High variability discourse in the history and sociology of large technical systems

Gesellschaftsweit operierende technische Infrastrukturen und ihre Verknüpfung und Überlagerung in urbanen Zentren werden seit Mitte der achtziger Jahre in einem internationalen Forschungsnetz "Large Technical Systems" (LTS, deutsch GTS) untersucht. Die WZB-Forschungsgruppe "Große technische Systeme" und in ihrer Nachfolge die Forschungsgruppe "Metropolenforschung" waren an diesem Forschungsprogramm kontinuierlich beteiligt. In diesem Aufsatz wird der techniksoziologische Spezialdiskurs über GTS reflektiert und seine große Variabilität nachgezeichnet. Indem die Vielfalt von metaphorischen und narrativen Strukturen dieses Forschungsfelds herausgearbeitet wird, wird zugleich sichtbar, welche Problemstellungen unterbelichtet geblieben sind: Nutzerforschung, die kulturelle und ökologische Einbettung großer technischer Systeme und ihre Ortseffekte. Die verstärkte Einbeziehung dieser Aspekte wird die Variabilität von GTS-Diskursen weiter steigern; Ansätze, in denen die Systemmetapher weniger zentral ist, werden an Bedeutung gewinnen. (HH)"Globally operating technical infrastructures and their linkages and superimpositions in large urban centers have been studied in an international research-network 'Large Technical Systems' (LTS) since the mid-1980s. The WZB research groups 'Große technische Systeme' and its successor 'Metropolitan Studies' have been part of this research program. The paper reflects on LTS-discourses within the wider field of social studies of technology and traces its high variability. Demonstrating the diversity of metaphorical and narrative structures underlying LTS research at the same time points towards a series of issues which have been underrepresented in this research field: use as opposed to development and management of systems, the cultural as well as the ecological embedding of systems, spatial/ local effects of systems. Including such aspects into the on-going historical and sociological discourses about LTS will tend to increase its variability, approaches where the systems metaphor is given less explanatory power will compete for attention." (author's abstract

Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat

Computers begin, without being aware of it, to effect a major turn in social science technology research: machine technology, having been left for a long time to engineers and environmentalists, arouses the interest of sociologists, too. The paper highlights the conceptual advances of a new sociology of technology, which takes seriously the social constructions of technology of computer scientists and computer users. In the context of an emerging "media ecology", the main argument is about a social scientific mystification of Artificial Intelligence technologies

Romancing the Machine: Reflections on the Social Scientific Construction of Computer Reality

Summary in GermanSIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Do Politics have Artefacts?

In social studies of technology, as in many other scientific disciplines, highly persuasive similes are at work: pious stories, seemingly reaped from research, suggesting certain general theoretical insights. Variously adapted, they are handed down: in the process, they acquire almost doctrinal unassailability. One such parable, which has been retold in technology and urban studies for a long time, is the story of Robert Moses’ low bridges, preventing the poor and the black of New York from gaining access to Long Island resorts and beaches. The story turns out to be counterfactual, but even if a small myth is disenchanted, it serves a purpose: to resituate positions in the old debate about the control of social processes via buildings and other technical artifacts - or, more generally, about material form and social content

Expertise Lost: An Early Case of Technology Assessment

This Note traces the curious history of an early technological risk assessment from three vantage points: that of historians of technology, of technology assessment (TA) experts, and of those knowledgeable in SSK. The principle of 'double coincidence' is introduced, and the uncertain status of expertise in TA is discussed

The transverse science and technology culture: dynamics and roles of research-technology

Science and technology are composed of several regimes of production, each having its own research axis and mode of diffusion - the disciplinary regime, transitory regime, utilitarian regime, and transverse regime. This article discusses research-technology, an example of the transverse regime of cognitive and artefact production. Research-technologists stand between science and engineering, between academia and enterprise. They design and build a special category of instrumentation (open-ended, multi-purpose generic instrumentation) and they operate out of an interstitial arena that lies between the usual poles of interest and organization - university, firms, the state, military etc. By virtue of their interstitial position and development of generic multi-audience devices, research-technologists exhibit a highly dynamic division of socio-cognitive labor. They sometimes engage in boundary crossings, in order to acquire data for instrument design or for purposes of instrument diffusion. Conversely, they sometimes close borders, protecting themselves from the exogenous pressures of short-term audience demand. One sees that selective boundary-crossing is not inconsistent with community closure! This article outlines the history of research-technology in Germany and the US, shows how the research-technology perspective differs from the new orthodoxy in the sociology of knowledge, and points to how a better grasp of the workings of the division of socio-cognitive labor may prove fruitful beyond the sociology of science and technology

The Question of Technology, or How Organizations Inscribe the World

The paper relates technology studies to organization research and examines the technology-as-text metaphor. The study of organization is incomplete as long as tangible technology remains in its blind spot. Linguistic metaphors and analogues, while capturing and indeed amplifying much of received understandings of technology, succeed only partially in repairing the situation. The image of the palimpsest is used to highlight this critique and to visualize ways out. Thus, while the paper‚s main concern is to bring back technology to the study of organization, a specific approach to the study of technology is also argued for

Person und dingliche Umwelt

Beziehungen zwischen dinglichen Umwelten und personalen Strukturen werden aus umweltpsychologischer, wirtschafts- und techniksoziologischer Sicht analysiert und mit umfangreicher Forschungsliteratur dokumentiert

Technische Normen - Soziale Normen?

Der Autor geht in seinem Beitrag davon aus, daß wir in der real existierenden maschinellen Technik einen gesellschaftlichen Realitätsbereich haben, der weder in "Natur" noch "Handeln" auflösbar ist. Er sucht eine Annäherung an gegenständliche Technik und damit ihre Implikationen für gesellschaftliche Entwicklung über die Kategorie "technische Normen" zu bewerkstelligen. Folgende Fragen sind dabei leitend: Wie kann man technische Normen soziologisch bestimmen? Kann man vermeiden, das, was "technische Systeme von selbst tun", soziologisch auszublenden oder als nicht-sozial auszuklammern? Fazit seiner Ausführungen ist, daß technische Systeme am besten als externalisierte, in die naturale Basis des gesellschaftlichen Prozesses eingeschriebene soziale Strukturen aufzufassen sind. Wichtig ist weiterhin der Sachverhalt, daß Komplexe von Gerätschaften in der Regel immer gleichzeitig in sehr vielen menschlichen Handlungszusammenhängen vorkommen. Der Aufdeckung dieser "multiplen Integriertheit technischer Systeme" dient die Analyse technischer Normen als die "institutionelle Struktur von Maschinerien". (BE