The Conceptual Groundwork of Change

This work begins from a simple proposition: concepts structure the world. They configure what is seen, what becomes actionable, and what counts as a response. Their emergence and circulation shape institutional logics, social expectations, and the boundaries of political imagination.

Concepts are embedded in practice—taken up in legal codes, bureaucratic classifications, and modelling assumptions. As Bowker and Star have shown, systems of categorisation are never neutral; they encode moral, technical, and political orders. What appears as administrative infrastructure is often the sedimentation of prior conceptual decisions.

The question is not only how social change occurs, but how the conceptual conditions for change are assembled in the first place. This is a question with both epistemological and institutional dimensions. It draws on the tradition of critical theory, particularly the Frankfurt School’s insistence that analysis must attend to the historical construction of reason itself (Adorno 1966; Horkheimer 1947), while also intersecting with more recent work on performativity and sociotechnical imaginaries (MacKenzie 2006; Jasanoff and Kim 2015).

My interest is in tracing these conceptual formations—not to fix their definitions, but to understand how they acquire authority. This involves attention not only to the actors and practices that produce change, but to the conceptual scaffolding that makes certain changes actionable in the first place. Ideas do not float freely. They are embedded in governance, policy, classification systems, narrative conventions, and infrastructures of measurement. They carry histories, institutional investments, and implicit logics of causality.

In that sense, the work is meta-theoretical. It is not only concerned with describing social or institutional transformations, but with examining how our frameworks for understanding transformation shape the scope of what becomes thinkable or actionable. This interest resonates with Bourdieu’s analytic of doxa—those foundational assumptions that structure the field of perception without appearing as choices. But it also draws on more processual accounts of conceptual formation, such as Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” or Charles Taylor’s articulation of social imaginaries as historically situated and constitutively reflexive.

There is also a normative dimension. Concepts have stakes. The way risk is defined—whether as a technical calculation, a moral failing, or a systemic exposure—reshapes institutional responses and public expectations. The same is true for concepts like legitimacy, crisis, or resilience. Each encodes a horizon of possibility. In this sense, the work is both critical and practical. It shares the Frankfurt School’s commitment to reflexivity, but engages directly with contemporary governance—where institutions must act under conditions of uncertainty, and where conceptual choices carry material consequences.

The aim is not to offer a theory of everything, but to hold open the space for a certain kind of inquiry: one that takes seriously the power of concepts to configure action, and that treats the analysis of those configurations as a condition for intellectual and institutional responsibility.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Continuum, 1973.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press, 1999.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Polity Press, 1991.

Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Max). Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno). Continuum, 1947/2002.

Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press, 1999.

Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Margaret Gilbert. Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Raimo Tuomela. The Philosophy of Social Practices. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2004.