Showing papers by "Susan Leigh Star published in 1992"

The trojan door: Organizations, work, and the “open black box”

Abstract: The paper summarizes recent work on organizations, artificial intelligence systems, human-computer interaction, etc., which emphasizes thesituated, distributed, andfluid nature of social systems. This contrasts with the traditional way of writing and thinking about social systems which sees them as disembodied, ideal, formal notions of thought. The implications of this new view of systems for social actors, information, knowledge, and technology are discussed. The literature reviewed offers a new way of talking about systems and their practices.

The Skin, the Skull, and the Self: Toward a Sociology of the Brain

Abstract: The brain is a troubling object for sociologists. This chapter was written at a time in which sociologists are reexamining topics such as the body, material culture, and the nature of intelligence. We speak easily of the body in a Foucauldian sense as laced through with discourses, constituted intersubjectively, a true body politic with a sociology of its own. We are beginning to venture, trailing anthropology by some distance, to examine the materials that shape human work and interaction: tools, scientific materials, various sorts of architectures and physical arrangements.