I am back in Oxford after a wonderful conference on 7 June 2024 at Sciences Po, a research university in Paris, one of the world’s leading universities in the social sciences focused on political science and international relations. The event had the wonderful title of ‘Back to the Future: From Stone Age Telematics to Artificial Intelligence’.
I did a closing talk at the conference, which was organised as a farewell tribute to a long-appreciated colleague of mine, Thierry Vedel, on retiring from a senior research position at Sciences Po CEVIPOF (Sciences Po’s centre for research in political science). The day was organised by Professor Karolina Koc Michalska at the Audencia Business School in Nantes, France. Karolina had worked with Thierry Vedel, when she was a researcher at Sciences Po. I began collaborating with Thierry on cross-national studies of cable communication in the 1980, leading to a book entitled Wired Cities (Dutton et al 1987). Among the other speakers was another colleague of mine, Emeritus Professor Volker Schneider, a political theorist from the University of Konstanz, Germany. Karolina introduced Volker and me by noting that during our years of collaboration with Thierry, we had gained the wonderful handle of the “Three Musketeers” – as we were certainly “all for one and one for all”. I can’t imagine a nicer metaphor of our relationships.
Volker spoke about how he and Thierry had built on some of my work on an Ecology of Games (EoG) in the early 2000s. At the conference, Professor Schneider focused on how political and organisation theories, and particularly the EoG, can help us understand the development of large communication systems. He and Thierry used the EoG to describe the dynamics of videotex developments in France and Germany, and later I worked with them to further develop the EoGs as a useful perspective on large technical systems (Dutton, Schneider, and Vedel 2012). The social shaping of such systems cannot to be well explained by one single logic as they tend to combine a combination of complex systems or nested ecologies – what we can be captured as an ecology of games.
The nineteenth-century French author Alexandre Dumas would not have imagined our collaboration evoking the Three Musketeers, but our collaboration did illustrate the rewards of collaboration in supporting us individually and collectively. Our collaboration on the EoG has long been one of my best illustrations of how valuable collaboration can be in the social sciences. Moreover, this theoretical perspective, which you might view as dated, continues to be useful, such as in my current research on the Russian War on Ukraine, making this old collaboration continue to reap benefits for me and my colleagues. Likewise, Volker has revisited these notions as well is his forthcoming book on political networks (Schneider 2024).
It is not farewell but a congratulations to Thierry Vedel on a wonderful career that will continue to contribute to the study of politics and my work on the EoG. And a big thank you to Karolina for inventing this conference and inviting me and the other musketeers – a great metaphor, Karolina.
Reference
Dutton, W. H., Blumler, J. G., and Kraemer, K. L. (1987) (eds.), Wired Cities: Shaping the Future of Communications. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Dutton, W. H., Schneider, V., and Vedel, T. (2012), ‘Large Technical Systems as Ecologies of Games: Cases from Telecommunications to the Internet’, pp. 49-75 in Bauer, J. M., et al (Eds), Innovation Policy and Governance in High-Tech Industries. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Schneider, V. (2024), An Advanced Introduction to Political Networks. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Elgar.