10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17577
The sociology of expectations has helped academics and policy analysts to understand how socio-technical imaginaries are not only hypothetical and “in the future”, but how they create realities in the present. They do so by shaping what gets funded, who gets hired, and even how people lead their lives as they consider some futures more likely than others. While this focus on the performative power of specific visions and expectations has been hugely important, there is another situation that has arguably been at least equally impactful on the present: the absence of (alternative) expectations of the future. It is the absence of specific imaginations of the future that people deem desirable that explains why, despite being fully aware of political and economic practices and arrangements that are detrimental for human and planetary health, we have not changed these arrangements.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17577
2
en
Barbara Prainsack
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
crisis
The Roots of Neglect: Towards a Sociology of Non-Imagination
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
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Lectures
2023-02-19
2023-06-30
2023-02-19
2023-10-30
13-34
TS
Barbara Prainsack
2022
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17577
13
University of Vienna
2038-3460
2
crisis
en
34
The Roots of Neglect: Towards a Sociology of Non-Imagination
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17577/16427
13
                                                                              Lecture
The Roots of Neglect: Towards a
Sociology of Non-Imagination

Barbara Prainsack
University of Vienna


     Abstract: The sociology of expectations has helped academics and policy
     analysts to understand how socio-technical imaginaries are not only hypo-
     thetical and “in the future”, but how they create realities in the present.
     They do so by shaping what gets funded, who gets hired, and even how peo-
     ple lead their lives as they consider some futures more likely than others.
     While this focus on the performative power of specific visions and expecta-
     tions has been hugely important, there is another situation that has arguably
     been at least equally impactful on the present: the absence of (alternative)
     expectations of the future. It is the absence of specific imaginations of the fu-
     ture that people deem desirable that explains why, despite being fully aware
     of political and economic practices and arrangements that are detrimental for
     human and planetary health, we have not changed these arrangements.

     Keywords: non-expectations; neoliberalism; strategic ignorance; complexi-
     ty; crisis.

     Submitted: November 11, 2022 – Accepted: December 5, 2022
     Corresponding author: Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna, Dept. of
     Political Science, Vienna, Austria. Email: barbara.prainsack@univie.ac.at



1. Introduction: The State We’re in
     It has become a truism to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed
the fault lines of our societies. This is also why, even at the very early stages of
the pandemic, some people were hesitant when politicians talked about the
way back to normal life. This sentiment was trenchantly expressed by an
anonymous graffiti artist in Hong Kong: “Normal was the problem in the
first place” (Wintour 2020; see also Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021).
     What exactly was the problem? I believe it was – and is – nothing less
than the way we organise our society, including our economy. It is harm-
ing people and destroying the planet. Racism, sexism, coloniality and oth-
!
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
13 (2) pp. 13-34 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2022
14                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


er forms of injustice and exploitation – of people, and of the environment
– are written into our social, political, and economic institutions. In many
world regions, people suffer (and often seek to flee from) climate change,
violent conflict, and sexualised violence. Social and economic inequalities
are increasing almost everywhere. Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020)
famously coined the term “deaths of despair” to refer to the phenomenon
that more and more people in the rich world no longer have any motiva-
tion to stay healthy and fit, or even alive; there is nothing for them to live
for. Young people are afraid that even if they manage to make a good liv-
ing and live as healthily as they can, they may not make it to old age as
climate change will end their lives prematurely.
    The reasons for this situation are manifold and have been analysed in
a broad body of literature within and beyond of academia in recent years.
At the heart of the problem lies what Hendrik Wagenaar calls a “mirage
of economic democracy” (Wagenaar, 2023). Because of the intrusion of
the corporate-financial domain and its values and practices in every
sphere of society as well as out private lives, Wagenaar argues, democratic
politics (and policy) have lost their power to shape the workings of socie-
ty. As Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 seminal book (Polanyi 2001
[1944]), although markets – understood as spaces for the exchange and
sale of goods – have existed almost as long as humans have, a “great
transformation” took place in the 19th century. Local and regional mar-
kets grew together into a large system that began to regulate itself. Mar-
kets became increasingly powerful. Gradually, even those things that had
previously been freely accessible and belonged to everyone, such as la-
bour or land nature, were transformed into market goods – often by force
of law. Those who worked as independent producers were turned into
wage labourers (e.g., Maddison 2008). Control over the production of
money was given to private banks, long before “debt-driven growth and
deregulated finance” became key elements of neoliberal economics (Bollier
and Conaty 2015; Pettifor 2017; Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021, Chapter 8).
While “the market” had previously been a part of society, it now began to
break away from it and become a sector of its own, obeying its own laws.
At some point, society no longer ruled the market economy, but the market
economy began to dominate all most other aspects of society. This process
has progressed so far that today that most of us can no longer imagine a
world without the primacy of economic thinking. At the same time, politics
creates laws that support the expansion of markets instead of containing
them. Neoliberalism, which is sometimes described as the pushing back of
the state, is much better captured as the use of government and governance
to expand the rationales and rules of markets – and to support the interests
of powerful market participants who have become quasi regulators.
    The result are societies in which social and economic inequalities con-
tinue to grow. Because “the market” (and “the economy” more broadly)
are treated as separate from society, as something that observes their own
Prainsack                                                                15

