Routledge International Handbook of Failure

Introduction

1. FAIL! Are We Headed Towards Critical Failure Studies?

Adriana Mica, Mikołaj Pawlak, Anna Horolets, and Paweł Kubicki

PART 1: Critical Failure Studies in the Making

2. Failure in Intercultural Communication

Milene Mendes de Oliveira

3. Entrepreneurial Failure Contextualized: Sociocultural Approaches

Heli Helanummi-Cole and Rohini Jalan

4. Fear of Failure in Athletes: Fanning the Fire of Sport Desire or Burning Out?

Henrik Gustafsson, Paul Davis, and Louise Davis

5. Career Failure: Forms and Levels of Analysis from a Sociological Perspective

Julia Gruhlich

6. Sociology of Failures in Clinical Trials

Amélie Petit

7. From Varieties of Failure to Failure Judgments: The Sociology of Valuation and Failure Studies

Thorsten Peetz, Frank Meier, and Désirée Waibel

PART 2: Failure Regimes and Power

8. Failed Identities: On the Processes and Meanings of Unformed Alternate Selves

Susie Scott

9. The Study of Failures and the Problem of Contingency

Oliver Kessler

10. Successful Failure

Wolfgang Seibel

11. The Theatre of Failure: Social Media’s Role in Demonstrating Mundane Disruption

Jess Perriam

12. Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime

Liisa Kurunmäki, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller

13. Foreign Policy Failure: A Narrative Analysis

Kai Oppermann and Alexander Spencer

14. Valuing Plurality: Objectivist and Interpretivist Approaches to the Study of Mistakes and Failures in International Relations

Andreas Kruck

PART 3: Restoring, Learning and Attributing Blame for Failure

15. Before Breakdown, After Repair: The Art of Maintenance

Jérôme Denis and David Pontille

16. Cloud Backup and Restore: The Infrastructure of Digital Failure

A. R. E. Taylor

17. Governance Failure, Metagovernance Failure, and the Pedagogy of Failure

Bob Jessop

18. Beyond Policy Accidents: Learning the Lessons of Policy Failures

Michael Howlett

19. Market Failures

Christian Frankel

20. Preventing Major Disasters: Success and Failure as Two Sides of the Same Coin

Jan Hayes and Sarah Maslen

21. Blame Games: Stories of Crises, Causes, and Culprits

Sandra Resodihardjo

PART 4: Failure Trouble and Resistance in Neoliberalism

22. Counter-interpretations of Failure from Literature, Sociology and Social Philosophy

Jocelyn Pixley

23. The Material Ecologies of Policy Failure: Ruptures of Bodies and of State

Kelly Fagan Robinson and Timothy Carroll

24. Financialization and Failure: Lessons from the Anxious University

Max Haiven

25. Market Failures and Failed Marketization: Neoliberalism, Development and Poverty

Nicholas Bernards

26. Failing the States: The Fragility of the State-Failure Paradigm

Raza Saeed

27. Neoliberalism, Policy Failures, and the COVID-19 Crisis: Going Beyond Hirschman’s Fracasomanía

Tobias Franz

PART 5: Post-Failure or Reimagined Failure?

28. Experiments as Successful Failures

Matthias Gross

29. How Science Fails Successfully

Stuart Firestein

30. Politics, Sociology, and the "Inevitability" of Failure

Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas

31. Cripistemologies of the Body: Knowing through Disability

Susanne Hamscha

32. Beyond Failure: Queer Theory’s Fallibilities

Thomas Clément Mercier

33. Gravity Matters: A Meditation on Falling and Failing

Ann Cooper Albright

34. Crashing to Earth: Redefining Failure in a Time of Precarity

Janet O’Shea

Afterword

35. Discovery and Inquiry Pathways to Navigating the Routledge International Handbook of Failure

Gertrude J. Fraser and Claire Holman Thompson

Biography

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.

"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