Boel Berner

Constructing Risk and Safety in Technological Practice

Modern technological systems entail risks and uncertainties of hitherto unknown dimensions. This book discusses the construction of risk and safety within a variety of empirical contexts where tech ...

Working knowledge as performance: on the practical understanding of machines

This article uses perspectives from science and technology studies to understand the working knowledge used by operators to understand and handle machines. Industrial production is seen as a heterogeneous assemblage of sociomaterial practices, where machines and humans interact in processes of mutual inscription and modification. Working knowledge is analysed as situated practices of knowing, or performances.This perspective is used in a meta-interpretation of earlier ethnographic research and other accounts of manual, industrial work, focusing on the mental, bodily and emotional understanding employed in crucial situations, as when learning to work, localizing machines, or coping with difficult or recalcitrant machines.

The meaning of cleaning: The creation of harmony and hygiene in the home

Abstract Towards the end of the 19th century cleaning and maintaining orderliness in the home took on increasing social and moral significance. New competences were required of women to achieve the desired hygiene and harmony in the home. The article focusses on the advice given in household manuals, books and articles to middle‐class women in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden. The texts identified a number of threats to health and possessions which necessitated a constant battle against dust and dirt. The meaning of cleaning can be seen in relation to the “bacila fright” created by science in late 19th century, but also to a rising middle class’ desire for distinction and social respectability. Above all, womens efforts and skills to create order must be set within the context of the patriarchal family of the time. Women were to be competent housekeepers in the minutest domestic detail — but were wholly dependent on their husbands income and good will. This made for a contradictory situation where the goals o...

Explaining exclusion: Women and Swedish engineering education from the 1890s to the 1920s

Abstract Not until 1921 were Swedish women allowed to study engineering on the same basis as men. The article analyses the reasons given for excluding women from higher technical education and sets them within a context of contemporary efforts to establish the engineering profession as one of industrial and public leadership. Engineering education for mobility and leadership involved pedagogical forms which were thought unsuitable for women, and a culture intended to create community between men as well as distinction towards women and less educated men. A few exceptional women were, however, let in on a negotiated basis, as the gendering of technological fields began to diverge between the more powerful “masculine” areas and those more “gender neutral” ones.

Swift transport versus information gathering : telemedicine and new tensions in the ambulance service

Swift transport used to be the predominant way ambulance services provided care. During the past few decades, advanced information and communication technologies have increased the amount of patient information that ambulance crews can transmit to hospitals. The ambulance service has thus, in principle, been transformed from a swift transport unit into a complex information-gathering unit. The new telemedicine technologies available to crews are linked to demands concerning organizational changes and alterations in work procedures that challenge traditional ways of providing “good” ambulance care. In this article, we draw on both ethnographic observations and concepts from the field of science and technology studies to demonstrate how established work practices and complex local situations format the ambulance crews’ use of information-gathering technologies. We highlight how ambulance crews employ strategies of localization, including taming and deliberate nonuse of telemedicine technologies, to align these technologies with their established stance about how everyday ambulance care is best implemented.

Manoeuvring in an Environment of Uncertainty: structural change and social action in sub-Saharan Africa.

Part 1 Theoretial inroads: structural change and social action in sub-Saharan Africa - an introduction uncertainty in Africa - shifting paradigms and levels of analysis. Part 2 Redefining boundaries: the African nation-state - an elusive challenge ethnicity and politics in Cameroon - a new kind of uncertainty in the 1990s naming and claiming - land-authorizing strategies in post-independence Zimbabwe. Part 3 Individual and group strategies: entrepreneurs as path-finders in processes of social change knowledge for sale? - the politics of university education reform in Africa, with a Nigerian example the way of the bricoleur pastoralists manoeuvring in the drought-ridden Sahel. Part 4 Understanding African uncertainties - and beyond: everything can be negotiated - ambiguities and challenges in a time of uncertainty manoeuvring in uncertainty - on agency, strategies and negotiations.

The worker's dream of becoming an engineer

Abstract This article will discuss the dream of many young Swedish men from the working class to become engineers by way of night classes and correspondence courses. This was a culturally and economically important part of the “Swedish model” of modernisation and technical change. The article consists of three parts. In the first, the construction of the dream is analysed via ads and folders which from the 1930s to the 1960s and with varying arguments tried to entice young workers to study their way out of their class. In the second, the ideology and reality of the “triumph of ability” via correspondence courses is analysed with the help of Claus Offes notion of the “performance principle”, and its gendered contents is discussed. In the final part, the dream is set within the social‐democratic vision of social mobility through education as a means to a modern and class‐less society.