rules and should not be “interfered with”, we have become accustomed
to their destructive effects on the environment and the wellbeing of peo-
ple. The conceptual and categorical separation of “the economy” and the
rest of us has arguably made it possible that the same people who book a
“green” holiday in eco-sustainable accommodation fly around half of the
world to get there. That we have “ethical fashion” delivered to our homes
by a UPS driver in a truck without air condition in the searing heat – a
situation which made headlines in the summer of 2022, not because it was
an exceptional incident but because the company refused to do anything
about it even after one of their drivers died (Fox 11 Digital Team 2022).1
The same people who share stories of labour exploitation on social media,
continue to buy goods and services from the offending companies, and
continue to engage in the very same practices that caused the root of the
problem – here, climate change – in the first place. Framing this situation
as hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance of a comfortable, well-off middle
class is not very helpful – there are structural grounds for the discrepancy
between political ideals and everyday practice.
    Why is this the case? And why have we not changed the arrangements
that cause the problems that our societies are acutely dealing with? With
the COVID-19 pandemic still not behind us, and amidst wars and a very
tangible climate crisis, the flaws in the way we have organised our econo-
my, our political decision making, and our social order, is becoming pain-
fully visible – and tangible. It should not have taken the COVID-19 pan-
demic for us to realise that something is very wrong. We have been aware
of these issues, and often also know how they could be addressed. There
is no dearth of literature on the human causes of climate change, the det-
rimental and even deadly effects of austerity, and the political, economic,
and health-related outcomes of grave inequalities. Why have we not
something to change this situation?
    In the remainder of this article, I will attempt an explanation. I will
explore several possible rationales for why we, collectively, do not act. I
will conclude that a sociology of non-imagination that – like the way in
which the sociology of expectations has helped us do within its remit –
could help us understand the ways in which the absence of alternative vi-
sions and expectations creates facts on the ground.


2. Why We Don’t Act: Four Attempts at Explanation2
    There is one explanation for why we do not act that I will not discuss
in this section, despite its importance. It corresponds with a good part of
the body of critique of neoliberalism. In different variants and forms it
revolves around the argument that neoliberalism, by using institutions
and instruments of public governance to expand market interests, has
eroded the key function of governing, namely, to increase the welfare of
16                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


people. I strongly agree with this critique and owe much of my own
thinking to it. At the same time, I seek to go beyond it in the sense that I
am interested not only in how this has happened (which is explained very
well by Crouch 2011, for example; see also Gerstle 2018) but also in the
deeper question of why we, as members of our societies, have allowed to
let this happen. The explanations that I explore in this section are thus to
be seen as complementing the explanations building upon neoliberalism
critique, and not competing with it.

     2.1 “More Prisoners than Students”: Our Societies Are Too Old

    In his 2018 book on How Democracy Ends, the English historian and
political theorist David Runciman offers an answer to why, in so many
democracies shaken by corruption, perennial crisis, and worsening condi-
tions for workers and other groups, no political change is on the horizon.
Runciman exemplifies his argument with the case of Greece. Even before
the COVID-19 pandemic, austerity measures had led to cuts in public
budgets and services as well as income losses for many citizens, which in
turn had contributed to a decline in physical and mental health in the
population (e.g., Stylianidis and Souliotis 2019). Runciman is interested in
why there are no revolutions3 in democracies that struggle as much as
Greece does. Part of the reason, he argues, is that Greece – to stick with
this example – despite the hardships that its people have experienced in
recent decades, is a rich country compared to many other countries in the
world.4 Between 1968 and the financial crisis in 2008, the Greek economy
grew five-fold (Alogoskoufis 2021; see also Runciman 2018, 45). Greater
wealth is a disincentive for radical change for those who remember how it
used to be before things started to improve. In Runciman’s words, people
“think twice before tearing the whole thing down” (Runciman 2018, 45).
    But how about the younger people, those who do not remember what
things used to be like before the economy started to grow in the 1960s?
This, Runciman argues, is exactly the point: there are not so many who do
not remember. Greek people are old. In fact, they are one of the oldest
societies in the world, with a median age of over 45. Only Japan, Germa-
ny, Italy, and Hong Kong have a higher median age (WorldData, n.d.).
The youngest countries, Niger and Uganda, have a median age around
15. In Greece, there are more people in prison than studying at universi-
ty, Runciman notes. In such societies, high youth employment does not
fuel political protest simply because there are not so many young people
to rise up. Indeed, research shows that countries with large proportions
of young people – so-called “youth bulges” – are more likely to experi-
ence political violence (Urdal 2006).5 If political uprise is a young peo-
ple’s game, then societies such as Greece are simply too old to play it.
Today’s “battles are taking place between men and women in business
Prainsack                                                                             17

suits armed with spreadsheets” (Runciman 2018, 44) – and these battles
are not about what a new society should look like.
    To be clear, Runciman is not suggesting that the advanced median age
of Greek society – and that of most other societies in the Global North6,
in fact – is the only or even the main reason that is not radical change.
Next to the growth of wealth over the last decades, another important ar-
gument, according to Runciman, is that democracy has very little to
promise anymore. Not because there is anything wrong with democracy,
but because what it has to offer it has already delivered: it has given peo-
ple dignity and benefits (Runciman 2018, 235). In Runciman’s words,

    The battles to expand the franchise have been largely fought and won. The
    state bears the burden of the huge range of public services that it is expected
    to provide. Levels of debt, both public and private, are high. Taxes could be
    higher – they have been higher at periods over the past hundred years – but
    the popular appetite for paying more is very limited. The current populist
    backlash in the established democracies is happening in places that have
    been doing their best with democracy for a while. (Runciman 2018, 101).

