EPoS talks & workshops
All these formats are designed to stimulate and promote the exchange of ideas and social networking among researchers. The aim is to foster synergies, develop joint research agendas, and encourage the growth of methodological projects and working groups.
The ‘Diskurs im Sitzwohl’ series is aimed at those who enjoy engaging in intellectual exchange with like-minded researchers. We invite external experts to present their work, projects, theses, and provocative insights on socially relevant topics, to develop specific approaches based on scientific theories, and to discuss these during the ensuing conversation. The highly interactive nature of this philosophical and intellectual exchange is designed to be stimulating and inspiring, especially for experienced researchers.
Last event: 3 June 2025, 5.30 pm – 7.00 pm
"Making Up User Voice"
Andrea Mennicken, Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics
How can we analyse, problematise and theorise the processes and practices involved in eliciting, assembling and representing “user voice” within organisations delivering health, care and other social services? Drawing on Hacking’s dynamic nominalism and Hacking’s later engagement with Goffman, we investigate how ‘user voice’ is constructed in the interstices between the locally situated, lived individual experiences of service users and the broader categories of professional and regulatory discourses on care and service quality that seek to account for these experiences. We problematise and theorise the construction of user voice as a situated practice in which user voice has no prior ontological status or coherence, but is rather a socially and relationally constructed object. We develop the concepts of tracing, framing and connecting as theoretical frameworks to address the various dimensions of producing user voice and to explore the struggles and dilemmas involved in making abstract classifications of user experience work in practice.
Andrea Mennicken is currently an Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Co-Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Since 2024, she has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of *Accounting, Organisations and Society*. Her research interests include social studies of quantification, accounting and valuation, governance and regulation, processes of marketisation, standardisation, and public sector reforms. Andrea’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including *Accounting, Organizations and Society*, *Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales*, *Foucault Studies*, *Organization Studies*, and *Sociologie du Travail*. She co-edited the book *The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, Evidence and Democracy* (2022, Palgrave Macmillan) with Robert Salais. From September 2025, Andrea will take up the post of Professor of Management and Organisation at King’s College London.
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