From Ranking to Repair!

While the world is disrupted,  ranking is still with us.  I am sure many of you are too familiar with the new Ranking game  .  I also believe, together  with many of you, that the world – for better or worse – will not be the same, as it was.

As concerns the Ranking book itself, it looks that so far the German, Chinese (with simple characters), Korean and Japan translations have been licensed, and the Hungarian translation seems to be plausible. Assuming we will have some reasonable Fall,  I will teach a class at University of Michigan about Ranking.

From mid-December  I am thinking about the plan of new book with the working title REPAIR! How to Improve Broken Objects, Ourselves, and Our Society. It looks I will have a co-author, the Hungarian social psychologist Zsuzsa Szvetelszky .  Here is a paragraph from the draft of the book proposal:

The question of when to repair and when to replace objects is always with us. We could mention a number of illustrative phenomena. Many of us are suffering with the problem of broken friendships, and we ask ourselves whether or not they can be mended. A stopped clock can be repaired, but a burned-out light bulb must be replaced. A bulb, however, is replaceable. It would be ridiculous to throw out your whole crystal chandelier with sixteen lights (as part of your family inheritance) if one of these lights does not function. But sometimes big companies adopt business policies that do not provide access to spare parts, and a whole new gadget must be bought. The “right to repair” movement started a legal fight to allow consumers to repair their broken electronic devices by being able to buy replacement parts at a reasonable price. So we also review the possible change of the attitude of people from living in a throw-away society to accept consumption reduction.

We prepared an article as a response for the open call for the Hungarian social science journal Replika . You can download the paper from here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zVRpXu9Fvk-m_8rKPoDhLokB6pgdNBJT

Hope the Reader is well!