    In summary, the first possible explanation for why we are not standing
up to change the way that our society is organised, and the way in which
our economic model is destroying people and the planet, is that we are,
collectively, too old, and too invested in how things are. Many of us have
grown into this system and lived in it for such a long time that we cannot
imagine anymore that things could be different. We are implicated in it.
But some of us do protest, you might think – and you would be right, of
course. But the problem is that this action does not change the way things
are. In the next section, I will argue that people’s actions to change the sta-
tus quo are sometimes not even seen.

  2.2 We Do Act, but It Cannot Be Seen through the Traditional
Lens of Participation

    Political scientists tend so see citizen participation only when it takes
place within the institutions of electoral democracy – such as when citi-
zens start a formal initiative pushing for a change in legislation, when they
turn up for a referendum, or cast a vote – or when they engage in political
or even violent protest. The reference point is, thus, always the formal in-
stitutions and processes of collective will formation; citizens participate
by being active within these institutions, or against them. What political
science, and also mainstream policy analysis, does not see is when citizens
engage outside of these formal institutional landscapes. For example,
when citizens create solutions to problems of missing or defective social
care (Wagenaar 2019), when they produce their own green energy, or
when they change the way in which goods and services are traded from
18                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


commercial profit-driven modes to modes that foreground the wellbeing
of people and the planet.
    Innovation studies have found that what they call “household innova-
tion” – that is, “the dedication of household resources to creating a prod-
uct or process that will generate a service flow in the future” (Sichel and
Von Hippel 2021, 639) contributes much more to the economy than
commonly assumed – because it is largely invisible to analysts (Sichel and
Von Hippel 2021). What Sichel and Von Hippel conclude for technolog-
ical innovation seems to apply also to other types of innovation – such as
the care cooperatives and other social enterprises in the Netherlands that
Wagenaar (2019) writes about. One big advantages of such citizen-
initiated and citizen-led organisations is that they have links to the com-
munities they are serving, instead of being implemented top down. They
respond to the specific characteristics and problems of the community,
instead of representing a standardised, anonymous answer to a problem
that other communities may have. Despite their significant innovative po-
tential – e.g., by establishing new modes of service provision, by creating
local non-profit barter economies, or by challenging the normative con-
ceptions of the issues that they set to solve (see Wagenaar 2019, 310),
these social enterprises are often not seen – neither by policy makers nor
journalists nor most academics. Besides the limitations of the theoretical
lenses of scholars and the pragmatic and ideological ones of policy makers,
there may be a deeper, structural reason for this, which I will turn to next.

     2.3 Hegemony and Complexity

    In our 2021 book The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better
World, Hendrik Wagenaar and I attribute our collective inability (and not
only unwillingness) to change the status quo to two main predicaments:
complexity and hegemony. Talking about complex systems is equivalent
to talking about the intrinsic structure of the world we live in. It is impos-
sible to wish complexity away – it is a characteristic of both social and
material reality. It comes from the interactions between the system’s vari-
ous components, not only from the actions of individual components.
This makes it so hard to understand complexity, and impossible to pre-
dict it. This means that even if we want to act on a specific problem, if we
have analysed why it needs addressing and how we want to address it,
complexity can come in the way. In public policy, this phenomenon is
known as the “law of unintended consequences”: policy solutions, despite
being well intended and designed well on the surface, can be ineffective
or even make problems worse instead of alleviating them (see Sterman
2002) – because the world talks back. Within complex systems such as
the world we live in, when we intervene on one specific problem the re-
percussions of that intervention can be felt in many or even all other
Prainsack                                                                     19

fields. Although we are aware of the individual components of the issue,
we find it difficult to understand how they work together:

    Policy resistance arises from the mismatch between the dynamic complex-
    ity of the systems we have created and our cognitive capacity to under-
    stand that complexity (Sterman 2002, 5).

    This situation can be avoided only if policy makers try to harness
complexity, rather than denying or resisting it (e.g., Wagenaar 2007).
Recognising complexity is not the same as declaring something to be
complicated. An internal combustion engine, for example, is complicated:
it contains many parts which need to interact in precise and predictable
ways with all other parts. A small group of friends, however, can form a
complex system; it is often impossible to predict what they will do. Emer-
gent outcomes, to use the terminology of complexity theory, are the re-
sults of the group members’ interactions and actions. Emergence signifies
that the features of the parts cannot fully explain the whole. This contra-
dicts traditional policymaking, which tends to use the characteristics of
individual components as our leverage points for group intervention (see
also Wagenaar 2007). More often than not, policy makers who do not
acknowledge and harness complexity attribute the failure of their policies
to individual behaviour. Rather than gaining a more comprehensive un-
derstanding of the structural roots of these behaviours, they blame cli-
mate-destructive practices, for example, to individual “choices” and try to
persuade or nudge people to change these.
    Hegemony, which we describe as imaginative captivity, is the second
reason that we have not yet acted on the state of the globe (Wagenaar and
Prainsack 2021). Hegemony renders us unable to look beyond our imme-
diate, moral, and practical concerns. In a world that makes sense to us,
we live, work, breathe, and “know our way”. Because we have been so-
cialised into specific systems of practices and judgments, the features of
these systems have become self-evident to us. They comprise specific
methods of appreciating, seeing, and acting. Their shape and meaning are
built into the very structure of our language.
    Hegemony serves as the reference point for how we are in the world.
For instance, when we constantly hear experts, politicians, and news an-
chors use the word “economy”, we assume that there is an entity, distinct
from the rest of society and in opposition to the natural environment, that
is run by professionals (business managers, economists, the financial
press, central banks, and so forth), operates according to its own rules,
and that its smooth operation somehow ensures everyone’s well-being.
The reporting of statistics such as fluctuations in the gross domestic
product, the number of unemployed people, the rate of inflation, and
other metrics confirms that depiction day in and day out (see also Maz-
zucato 2018). We assume the existence of the economy, and even when
20                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


