte's denunciation of PowerPoint does not capture the cognitive style made possible by the affordances of this pervasive new technology. On the basis of our case materials, they identify several features of the elementary grammar of a rhetoric that exploits the medium's potential to manipulate text, sound, and image. The analysis further demonstrates the distinctive morphology of PowerPoint. Its digital character provides affordances 1) that allow heterogeneous materials to be seamlessly re-presented in a single format that 2) can morph easily from live demonstration to circulating digital documents that 3) can be utilized in counter-demonstrations. A careful examination of this widely used technology is critical for understanding public discourse in a democratic society.

Interactive technology is a key factor used to explain the recent growth and prominence of NGOs, who today are engaged in the transformation of national, international and transnational political space. Yet technology cannot explain NGOs' rise, for technology is but a context which afford opportunities. We ask what it is that allows NGOs to take advantage of new circumstances, and focus our discussion on the co-evolution of NGOs with interactive technology. Our approach is part of a growing body of social science research that seeks to overcome the artificial divide between "society" and "technology" by viewing the social as consisting of humans and non-humans (objects, things, artifacts). Viewing technology not as a tool but as part of a co-evolutionary process that shapes organizational forms and practices will help us understand why NGOs have, given the opportunities provided by the retrenchment of the welfare state and the end of the cold war, been able to assume a more powerful and controversial role as co-constituents of global transformation.

While we were writing our book, Postsocialist Pathways, during the mid- 1990s, a friend in Budapest told us about a board game he had played as a child during the socialist period. Prior to the Second World War, Hungarians had played Monopoly, which they knew as Kapitaly. But the competitive game of capitalism was banned by communist authorities, who substituted another board game, Gazda´lkodj Okosan! or "Economize Wisely." In this goulash communist version of political correctness the goal was to get a job, open a savings account, and acquire and furnish an apartment. Our friend was too young to have had a Kapitaly board, but his older cousins from another part of the country knew the banned game and taught him the basic rules. You did not need to be a nine-yearold dissident to see that Monopoly was the more exciting game. And so they turned over the socialist board game, drew out the Kapitaly playing field from Start to Boardwalk on the reverse side, and began to play Monopoly—using the cards and pieces from Economize Wisely. But with the rules only intermittently regulated by the older cousins, the bricolaged game developed its own dynamics, stimulated by the cards and pieces from the "other side." Why, for example, be satisfied with simple houses and hotels when you could have furniture as well? And under what configurations of play would a Prize of Socialist Labor be grounds for releasing you from or sending you to jail? The notion of playing capitalism with noncapitalist pieces strikes us as an apt metaphor for the postsocialist condition. The political upheavals of 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in Russia turned the world upside down. Assuming that they were "starting from scratch,"Western advisors from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and university-based institutes issued instructions for new "rules of the game." But the ruins of communism were not a tabula rasa, and so the new hybrid game was played with institutions cobbled together partly from remnants of the past that, by limiting some moves and facilitating other strategies, gave rise to a bricolage of multiple social logics. If from these coexisting and overlapping principles they are building a distinctively postsocialist capitalism, they share with all modern societies a common feature that the social fabric is woven with multiple, discrepant systems of value.

This study analyzes the restructuring of a national economy by identifying the career pathways of its enterprises. This analysis is conducted in a setting strategically chosen as a case of rapid and profound economic transformation: the post-socialist Hungarian economy between 1988-2000. The goal of this study is to chart the multiple pathways of property transformation. Property pathways are conceptualized as the patterned sequences of change that firms undergo 1) in the composition of their ownership structure and 2) in their position within network structures of ties to other enterprises. These career pathways are neither unidirectional nor plotted in advance. The landscape and topography of the socioeconomic field are given shape and repeatedly transformed by the interaction of the multiple strategies of firms attempting to survive in the face of variable political, institutional, and market uncertainties. These different types of uncertainties will have different temporalities, and the study explores whether and how they increase or diminish in various periods. The authors develop and test specific hypotheses about how enterprise pathways along the compositional and positional property dimensions are related to the shifting contexts of these types of uncertainty. The core dataset for this study includes the complete ownership histories of approximately 1,800 of the largest enterprises in Hungary for a twelve year period, starting with the collapse of communism in 1989, recording each change in a company's top 25 owners on a monthly basis. Monthly entries for each enterprise also include changes in top management, boards of directors, major lines of product activity, raising or lowering of capital, and location of establishments and branch offices, as well as the dates of founding, mergers, bankruptcy, etc. Data on revenues, number of employees, and operating profit will be compiled from annual balance sheets. These rich data make it possible to map the life cycles of the business groups that are formed by network ties among enterprises, identifying not only when they arise, merge, or dissipate, but also the changing shapes of their network properties. To identify patterns of change, the study draws on sequence analysis, a research tool that makes possible the study of historical processes in an eventful way similar to historiography while retaining social scientific abstraction. Whereas sequence analysis has given us a perspective on careers as historical processes but has not been applied to business organizations, network analysis has been applied to business organizations but has not been done historically. The methodological innovation at the heart of this study is to combine the tools of sequence analysis and network analysis to yield a sequence analysis of changing network positions.

Vom Verlagssystem des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts bis hin zu den Qualitätszirkeln der Gegenwart haben die Marktwirtschaften versdiiedene organisatorische Lösungen für das Problem der Verteilung und Entlohnung von Arbeit gekannt. Die Vielfalt solcher Arrangements ist nahezu unerschöpflich: Sie reichen vom selbständigen Sub- unternehmer in den Fabriken um die Jahrhundertwende über tayloristische Systeme der "wissenschaftlichen" Verteilung und Entlohnung von Handarbeit, die bürokra- tisierten Regeln hinsichtlich Aufstieg und Arbeitsentgeltung durch interne Arbeits- märkte, das japanische System der flexiblen Arbeitsneuverteilung, die unternehme- rischen Einheiten innerhalb des Unternehmens bei Hewlett-Packard bis hin zu der autonomen Gruppenarbeit in der skandinavischen Automobilindustrie, in der das Fließband abgeschafft wurde. Aber auch die zentral gelenkten Wirtschaftssysteme haben in den vergangenen siebzig Jahren verschiedene Organisationsformen der Verteilung und Entlohnung von Arbeit gekannt. Zu nennen wären hier beispiels- weise Trotzkys militarisierte Programme in der Zeit des Kriegskommunismus, die wiederholten Versuche zur Einführung des Taylorismus, die Stakhanovitenbewe- gung, die Zulassung des Wettbewerbs unter sozialistischen Brigaden, die zentral festgesetzten Lohngruppen und Lohnregelungen sowie das unlängst in den Land- wirtschaftskommunen Chinas eingeführte "System der familialen Verantwortlich- keit".