Karin Knorr Cetina

Karin Knorr Cetina is an Austrian sociologist, born on 19 July 1944 in Graz, Austria, known for her work on epistemology and social constructionism, set out in her books The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (1981) and Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (1999). She later turned to the study of global microstructures and the social studies of finance, and has held the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professorship, jointly appointed in anthropology, while chairing the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She introduced the concept of the knowledge object to describe unfolding structures, non-identical with themselves, that emerge as post-social relations within the epistemic cultures she studied.