we are critical of certain aspects of it (such as large inequalities in wealth,
or its contribution to global warming), it does not occur to us to question
the category and the tacit assumptions of its functioning itself. We do not
notice that it is a self-referential system that reinforces itself by the very
metrics that it uses. In this manner, hegemony concerns the very intelligi-
bility of our world, the way we determine what can be judged true or false
in the first place. The “economy”, as discussed at the beginning of this
paper, as a separate realm, performing to its own laws, to be managed by
people with specialised knowledge, is the tacit background of our life-
world, somewhat like a landscape or cityscape. We live in it, but we do
not see it (Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021).
    Hegemony also has a firm hold also over our ethical considerations, as
it entails a particular moral order. It confers intellectual authority to des-
ignated experts and, conversely, withholds it from others, such as “ordi-
nary” citizens or marginalised groups.7 Think of the awe with which the
pronouncements of Central Bank presidents or captains of industry are
received by the media, while those drawing attention to human-made
climate change are dismissed as hippies or eco-warriors. Closely related to
this is how hegemony also shapes moral sensibilities. It instructs us how
to feel. In our 2021 book Hendrik Wagenaar and I took a bet that people
looking back at the 2020s from a few decades in the future will be
shocked when they read how governments demonised welfare recipients,
condemned hundreds of thousands to a precarious existence by abolish-
ing worker protections and fighting unions, or destroyed precious public
sector institutions by handing them over to private corporations, or how
corporations condemned hundreds of thousands to a precarious existence
by abolishing worker protections and fighting unions. They may experi-
ence the same kind of moral outrage that many of us are experiencing
right now at historical accounts of blatant sexism and racism when they
read or see how we condoned an economic system that forced retirees out
of their homes and into a precarious nomadic life (Bruder 2017). In our
book we imagined how in the future, historians will look back at today’s
debates where demands for workers’ rights or state-regulated universal
health are met with angry cries of “socialism”. We believe – and hope –
that there will be a world where the moral inertia towards these destruc-
tive aspects of our economic and political order will be met with aston-
ishment. That we do not perceive great outrage at these things happening
in front of our eyes today – this is hegemony at work.
    What makes it difficult to break free from hegemony is that we cannot
merely think ourselves out of it. Hegemony, understood as imaginative
captivity, is anchored in our personal, social, economic, and political
practices. As we argue in our book,

     the world is self-evident to us because it rests on a bundle of practices, in-
     to which we have been thoroughly socialised and which are held in place
Prainsack                                                                            21

    by institutions, beliefs, understandings, ideologies, and identities. This is
    where hegemony and complexity meet. Try to reform one aspect of this
    dense structure (for example, introduce sustainable production methods)
    and you run into another set of institutions and practices that push back
    (the international finance system, or the large network of carbon subsi-
    dies, for example). Resistance to change is not so much a psychological
    quality, as Elisabeth Shove (2010) pointed out, but the effect of being
    caught in a web of practices. When the solutions to improve a given situa-
    tion are framed in the same terms as the very situation you seek to change,
    you know you are in a hegemonic situation. Or, reversely, when some rea-
    sonable proposals are met with incredulity, dismissed as impractical or not
    worthy of serious discussion, this is another sure sign that you find yourself
    caught up in a hegemonic situation. (Wagenaar and Prainsack 2021, 18)

    To give an example: what do you think when you hear that, to save
money, governments need to spend? Most of us believe this statement to
be false because we have been told for years and decades that it is. That
this statement is false is part of the hegemonic narrative we grew up with.
But this statement is correct: to save, governments need to spend. Invest-
ing in public services and infrastructures creates value and saves money
for solving the problems that austerity created later on.8 A state does not
save money when it leaves people to their own devices. Unlike a compa-
ny, a state cannot – and obviously should not – lay off people. People liv-
ing in long-term unemployment or abject poverty are not only experienc-
ing great hardship, but they are also costly for the state. If ethical argu-
ments are not sufficient to make the case for government spending, eco-
nomic arguments should: having large numbers of people living in pov-
erty is expensive. It may be cheap in the short run, but adds up later. A
string of research on the social costs of austerity programmes testify to
this (e.g., Karger 2014; Ortiz et al. 2015). Despite all these facts, most of us
believe the statement that states need to spend in order to save to be false.
    Taken together, hegemony and complexity go some way to explain
why we, collectively, have not managed to change the problematic state of
the world so far. Many are trying to break free from the current order of
things; they protest oppression, injustice, dictatorships, and the exploita-
tion of people and the environment. But usually, their actions remain
without a lasting effect. Sometimes the reason for this is that those who
stand to benefit from the status quo actively work to thwart attempts to
change it – think of voter suppression, the prohibition or sabotage of un-
ions, or the simple lobbying of governments for the interests of the car-
bon industry or other big business. Very often, however, their protest is
not only dismissed by powerful elites but also by their fellow citizens –
those people who suffer from the precarisation of labour, climate change,
and illiberalism as much as they do. That these fellow citizens do not join
the protest, that so many of us believe it is better to stick with the “devil
we know” rather than leap into the unknown, and that so many feel that
22                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


it would be too messy to uproot a system that they got used to – this the
result of the joint effect of hegemony and complexity.
    And there is yet another, and at least equally important, problem that
helps to explain why we do not act.

