Knut Holtan Sørensen

Tacit Networks, Heterogeneous Engineers, and Embodied Technology

Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved this lack of concern with the meso level. This article suggests a more critical evaluation of this transfer, along with a review of the now popular assumption of a high degree of similarity between science and technology. Two case studies show how meso-level considerations are important to an understanding of the nature of technological innovation and illustrate the lack of similarity between scientific and technological development.

Making sense of global warming: Norwegians appropriating knowledge of anthropogenic climate change

This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts’ disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of political inaction, and considerations with respect to everyday life. These sense-making devices allowed for ambiguous outcomes, and the paper argues four main outcomes with respect to the domestication processes: the acceptors, the tempered acceptors, the uncertain and the sceptics.

Walking the line? The enactment of the social/technical binary in software engineering

This article shows how professional communication practices with customers are accounted for in software engineering. It looks at how communication and related activities are enacted and placed in relation to the so-called social/technical binary while also critically engaging with analyzing how this dualism is performed. Empirically, the article investigates how software engineering and communication with customers are framed in two settings: at one Norwegian university and in three Norwegian software companies. At the university, an effort was made to reframe software engineering as a communication-oriented rather than technically focused activity. However, faculty as well as students reproduced a technically focused framing of software engineering that externalizes communication. The framing observed in the companies was different, with less outspoken distinction between ‘technical’ and ‘social’ aspects. Rather, communication with customers was described as based and dependent on technical knowledge. However, a closer reading shows how the social/technical binary is maintained by a consistent reference to the technical in professional terms while communication is described in lay terms. Implications of this are discussed in the conclusion.

Cultural Politics of Technology: Combining Critical and Constructive Interventions?

There is an interesting symmetry between the two otherwise strikingly different efforts to provide a critical outline of the politics of technology on one hand, and to provide normative tools to develop technology policy on the other. This common feature centers on the concept of power and the way this is embedded in economic interests and legal strategies. The traditional, critical politics of technology approach, eminently represented by Langdon Winner (1977, 1986), is concerned with the isomorphism of technology and capitalism and the resulting democratic deficit in relation to technological development. In this view, technology is either shaped by economic and big government/military concerns or it is more or less out of control for everybody. Technology policy, on the other hand, has for a long time been a quite pragmatic area where the basic tenet has been to leave technology on its own, or, rather, to the forces of the market. If problems should occur, they may be managed by the use of the economic and legal instruments that governments have at their disposal. The rhetorical question asked by Winner (1980), “Do artifacts have politics?” was counterpoint to the widespread perception that technology was a neutral instrument of cultural, social, and economic progress. Rather, he argued, technologies may be instruments of particular, well-defined political agendas. While some doubts have been raised regarding the empirical validity of one of Winner’s examples (Woolgar and Cooper 1999; Joerges 1999), there is broad agreement within technology studies that artifacts are not innocent, neutral instruments to serve the advancement of humankind. They have been designed to achieve specific purposes; technologies are inscribed with designers’ tastes and preferences, which may or may not be of an explicit

Out of the boy's room? A critical analysis of the understanding of gender and ICT in Norway

The issue of gender and ICT and the concern about an emerging digital divide in Norway have been dominated by a fear that the symbolic content and practices around ICT—epitomized in the hacker stereotype—are turning women off by making them feel like entering a “boys room” when using ICT. State feminist policies have been developed to cope with these challenges, directed at schools and universities in particular. This paper provides a critical discussion of the state feminist understanding of gender and ICT, to argue the need for a more heterogeneous approach.

A ROM of One's Own or a Home for Sharing? Designing the Inclusion of Women in Multimedia

In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such initiatives, a CD-ROM called JenteROM and a webservice called HjemmeNett, based on interviews with the most prominent actors of the respective design constituencies. The analysis focuses on the ways gender is constructed in multimedia form and content, in order to explicate gender as a process of social learning. What is observed is a set of ongoing transformations of gender as well as computers, related to controversies about proper definitions of gender and femininity as well as about how new media content and form should be designed in order to cater to womens interests.

Technology and Industrial Democracy An inquiry into some theoretical issues and their social basis

The issue of the possible impact of technology on industrial democracy is explored theoretically, using two different approaches — sociotechnical theory and the Marxist labour-process approach. Within each of these approaches, a model of the interaction between technology and democratization is developed to illustrate how different theoretical conceptions produce different problematics and expose a seemingly similar issue in nearly non-comparable ways. The social basis of these differences is also discussed, and the necessity of further theoretical work is argued.

Designing a ‘green’ building: expanding ambitions through social learning

The process of creating a specific building – Miljøbygget in Trondheim, Norway – is analyzed in order to understand how the project teams ambitions expanded to embrace ‘green’ issues and create new targets. The decisions and roles of key actors are investigated regarding these goals and criteria. The analysis draws on two concepts. First, translation theory is used to highlight the potential role of new knowledge or technology that originates outside of the project. Second, the concept of social learning is employed to understand the process of expanding ambitions, developing goals and criteria within the project, and how this is related to the collective exploration, discovery and analysis of new practices. The wider implications are considered with respect to innovation in the construction industry. The projects initial moderate energy efficiency ambition was transformed, first into stricter energy efficiency goals, then into broader environmental aims. The resulting innovation is an ambition-enhancing, experience-based and enthusiasm-driven process of social learning in the project team, marked by interpersonal trust, including trust regarding competence and contractual relations. Translation efforts were also found to be important for bringing new knowledge into the project. The conclusion discusses some policy implications.

The role of social science in engineering

Publisher Summary Science, mathematics and the liberal arts have been used to strengthen the social status of engineers. Insofar as social science subjects were made part of engineering curricula, the underlying reasoning seems to have diverged. In an era that seemingly celebrates interdisciplinarity where technology is no longer the exclusive preserve of engineers, one might imagine that it would be rewarding to review research into the influence that social science has had upon engineering. For a long time, people have argued that social science issues should be given more prominence in engineering curricula. More to the point, social studies of technology have repeatedly observed how important the understanding of the social world is to successful engineering. This emanates especially from the consistent reconceptualisation of technology as seamlessly sociotechnical, as an outcome of combining so-to-speak nature and culture.

Mismatch or misunderstanding? Calculation and qualculation among economists and consumers in their framings of the electricity market

This paper reports on a study of how economists engaged in energy policymaking and household consumers frame the electricity market, based on interviews with prominent energy economists and focus group interviews with household consumers. Drawing on economic sociology, and above all the contribution of Michel Callon, we analyse framing processes involved in the sense-making with regard to the electricity market, including electricity consumption and the understanding of how households act with respect to the market. It was found that the economists drew predominantly on a framing of the electricity market according to their theoretical understanding of markets, considering consumers as calculative agents in a strict sense. In contrast, the consumers argued a more inclusive and complex framing of the electricity market by also emphasising moral, social and political issues. Thus, the consumers appeared to be qualculative rather than just calculative agents. This different framing did not emerge from consumers’ misunderstandings or their being misinformed about market mechanisms. Rather, we observed a mismatch between the energy economists and the household consumers regarding the underlying rationality of their framings, how they perceived consumption of electricity, and what they included and excluded in the framing of the market.