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The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
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Social construction of technology (SCOT) as mentioned in this paper is a popular approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and demonstrates the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory.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.read more
Citations
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Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address the question of how technological transitions (TT) come about and identify particular patterns and mechanisms in transition processes, defined as major, long-term technological changes in the way societal functions are fulfilled.
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Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
TL;DR: In Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star as mentioned in this paper explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world and examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary.
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Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective
John Seely Brown,Paul Duguid +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take the community of practice as a unifying unit of analysis for understanding knowledge in the firm, and suggest that often too much attention is paid to the idea of community, too little to the implications of practice.
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From sectoral systems of innovation to socio-technical systems: Insights about dynamics and change from sociology and institutional theory
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make four contributions to the approach by addressing some open issues in the sectoral systems of innovation (SOSI) approach, namely, explicitly incorporating the user side in the analysis, suggesting an analytical distinction between systems, actors involved in them, and the institutions which guide actor perceptions and activities.
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Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the IT in IT Research--A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact
TL;DR: It is proposed that IS researchers begin to theorize specifically about IT artifacts, and then incorporate these theories explicitly into their studies, and believe that such a research direction is critical if IS research is to make a significant contribution to the understanding of a world increasingly suffused with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent information technologies.
References
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Book
The Interpretation of Cultures
Richard Fenn,Clifford Geertz +1 more
TL;DR: The INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ Books files are available at the online library of the University of Southern California as mentioned in this paper, where they can be used to find any kind of Books for reading.
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Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society
TL;DR: In this article, the quandary of the fact-builder is explored in the context of science and technology in a laboratory setting, and the model of diffusion versus translation is discussed.
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Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-modelling architecture for human-machine communication that automates the very labor-intensive and therefore time-heavy and therefore expensive and expensive process of designing and implementing communication systems.
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Technics and praxis
TL;DR: A program in the philosophy of technology can be found in this article, where a Phenomenology of Instrumentation: The Instrument as Mediator is presented. But it is not a philosophy of science.