  2.4 We Cannot Envisage a Future for Which Our Current
Action Would Be Necessary

    In 2021, social theorist Jana Bacevic wrote a text titled “Why we don’t
act” (2021), referring to the failure of so many governments all around
the world to take effective action to protect people from COVID-19. She
drew an analogy to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, when there was suffi-
cient knowledge for people to have been able to predict what would hap-
pen, yet they were still taken by surprise. Bacevic explained people’s iner-
tia in the following way: “It was rather that they could not imagine a fu-
ture in which their present action was required” (Bacevic 2021). Bacevic
said something of key importance here. Even if we know what is wrong
with the status quo, even if we know how we could address specific prob-
lems, we lack a bigger narrative of why we should act. We lack a vision of
what our societies would look like in a better world. Without such a vi-
sion, given how difficult it is to change our existing political and econom-
ic order, it is not worth bothering.
    The lack of such a vision, and a narrative of how we get there, also
helps to explain one of the seeming paradoxes of democracy. In his most
recent book, Thomas Piketty (2022) showed that although the world has
become more equal in the last 100 years, not much has changed for the 50
percent of people who held virtually no share of the global wealth then,
and who still hold hardly any wealth at all today. For those who live in
democracies, why have they not voted out the political elites who are re-
sponsible for these persisting inequalities (which in many democracies are
actually growing)? For those who live in undemocratic, autocratic re-
gimes, why has there been no revolution? Piketty does not answer this
question in his book. I believe that Bacevic does, at least in part. It is be-
cause of the power of stories that convey that if the economy does well,
everyone will benefit. That high income or corporate taxes stifle innova-
tion. That the state must save money by not spending it on people. And
that the economy is a system separate from the rest of society that one
must have expert knowledge of in order to criticise it – not to mention
“interfere” with it. These stories are articulated over and over by almost all
societal actors – and believed, and retold, by many of the people who suffer
from it. They are hegemonic in the sense we described above. More often
than not, information about the fate of disadvantaged people does not be-
come part of the main narrative – because it does not fit. It has no anchor
point. To give a concrete example: if income is framed as payment for la-
bour, then there is no conceptual space for people to receive an income for
Prainsack                                                                        23

anything else than labour. Not only does this make it impossible to con-
ceive of income that people may “deserve” if they do not work for it – such
as an unconditional basic income – but it also moves out of collective sight
a huge source of income of the wealthy, namely income from capital.
    The fact that the suffering of many people has no conceptual frame,
no anchor point, represents an instance of epistemic injustice, which Mi-
randa Fricker (2007) famously defined as injustice experienced by people
in their capacity as knowers. According to Fricker, epistemic injustice
typically appears in one (or both) of two forms. The first is testimonial
injustice, when the knowledge of a person is dismissed due to prejudice
(because she is a poor person, or “only” a patient and not a doctor). The
second form, hermeneutical injustice, takes place when people have no
reference point to even conceptualise or articulate their disadvantage.
Fricker’s own example is sexual harassment experienced by a person at a
time and place where there is no societal conception of this phenomenon.
The person may feel hurt or even traumatised without being able to artic-
ulate what is wrong. This, I argue, is happening to the majority of people
in many countries at the moment, who are living in poverty or worrying
about their livelihoods while a small stratum of people is becoming rich-
er. Many of them feel that there is something wrong with this situation,
but they have no conceptual anchor point to articulate how it is wrong,
and that – and how – it could and should be different.
    Ruha Benjamin (2019, 162) argued that “[c]alls for abolition are never
simply about bringing harmful systems to an end, but also about envision-
ing new ones”. The same is true for our narratives about the increasing pow-
er of tech corporations and other multinational businesses; our narratives fo-
cus on the obscene wealth and power that they are accumulating, and not on
the harm that this does – or how things could be different. Referring to the
surveillance studies community, Daniel Susser (2022, 297-298) argued that:

    [u]nless we introduce competing visions of a good technological future,
    the most we can hope for […] is to realize Silicon Valley’s vision – minus
    some of the harm.

    We need a vision of the future that integrates all fields of policy mak-
ing, and all fields of societal practice, of what a better future could look
like. If we had a narrative that focused on why so many people in most
countries of the world are still struggling, instead of a narrative that focuses
on progress and increasing wealth, there would be much more pressure on
all of us to act. As Bacevic argues, it would need to be a story about what a
future should look like for which it is worth acting upon the present.
24                                                              Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


3. Towards a Sociology of Non-Imagination
    The sociology of expectations has been an important and fruitful field
of academic and policy-relevant exploration and insight. Despite its focus
on technological innovation, its core tenet that expectations are not merely
feelings or thoughts but instead “an intensely future oriented business with
an emphasis on the creation of new opportunities and capabilities” (Borup
et al. 2006, 285) is relevant far beyond the field of science and technology.
It has shown, as Kornelia Kondrad and Knud Böhle (2019, 102) put it, how:

