Karin Knorr-Cetina (also Karin Knorr Cetina) (born July 19, 1944 in Graz, Austria) is an Austrian sociologist well known for her work on epistemology and Social constructionism, summarized in the 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). Currently, she focuses on the study of global microstructures and Social studies of finance. Karin Knorr is professor of the Theory of Sociology at the Universität Konstanz and guest professor at the University of Chicago.
A knowledge object is a theoretical concept introduced by Knorr-Cetina to describe the emergence of post-social relations in epistemic cultures. Knowledge objects are different than everyday things and are defined as unfolding structures that are non-identical with themselves.