Scenarios Beyond Imagination: What Is Imaginable? and What Is Not?

Abstract

This open panel aims at jointly discussing recent advances from both economic sociology and STS regarding anticipation through scenario-planning and its confrontation to unforeseen events. Several policy areas, such as finance or environmental and health risks rely on scenarios to act on potentially disastrous consequences of socio-technical systems. Breakdown scenarios reduce uncertainty around potential outcomes of economic and governmental activities that are considered unacceptable and come at high political costs. What happens if such worst-case scenarios actually occur?

A first line of inquiry deals with decision making in the present according to possible future breakdown. Cases such as the 2008 Great Recession or the 2011 Fukushima accident show that although experts, scientists and practitioners work on worst-case scenarios, their real occurrence is often considered highly improbable or even excluded. How can we understand the elaboration and “imagination” of worst-case scenarios in face of promises of safe and stable futures? How do their advocates attempt to render their threat credible and shape action?

A second interrogation concerns the consequences of real-world breakdowns on anticipation devices. Rather than being considered as failures or generating far-reaching innovation, crises often do not profoundly question their use. For instance, the European “stress-tests” in both the financial and nuclear crises transformed real-world events into a “reality test” for scenario-planning and led to complement and improve scenarios. Their adjustment based on the integration of unexpected events in turn contributes to restoring confidence and regenerating promises of government and economic activities in the face of crises.

Empirical contributions in the following areas of research in STS or economic sociology are particularly welcome (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered): national and international politics, finance and economy, as well as health, food and agriculture, environment, transport, and (digital) technologies.

Chair

• Olivier Pilmis, CNRS - Centre de Sociologie des Organisations

Individual Presentations

• Envisioning the Unprecedented: Nuclear Emergency Response Technologies and the Politics of Anticipated (non-)Use - Sonja Schmid, Virginia Tech's National Capital Region Campus

• Excluding a French Fukushima: Accident Modeling as a Means of Regenerating Promises of Government in the Face of Crises - Valerie Arnhold, Sciences Po

• Seeing and Being Seen: How Stress Testing Banks Puts the State Itself on Trial - Julian Jürgenmeyer

• Resilience Governmentality: Toward a Genealogy of Systemic Risk Regulation - Onur Ozgode, Northwestern University

• The Temporal Order of Expectations: Short- and Long-Term Expectations around the Great Recession - Olivier Pilmis, CNRS - Centre de Sociologie des Organisations

Session Organizers

• Valerie Arnhold, Sciences Po

• Olivier Pilmis, CNRS - Centre de Sociologie des Organisations