How Universities see: from the Theory of Organisation to Social Topology

Abstract

This article concerns the ability of university to draw distinctions. The main question is what universities can «see», and which objects fall into their «blind spot». The issue under consideration is quite novel for the sociology of education, therefore we propose to develop new theoretical language, that is, the language of social topology of higher education. Social topology abandons substantial metaphor of university, i. e. it is considered to be not a mere single object. Instead it describes university as a network of relations, consisting of different nods — actants. So far, the process of drawing distinction is understood as a necessary condition of building up intraand interpolitical relations between key actants.