     [c]collective expectations and imaginaries, their explicit claims and im-
     plied framings, prestructure which developments are considered relevant
     and urgent, possible or inevitable,

in fields as diverse as biotechnology, healthcare, and green technologies.
    I argue that, in addition to the sociology of expectations, we need a
sociology of non-expectations – or, more precisely, of non-imagination.9
As Susie Scott (2018) pointed out, understanding deliberate inaction is
not the same as making sense of other, non deliberate forms of non-
doing. Analysing political struggles to suppress actions to abolish racist or
sexist policies, for example, is not the same as understanding instances
where racism or sexism are not even seen as a problem, and no alternative
is thus imagined. In Scott’s words, we need to attend not only to “‘acts of
commission’ (doing nothing) [but also to] more passive ‘acts of omission’
(not-doing/not-being something)” (Scott 2018, 4). Such as sociology of
non-expectations (or a sociology of nothing, as Scott would call it), is not
merely of academic importance. The absence of visions about what an al-
ternative, better, future should look like creates facts on the ground. It
makes us accept the status quo, or the supposedly “natural” course of
things, as a given, and it makes us put up with its negative effects. In the
worst case, it naturalises specific distributions of power and agency, and
suggests that these are beyond our control.
    There are several concepts and bodies of work that could underpin
such a sociology of non-imagination. An obvious one is a form of soft
power that political scientist Peter Digeser called the Second Face of
Power (Digeser 1992; see also Dahl 1957, 202-203). The First Face of
Power, following Digeser, is the one that most people have in mind when
they think of power. It includes an open conflict and crude domination,
sometimes even brute force. It materialises when an actor – a person, an
organisation, or a state – makes another do something that the latter does
not want to do, either by use of force or direct pressure. The Second Face
of Power, in contrast, refers to situations in which an actor prevents
somebody else from doing what they want to. The recognition of this less
openly visible dimension of power is largely owed to the work of Peter
Prainsack                                                                          25

Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz who, in a landmark article in the early
1960s, drew the attention of political analysts to:

    instances of power where actors are not constituted as parties to a conflict
    and/or issues are not defined as contentious (c.f. Bilgin and Elis 2008, 9;
    see Bachrach and Baratz 1962; 1963).

    Analysts of the Second Face of Power look at decisions that were not
made, or processes that resulted in certain items never making it onto
agendas. As such, the Second Face of Power is closely related to Miranda
Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice – the injustice that is done to people
in their capacity as knowers, when their expertise or experience is ignored
due to prejudice or other problematic reasons. It goes beyond epistemic
injustice, however, in that it also often has tangible social, economic, and
political consequences. And while some practices that fall under the remit
of the Second Face of Power would count as deliberate inaction in Scott’s
typology – e.g., if they result from a political agenda not being pursued be-
cause its proponents are being actively silenced – the Second Face of power
can be a useful analytical lens to recognise power as a tool of inaction.
    Another important body of work that a sociology of non-imagination
could draw upon is scholarship on ignorance, pioneered by Linsey
McGoey. Different forms and meanings of ignorance come to bear here.
Strategic ignorance, as many readers of this journal will know, refers to the
deliberate creation of ignorance for strategic purposes (McGoey 2019) –
such as the throwing into doubt of scientific evidence on human-made
climate change. Useful unknowns (Bacevic and McGoey 2021), in con-
trast, are mobilised when policy makers and other actors gain from “gen-
uine” unknowns – such as the impossibility to know what the next muta-
tions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus will look like. The midpoint between a
useful unknown and strategic ignorance is what Bacevic and McGoey call
surfing ignorance. It conveys “the active, institutional capacity to willfully
steer ‘unwilled unknowns’ to meet different goals” (Bacevic and McGoey
2021, 2). It happens when decision makers choose not to look for evi-
dence on an unknown because they fear that this evidence could go
against their interests, or conflict with their goals in another way.
    A third tradition that a sociology of non-imagination could be in-
formed by is Post-Normal Science, which was introduced by Silvio Fun-
towicz and Jerome Ravetz in the early 1990s (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993;
see also Dankel et al. 2017). In contrast to normal science in the Kuhnian
sense (e.g., Kuhn 1962), which is based on the solution of scientific “puz-
zles” that are described and solved within established scientific para-
digms, in some situations, policy development requires Post-Normal Sci-
ence: namely in situations where facts are uncertain, values are in dispute,
stakes are high, and decisions are urgent (ibid). Understood not as a re-
placement but as a complement to normal science, within Post-Normal
26                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


Science, both the problem descriptions and the solutions are considered
according to criteria of the communities that are affected by the policy or
decision based on the science. Going beyond regular public participation
exercises, Post-Normal Science turns the traditional domination of (sup-
posedly) hard facts over (allegedly) soft values on its head: local, commu-
nity-based knowledge can turn out to be the most robust reference point
for how a problem should be framed and addressed to be solved effec-
tively. It overcomes the imaginative hegemony of established paradigms
that typically limit our actions already at the point of posing the problem
in a particular way. In this way, Post-Normal Science does not only help
us to understand why certain problems cannot be solved effectively, and
why we cannot imagine alternatives, but it can also help us to build these
alternatives – which I will focus on in the final section.


4. Conclusion: Gardening, Not Engineering
    In the previous sections I have discussed several explanations for why
we have not acted on the status quo, despite knowing how harmful our
way of working and living is for people and for the planet, and despite
solutions having been suggested for several of these problems. For exam-
ple, to address the societal invisibility of unpaid labour, and the situation
that so many people work in jobs that make them – literally – ill, universal
basic income has been proposed as a solution (see e.g., Robeyns 2001;
Haagh 2019). Some argue that such a universal basic income – because it
would reduce work commuting and change the way that people consume
– would also make our lives more sustainable (for a summary and critical
perspective, see Howard et al. 2019). For the latter, which is arguably the
biggest challenge of all, models such as economies without growth, soli-
darity economies, or commons as an alternative to capitalist extraction
have been proposed (e.g., Bauhardt 2014; Bollier and Helfrich 2019). But
none of these solutions have been taken up and implemented by any gov-
ernment in the world. This is, as has been argued – and as I have sketched
above – perhaps related to most democracies in the world getting older,
and the transaction costs for radical change being too high for most peo-
ple. It is certainly due to our being captured in an imaginative hegemony.
We cannot think beyond the world that we see and enact every day.
    Drawing upon the work of Jana Bacevic (2021) and others, I have ar-
gued that getting out of the mess we are in will require envisaging a future
for which it is worth intervening into the status quo in a major way. It will
need to be a vision of a society for which it is worth accepting the discom-
fort and uncertainty of braking with what we have known. Hendrik Wa-
genaar and I have started to sketch such a vision (Wagenaar and Prain-
sack 2021). A society that is oriented towards the welfare of people and
the planet, we argued, requires strong public infrastructures and services
Prainsack                                                                   27

that ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, in addition to a way of
reorganising the relationship between government and the business that
re-establishes the primacy of the former. Importantly, this newfound
power of government is not to be used to discipline and exploit people as
it is the matter today; governments have been willing enablers and ac-
complices of the exploitative and extractive business practices that they
so frequently bemoan. In contrast, it is to be used to further the welfare
of all people in a society. In our book we used the example of the “Red
Vienna”, namely the period between 1919 and 1933, when a Social-
Democratic administration developed an innovative, integrated and high-
ly successful public housing policy. The public housing built in this peri-
od was not merely a social housing for people who could not otherwise
afford a home: it was a vision of a flourishing society where everyone
should be able to lead a good life regardless of their inability to pay for it.
The housing estates built in this era – and many afterwards that were in-
spired by it – bear little resemblance with the dreariness of social housing
projects in the United Kingdom or other countries. They are solid, well-
built and often beautiful buildings surrounded by parks and gardens.
Many of them have childcare facilities and swimming pools. There is wide
agreement that Vienna’s current high quality of living up to this day is di-
rectly related to the achievements of the Red Vienna period. The histori-
an Wolfgang Maderthaner called Red Vienna “one of the most extraordi-
nary, creative and courageous communal experiments in modern Europe-
an history” (2019, 24). This is all the more astonishing as the Social-
Democratic administration of Red Vienna only lasted 14 years, operated
in an increasingly hostile political environment, and faced a series of mo-
mentous challenges at its inception. Yet it had a vision, a humanist-
socialist vision of emancipating the working class. Our own vision for the
future of our societies includes a return to “good government” in the
sense of a bureaucracy and administration that is committed to making
everyone’s life better and proudly pursues it. It is a vision of a society in
which the state is no longer a dirty word.
    Which leaves us with the question of how we get there. My honest an-
swer is that I am not sure. I know that it will require both pressure from
the people and the willingness of political decision makers to take risks
and take unpopular decisions. My hope is that the combination of in-
creasing costs of living, the fallout of climate change, and other hardships
will not push people to escapism or resignation, but it will lead to collec-
tive action for change. But one thing that will be crucial about implement-
ing the vision of a future for which, to use Bacevic’ words again, it is worth
acting upon the present is that it should be envisaged as a project of gar-
dening rather than engineering (see below). Complexity, as I argued above,
is not to lead us to fatalism, to throw our hands up into the air because
“everything is so complicated”. It calls upon us to harness complexity (Wa-
genaar 2007) in the spirit of humility and openness and the continuously
28                                                          Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


proliferating possibilities of what Connolly calls a world of becoming
(Connolly 2011). We cannot do this without having a new concept of how
things not only hang but also develop together, and of our place, as hu-
mans, in this interconnected web of flows, energy and materiality.
    This is diametrically opposed to how policy makers are trying to ad-
dress the large societal challenges today. When EU Commission Presi-
dent Ursula von der Leyen announced the European Green Deal in 2019,
she did it with the following words: “this is Europe’s man on the moon
moment” (c.f. Hutchinson 2019). She thereby framed the project of mak-
ing Europe more sustainable as an engineering project. The concept of
engineering, in turn, is strongly related to many of the innovations made
over the past 200 years, including electrification, pharmacology, infor-
mation and communication technologies, and the machines that revolu-
tionised transportation, agriculture, and education. Some of the largest
and most impressive engineering projects in the world – the Large Had-
ron Collider, the Delta Flood Management complex in the South-West of
the Netherlands, the Oslo to Bergen line, and the Pyramids of Giza – are
all examples of humankind’s mastery over the natural world. They make
it possible for people to cut across mountains by rail, push back the sea,
look up into space, and treat diseases. This idea of human mastery is evi-
dent not only in the projects that “big engineering” has taken on, but also
in the very nature of the discipline. Precision and the capacity to accu-
rately predict how a tool, machine, or system will behave and the effects it
has on the specific area of the environment in which it functions are cru-
cial to engineering. This implies that the engineer must not only be aware
of all the variables and aspects that may affect how the machine or system
functions, but also have control over them.
    But we cannot be in control of the planet. We are also unable to
“manage” the climate because it is a complex system with which we are in-
extricably linked. We may be able to harness it, but we cannot and should
not try to control it. Engineering sends the wrong message when it comes to
building a sustainable society, regardless of how much it has contributed to
global prosperity and progress and how useful the engineering metaphor
has been in demonstrating that human ingenuity and perseverance can suc-
cessfully tackle the most difficult challenges. The reductionist, universalist
approach to knowledge can only take us so far. We cannot avoid complexi-
ty. We require more gardening rather than more engineering.
    An excellent engineer should be very logical and analytically inclined,
have a strong mathematical foundation, and be problem-solving oriented.
A good gardener needs very different skills, such as the capacity to pay
attention to, “listen to”, and learn from nature. Gardening is a relation-
ship, not a project of mastery. Even with the most thorough research and
meticulous planning, a garden cannot be planned on a drawing board and
then just “executed”. The gardener must work with a certain amount of
uncertainty because she cannot control all the factors that will affect the
Prainsack                                                                            29

