Keynotes
Two keynotes will be given during Pomaa 2026, by professor Steve Woolgar, and by Associate Professor Tina Øllgaard Bentzen.
It is a great privilege to welcome Professor Steve Woolgar as keynote speaker at POMAA 2026. Few scholars have done more to shape our understanding of how science, technology, and society are entangled in the production of order, accountability, and meaning. In this talk, Professor Woolgar extends his long-standing interest in the material and moral dimensions of organisation into the terrain of waste, matter, and the politics of what is left behind.
Steve Woolgar is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Green Templeton College and Professor Emeritus of Science and Technology Studies at Linköping University. After studying sociology at Cambridge he continued through a pioneering career in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Woolgar co-authored, with Bruno Latour, the foundational book Laboratory Life (1979), which offers an ethnographic account of scientific practice and challenges the idea that scientific facts simply mirror reality. Instead, it reveales how facts are made, collectively, materially, and rhetorically, within social and technical networks.
Throughout his career, Woolgar has persistently explored the conditions under which knowledge, objects, and institutions become accountable. His later works, including Science: The Very Idea, Globalization in Practice, and Virtual Society?, interrogates how technologies and infrastructures shape what counts as reality, responsibility, and evidence. This interest has made him one of the key figures in what might be called the “second wave” of STS: a move from analysing how science produces knowledge to examining how knowledge practices produce social worlds.
In this keynote, Steve Woolgar turns attention to a deceptively mundane but deeply consequential issue, waste. He asks: how do materials deemed worthless or threatening expose the moral and organisational logics of modern institutions? What does it mean to be accountable for what persists, leaks, or refuses to disappear? By following waste, Woolgar invites us to rethink ontology as practice, the way categories of “matter,” “threat,” and “responsibility” are enacted and managed within systems of public governance.
For scholars and practitioners of public management, Woolgar’s keynote promises not only conceptual provocation but also empirical resonance. His reflections remind us that accountability is not merely administrative but ontological: a question of how we make and maintain the very realities we claim to govern.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Associate Professor Tina Øllgaard Bentzen as keynote speaker at POMAA 2026. Tina’s research has been pivotal in advancing our understanding of how trust, control, and professionalism interact within contemporary public governance. Her work challenges traditional assumptions about bureaucratic authority and explores how public organizations can cultivate both accountability and robustness through trust-based leadership.
Tina Øllgaard Bentzen is Associate Professor at the Roskilde School of Governance, Roskilde University, Denmark. She holds a background in social sciences and has developed an extensive research agenda on leadership, organization, and the dynamics of trust in the public sector. Through both empirical and conceptual work, she investigates how leaders and professionals navigate tensions between managerial control and professional autonomy.
Her studies combine close interaction with practitioners and decision-makers with rigorous academic analysis, resulting in insights that bridge research and practice. Drawing on qualitative studies across Nordic countries, Tina examines how governance reforms affect every-day decisions and motivation at the frontline of public sector organizations. Her work on trust-based leadership has received wide attention for showing how new forms of collaboration and co-creation can strengthen public organizations’ capacity to act under complexity and uncertainty.
At POMAA 2026, Tina will continue this line of inquiry by addressing : Trust and control: Competition or collaboration?