This Handbook examines the study of failure in social sciences, its manifestations in the contemporary world, and the modalities of dealing with it - both in theory and in practice. It draws together a comprehensive approach to failing, and invisible forms of cancelling out and denial of future perspectives.
Unlike most Handbooks in the social sciences, this one is groundbreaking and meets two difficult goals: one is to provide a comprehensive assessment of the emergent field of failure studies, and the second, which is to use the idea of failure to cast new light on many central problems of the social sciences, such as contingency, accountability, and economization. This Handbook is a milestone which will be widely read by researchers in many fields.
Arjun Appadurai, Professor Emeritus of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, USA
In a comprehensive way, the Routledge International Handbook of Failure provides new insights from different perspectives on the important topic of failure. This handbook is of critical importance because it can help scholars and practitioners overcome a pervasive anti-failure bias that restricts our thinking and actions. I highly recommend this book.
Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Notre Dame, USA
This new book on failure is a welcome addition to this fascinating and important topic. I hope it meets with great success.
Gary Wickham, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Murdoch University, Australia
This handbook highlights what can only be described as a failure of imagination in the social sciences concerning the concept of failure itself. The Handbook's essays reframe our understanding of what the discourse of failure reveals and obscures. Far from being a self- evident concept-neutrally applied-the application of the pejorative, failure, can too often prevent us from recognizing and seizing meaningful opportunities for advance or experimentation.
Ilene Grabel, Distinguished University Professor, University of Denver, USA
Adriana Mica is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw where she leads the Failure Lab. Her research interests include failure, possibility, ignorance, projectivity, and contingency in policymaking
Mikolaj Pawlak is an associate professor at the Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialisation, University of Warsaw, where he leads the Chair of Sociology of Norms, Deviance and Social Control. His research interests cover new institutional theory, migration studies, and sociology of knowledge/ignorance.
Anna Horolets is an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, anthropology of tourism and migration, and leisure studies. She currently studies migrants' imaginaries of the good life.
Pawel Kubicki is an associate professor at the Warsaw School of Economics where he leads the Department of Social Policy. He specializes in public policy analysis, particularly in disability studies, migration studies, and social exclusion, being involved in projects aimed at developing equalizing opportunities for persons with disabilities.
Introduction
1. FAIL! Are We Headed Towards Critical Failure Studies?
PART 1: Critical Failure Studies in the Making
2. Failure in Intercultural Communication
3. Entrepreneurial Failure Contextualized: Sociocultural Approaches
4. Fear of Failure in Athletes: Fanning the Fire of Sport Desire or Burning Out?
5. Career Failure: Forms and Levels of Analysis from a Sociological Perspective
6. Sociology of Failures in Clinical Trials
7. From Varieties of Failure to Failure Judgments: The Sociology of Valuation and Failure Studies
PART 2: Failure Regimes and Power
8. Failed Identities: On the Processes and Meanings of Unformed Alternate Selves
9. The Study of Failures and the Problem of Contingency
10. Successful Failure
11. The Theatre of Failure: Social Media's Role in Demonstrating Mundane Disruption
12. Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime
13. Foreign Policy Failure: A Narrative Analysis
14. Valuing Plurality: Objectivist and Interpretivist Approaches to the Study of Mistakes and Failures in International Relations
PART 3: Restoring, Learning and Attributing Blame for Failure
15. Before Breakdown, After Repair: The Art of Maintenance
16. Cloud Backup and Restore: The Infrastructure of Digital Failure
17. Governance Failure, Metagovernance Failure, and the Pedagogy of Failure
18. Beyond Policy Accidents: Learning the Lessons of Policy Failures
19. Market Failures
20. Preventing Major Disasters: Success and Failure as Two Sides of the Same Coin
21. Blame Games: Stories of Crises, Causes, and Culprits
PART 4: Failure Trouble and Resistance in Neoliberalism
22. Counter-interpretations of Failure from Literature, Sociology and Social Philosophy
23. The Material Ecologies of Policy Failure: Ruptures of Bodies and of State
24. Financialization and Failure: Lessons from the Anxious University
25. Market Failures and Failed Marketization: Neoliberalism, Development and Poverty
26. Failing the States: The Fragility of the State-Failure Paradigm
27. Neoliberalism, Policy Failures, and the COVID-19 Crisis: Going Beyond Hirschman's Fracasomania
PART 5: Post-Failure or Reimagined Failure?
28. Experiments as Successful Failures
29. How Science Fails Successfully
30. Politics, Sociology, and the Inevitability of Failure
31. Cripistemologies of the Body: Knowing through Disability
32. Beyond Failure: Queer Theory's Fallibilities
33. Gravity Matters: A Meditation on Falling and Failing
34. Crashing to Earth: Redefining Failure in a Time of Precarity
Afterword
35. Discovery and Inquiry Pathways to Navigating the Routledge International Handbook of Failure