The Dispositif

PART 2The Dispositive and ICS

Introduction to Part 2

Information and communication science (ICS) studies the materialized, institutionalized and operationalized dimensions of the dispositive concept in society. From this perspective, the dispositive is both a research topic and sensitive “reality”, as it has a material existence in society.

When researchers integrate the dispositive into a research issue, they use it either as a research topic or as a concept.

In order to better identify the specificity of research activities, phenomena or facts analyzed by researchers are referred to as research objects. The scientific object refers to the result of the researchers’ work:

“We could clarify the difference between research object and scientific object by saying that the research object is ‘problematized’: its theoretical analysis framework, the method and the field is known even though the research object itself is not, since the researcher does not yet have the knowledge (an explicative representation more or less conceptualized) which both answers this research issue and has been subject to forms of experiment (data analysis, observations, etc.). The research object is thus halfway between, on the one hand, actual objects belonging to the field of observation and, on the other hand, already existing or targeted explicative representations of the reality (which, in turn, are part of the scientific object)”¹ (Davallon, 2004, pp. 32–33).

When chapters in Part 2 summarize research ...