Failure Irrationality

Adriana Mica is a Romanian-born sociologist living in Poland, the founder and leader of Failure Lab at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She has published (authored or co-edited) several books on unintended consequences, ignorance, and crises which reflect the political ecologies of Central and Eastern Europe and her fascination with the irrational, rather eccentric and absurd social processes. She is a co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), currently moving in the direction of developing a general theory of the taste and sound of failure, which will also bridge social sciences, policy studies and literature.Mikołaj Pawlak leads the Chair of Sociology of Norms, Deviance and Social Control at University of Warsaw, Poland. He studies how migration and response to migration are organised and how competition among scholars is being constituted. His book Tying Micro and Macro (Peter Lang, 2018) helped to recontextualise the levels of analysis in social sciences in Poland. He is a co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), currently working on a book concerning the ambivalent perceptions of bureaucracy.Paweł Kubicki leads the Department of Social Policy, and is also acting chair of the Academic Council on Political and Administrative Sciences at SGH Warsaw School of Economics. His research focuses on the critical area of policy failure, exploring its causes, consequences, and potential mitigation strategies. A co-editor of Routledge International Handbook of Failure (2023), his current work spans disability studies and public policy cost analysis.

• PART I. Irrationality: Endowing Failure with a Life of its Own; 1. Irrationality, quietism, and failure going on; 2. Obsession, the skin of policymaking; 3. Eligibility, the production of judgement; 4. Abeyance, the creation through stillness; PART II. All that Failure: Policymaking in Poland; 5. Failure ecology; 6. Migration policy and the escalation of political beef; 7. Abortion policy and the complacency surrounding violence against women; 8. Disability policy and the control of silence; Conclusions