How to Manage the Future? Mid-level Operators and Experiments

Abstract

This text serves as a commentary on two articles in this issue: Stepan Kozlov’s work, which introduces the concept of “middle-level operators” based on Bourdieu’s texts, and Maria Volkova’s article, which demonstrates the applicability of this concept within a Goffmanian approach to describing group styles. Kozlov describes middle-level operators as tools for managing uncertainty but does not reveal the mechanisms of their impact on the form of uncertainty. Building on this approach, the present text shows how the concept can be extended by drawing on Robert Merton’s ideas and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Examining the experimental nature of middle-level operators enables us to reconceptualize middle-range theories as research tools with both applied and conceptual significance. Drawing on experiments described in STS, the text demonstrates how middle-level operators function under conditions of limited uncertainty and the ways this uncertainty can be constrained during experimentation. The analysis of Russian urban planning reform as a case of complex, long-term experimentation shows how identifying middle-level operators that combine different scales of transformation allows us to recognize the construction of future images as the reform’s primary direction and to identify mechanisms of change restraint that lead to its decline. Thus, the concept of middle-level operators shifts the focus of social research toward empirical cases and serves as a tool for formalizing their conceptual potential.