Thomas P. Hughes

Bio: Thomas P. Hughes is an academic researcher from University of Pennsylvania. The author has contributed to research in topics: Electrification & Social constructionism. The author has an hindex of 27, co-authored 78 publications receiving 10409 citations. Previous affiliations of Thomas P. Hughes include Johns Hopkins University.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

Abstract: This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry--social construction of technology, or SCOT--that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume--collectively called SCOT (after the volume’s title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

Networks of power : electrification in Western society, 1880-1930

Abstract: Awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology, this book offers a comparative history of the evolution of modern electric power systems. It described large-scale technological change and demonstrates that technology cannot be understood unless placed in a cultural context.

The Seamless Web: Technology, Science, Etcetera, Etcetera

Abstract: Over the past two decades or so, historians of science have lamented the limitations of internalist history and celebrated the rise of contextual history. Historians of technology, however, have no...

Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance

Abstract: This paper draws on the social and behavioral sciences in an endeavor to specify the nature and microfoundations of the capabilities necessary to sustain superior enterprise performance in an open economy with rapid innovation and globally dispersed sources of invention, innovation, and manufacturing capability. Dynamic capabilities enable business enterprises to create, deploy, and protect the intangible assets that support superior long- run business performance. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities—the distinct skills, processes, procedures, organizational structures, decision rules, and disciplines—which undergird enterprise-level sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capacities are difficult to develop and deploy. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial. They not only adapt to business ecosystems, but also shape them through innovation and through collaboration with other enterprises, entities, and institutions. The framework advanced can help scholars understand the foundations of long-run enterprise success while helping managers delineate relevant strategic considerations and the priorities they must adopt to enhance enterprise performance and escape the zero profit tendency associated with operating in markets open to global competition. Copyright  2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and

Abstract: Abstract The Triple Helix of university–industry–government relations is compared with alternative models for explaining the current research system in its social contexts. Communications and negotiations between institutional partners generate an overlay that increasingly reorganizes the underlying arrangements. The institutional layer can be considered as the retention mechanism of a developing system. For example, the national organization of the system of innovation has historically been important in determining competition. Reorganizations across industrial sectors and nation states, however, are induced by new technologies (biotechnology, ICT). The consequent transformations can be analyzed in terms of (neo-)evolutionary mechanisms. University research may function increasingly as a locus in the “laboratory” of such knowledge-intensive network transitions.