Discursive Institutional Work and the Social Control of Dangerous Objects

Abstract Across societies and over time, the social control of objects deemed “dangerous”—i.e., as threats to public order, morality, or physical and psychological well-being—varies, from regulation to prohibition, with implications for responsibility, potential harm, and affected communities. Drawing on U.S. Congressional hearings on the issue of cannabis regulation and prohibition (1906–1951), we examine how shifts in social control track changing configurations of discursive institutional work. Our work demonstrates how configurations of rationalization, moralization, and syncretization shaped the meaning of cannabis as a dangerous object: rationalization calculates the risk, supporting calibrated regulation; moralization absolutizes the danger, promoting prohibition; and syncretization balances these two. We refer to this reciprocal dynamic as an epistemic ratchet, whereby rationalization and moralization each weaken the epistemic foundations of the alternative regime, making movement between regulation and prohibition difficult in either direction. Our study makes three contributions: (a) it extends the organizing-of-risk account of how danger is rendered governable to the form and reversibility of control; (b) it adds to research on discursive institutional work by identifying epistemology, complexity, and responsibility as the object-level qualities through which discourse becomes consequential for governance; and (c) it contributes to debates on responsibility, ethics, and harm by showing how the discursive redistribution of responsibility shapes the scope and coerciveness of control.