outcome. She can analyse the soil structure, know everything there is to
know about plants, consider the principles of garden design, and precise-
ly dose irrigation. Even then, however, she will only be able to create a
garden that is somewhat similar to the vision she has in her mind; yet, she
will never be able to predict the exact result. She is unable to predict how
the weather, wind, insects, parasites, and other elements that make up
and inhabit a garden would act. Instead of designing a garden, a gardener
takes care of one. She is conversing with the materials she works with. She
can grow seedlings, weed, or sow seeds, but she can never totally master. I
think this is the best way to develop and put into action a future vision.
    The American ecologist Robin W. Kimmerer describes in her 2013
book Braiding Sweetgrass how she learnt to listen to the stories that plants
had to share from her parents and grandparents. Her training in plant bi-
ology at university made her unlearn the analytical skill of hearing that her
family had taught her, and to train her analytical skill of seeing. She writes:

    I honor the strength of the language [of science] that has become a second
    tongue to me. But beneath the richness of its vocabulary and its descriptive
    power, something is missing […]. The language that scientists speak, however
    precise, is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in
    translation from the native languages of these shores (Kimmerer 2013, 48-49).

    These words are not merely a critique of the reductionism of science;
rather, they are a call to replace the grammar of accuracy, mastery, and
control with a grammar of interconnectedness (Kimmerer calls it “a
grammar of animacy”), which an openness for the unexpected and for
that which we do not yet know but must learn from others.
    Kimmerer makes use of a traditional approach to understanding, ob-
serving, and relating to the natural world that is shared by many indige-
nous people. It entails educating our senses as well as re-evaluating how
we view the natural and human world. The idea of the world and our
place in it is one of connection and process. It calls for a different per-
spective on time – not the hypertime that punctuates modern capitalism,
but rather the slower, deeper time of growth and development. And the
adoption of values such as humility, compassion, balance, and joy, where
we expose ourselves to learning from nature rather than pushing our-
selves on it to further our short-term exploitational objectives.
    This does not mean that we should give up engineering and stop
planning. The Grand and the Modest Story need not be in conflict with
each other. To fight climate change, develop renewable energy sources,
phase out carbon fuels, stop the loss of biodiversity and soil erosion, and
deal with the effects of global warming, we need all the technological in-
genuity and knowledge we can conjure. Engineering remains an im-
portant and highly suitable approach to complicated challenges – just not
for complex ones. For the larger challenge to build sustainable societies,
relational, and holistic modes of knowing ought to serve as our compass.
30                                                                     Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


Instead of mastery and control, this is a joint process of “coming to
know”, as Lianne Betasamosake Simpson (2014, 7) calls it. We need to
start with digging up the foundations of our society, and plant the seeds
for a better one. We need to replace the roots of neglect with the roots
for flourishing. And then: tend, watch, learn.


Acknowledgements

   I am grateful to Hendrik Wagenaar and all participants of the STS Italia
Summer School in Padova in September 2022, and the anonymous reviewers for
Tecnoscienza for their helpful comments and suggestions.


Notes
     1
       UPS were not contractually obliged to provide air condition or even a fan in de-
livery trucks, a spokesperson of the company said (Sainato 2022). World-wide, every
summer, a growing number of workers die in increasingly hot conditions.
     2
       This sub-header was inspired by Bacevic (2021).
     3
       I use the term “revolution” according to the definition of Shults (2002, 1027): a
revolution consists of (1) a radical mass protest; (2) a change of political power at the
hands of elites; and (3) significant systems changes. All three elements need to be present
for a political uprise to be qualified as a revolution.
     4
       In 2022, 100 countries had a higher poverty rate than Greece (Worldpopulation Review
2022). In terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Greece ranked in 51st place worldwide.
     5
       The correlation between youth bulges and political violence is particularly strong
in the case of internal armed conflict in starkly autocratic regimes (Urdal 2006). It
should be noted that this does not mean that younger people, as such, are more likely
to engage in political protest than other ones (e.g., Caren et al. 2011); what research
suggests is that the existence of large proportions of young people, whose opportunity
costs to engage in political uprises are low, makes political violence more likely. The
youth bulge literature should be read and interpreted in conjunction with research that
suggests that large population increases in societies where these are unaccompanied by
increases in productivity, and investments in human and physical capital, also increases
the risk of political violence (e.g., Acemoglu et al. 2020; see also Goldstone et al. 2022).
It has also been found that strong labour markets can mitigate or even suppress the
negative effects of youth bulges (Weber 2019), suggesting that the relationship be-
tween youth bulges and political violence is complex. (Higher education is not always
negatively associated with political violence; see Østby et al. 2019).
     6
       In Europe, the youngest society is Albania with a median age of about 34. The
United States have a median age of 38.5 (WorldData.info, n.d.).
     7
       In this sense, hegemony is closely connected to epistemic injustice, both in its tes-
timonial and its hermeneutical form; see Fricker 2007.
     8
       Another reason why this statement is true is that countries are not individual
households who have to earn the money they spend beforehand, if they do not want to
go into debt. But this is a story for another time.
Prainsack                                                                             31

    9
      John Gardner and colleagues (2015) write about a “sociology of low expecta-
tions”, based on their analysis of how clinicians develop visions of the future together
with their patients that accommodate doubt and uncertainty. This work is highly valu-
able but very different from a sociology of non-expectation that is attentive to the per-
formative effects of the lack of specific visions and expectations.

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