Routledge International Handbook of Failure

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 Mikołaj 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. Paweł 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 Fracasomanía

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