For over forty years, presidents of the Summer School Association of Queen’s University wrote annually to teachers across Canada, encouraging them to attend summer courses for credit toward a bachelor of arts. In the 1920s, presidents’ messages associated attendance with societal progress and the professionalization of teaching. In the 1930s, such messages linked attendance with personal growth and career development. In the 1940s and 1950s, they linked attendance with having an enjoyable summer vacation. This article analyzes how and why these messages evolved and argues that the underlying structure of the messages remained consistent: they were means through which Queen’s Summer School Association presidents marked symbolic boundaries between more and less professional teachers. This article contributes to our understanding of the social history of teacher education by interpreting a unique primary data source to explore the participation of teachers themselves in the construction of symbolic boundaries marking professional status.

Examining the “world's largest cash-based social policy” through the lens of care reveals widely shared scalar imaginaries and the productivity of care in constituting scale. In standardizing the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao), officials, applicants and researchers in rural Sichuan cited both “too much” and “not enough” care at the scale of the family in recommending or rejecting state assistance. Different levels of organization (scale1) were not stable bases with specific sizes and qualities (scale2) that enabled or limited care. Dibao-related practices were evaluated as an appropriate (“filial piety”), insufficient (“individualism”) or excessive (“corruption”) amount of family care. Care became an indicator of kinship measurements and a marker of state boundaries. Thus, scale (in both meanings) was enacted in China, as elsewhere, through negotiations of needs and responsibilities, through evaluations of care practices and their outcomes. In this sense, care scales.

The article discusses practices of cooperation between metal detectorists and professional archaeologists in Germany by exploring the approach of the regional office for historic preservation (Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe) in Speyer (Rheinland-Pfalz, southwest Germany). Its model is based on open access to a permit for detecting in a certain area, combined with regular meetings in order to establish knowledge circulation between volunteer and professional spheres. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork and questionnaires, the research shows that the approach creates a symmetric coproduction of knowledge, recognizing the metal detectorists as volunteer researchers producing genuine knowledge. Several theoretical aspects of knowledge circulation are analyzed with regard to their relevance for practices of knowledge production. The enactment of the boundary between public and professionals is the result of boundary work actively performed. As a consequence, this boundary should rather be seen as a fluid, hybrid zone, conceptualized as a translation zone. The concept of boundary objects points to the importance of specific elements for enabling circulation of knowledge between different spheres. Various communities of practice and their shared practices, conventions, perceptions, et cetera, influence the relationship and knowledge circulation, and these should be taken into account in coproduction processes.

This article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches’ geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork’s wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds’ ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities.

Organization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma.

Although there is an impressive body of research on the U.S. Congress, there has been limited discussion about the central role race plays in the organization of this political institution. While some scholars have documented Congress’ racist past, less is known about the present significance of race in the federal legislature. Throughout the day, African Americans routinely nod to one another in the halls of the Capitol, and consider the Black nod as a common cultural gesture. However, data from over sixty in-depth interviews suggest there is an additional layer of meaning to the Black nod in Congress. From the microlevel encounters, I observed and examined, I interpret the nod as more than a gesture that occurs in a matter of seconds between colleagues or even among perfect strangers in the halls of Congress. The Black nod encompasses and is shaped by labor organized along racial lines, a history of racial subordination, and powerful perceptions of race in the post-Civil-Rights era on the meso-, and macrolevels. Using this interpretive foundation, this article will show how the nod is an adaptive strategy of Black staffers that renders them visible in an environment where they feel socially invisible. The nod becomes an external expression of their racialized professional identity. I argue that the congressional workplace is a raced political institution and that the microlevel encounters I observed delineate and reproduce its racial boundaries. This article represents perhaps the first sociological study of Congress and provides an unprecedented view into its inner workings and the social dimensions that organize workplace relationships.

Shortly after the death of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), the doyen of early twentieth century German para psychology, his former colleague in hypnotism and sexology Albert Moll (1862–1939) published a treatise on the psychology and pathology of parapsychologists, with Schrenck-Notzing serving as a prototype of a scientist suffering from an ‘occult complex’. Moll’s analysis concluded that parapsychologists vouching for the reality of supernormal phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and materialisations, suffered from a morbid will to believe, which paralysed their critical faculties and made them cover obvious mediumistic fraud. Using Moll’s treatment of Schrenck-Notzing as an historical case study of boundary disputes in science and medicine, this essay traces the career of Schrenck-Notzing as a researcher in hypnotism, sexology and parapsychology; discusses the relationship between Moll and Schrenck-Notzing; and problematises the pathologisation and defamation strategies of deviant epistemologies by authors such as Moll.

In July 1925, the psychiatrist Albert Moll appeared before the district court in Berlin-Schöneberg charged with having defamed the medium Maria Vollhardt (alias Rudloff) in his 1924 book Der Spiritismus [Spiritism]. Supported by some of Berlin’s most prominent occultists, the plaintiff – the medium’s husband – argued that Moll’s use of terms such as ‘trick’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘farce’ in reference to Vollhardt’s phenomena had been libellous. In the three-part trial that followed, however, Moll’s putative affront to the medium – of which he was eventually acquitted – was overshadowed, on the one hand, by a debate over the scientific status of parapsychology, and on the other, by the question of who – parapsychologists, occultists, psychiatrists or jurists – was entitled to claim epistemic authority over the occult. This paper will use the Rudloff–Moll trial as a means of examining Moll’s critique of occultism, not only as it stood in the mid-1920s, but also as it had developed since the 1880s. It will also provide insight into the views of Germany’s occultists and parapsychologists, who argued that their legitimate bid for scientific credibility was hindered by Dunkelmänner [obscurantists] such as Albert Moll.

This article considers the complex construction of randomized controlled trials that lies behind the rhetoric of the gold standard. Drawing on insights from Science and Technology Studies and empirical material, I argue that trials in the field of cardiovascular disease prevention are constituted as ‘research’ rather than ‘science’. In these examples, control emerges out of a dual concern with practices of purification and involvement of aspects of the world outside the experiment, as the designers of trials aspire to relevance as well as rigour. Such strategies of ‘contextualization’ mean that trials are more like alchemy than assay, proceeding by complex moves to transform ‘base’ matters rather than distilling elements of clinical practice.