Steve Woolgar

Abilities and competencies required, particularly by small firms, to identify and acquire new technology

Abstract This paper reports research undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of social scientists and manufacturing engineers, into the longstanding problem of technology transfer. It particularly focuses on the problem of how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) identify and acquire new technology from universities. The research comprises an analysis of the problem in terms of the social relations between universities and SMEs, and an attempt to build and establish the feasibility of a technology bank world wide web (WWW) site for use by SMEs. Using concepts from recent work in social studies of science and technology, it is argued that a key to addressing the problem is to understand SMEs as unconfigured users both of government and policy initiatives, and of technological innovation.

Social basis of interactive social science

There is a need to develop an analytic framework that can help decision making about the nature and style of interactive research activity in social science. Substantial intellectual resources for doing this can be found in science and technology studies which offer insight into the social basis for interactive social science (ISS). The analytic framework needs to take account of the wider social and political contexts in which ISS is emerging. The reflexive application of social science to ISS enables us better to understand the nature of social relations in general and the specific constraints (and opportunities) posed by contemporary regimes of accountability. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The discursive structure of the social-technical divide : the example of information systems development

The social and technical are commonly defined in opposition to each other. Yet technology practitioners are often quite comfortable with the idea that the technical is constitutively social. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a computerised information systems development project, this paper examines various usages of notions of ‘technical’. Attempts to situate the study at the ‘technical core’ of the project were met with a series of rebuffs. ‘Technical’ talk is to be understood as a categorising device which does boundary work. Technical talk invokes and performs a disjunction between networks of social relationships and stipulates a moral order with associated norms for acceptance and transition. The difficulty of penetrating the intelligibility of technical talk is understandable as a struggle in familiarising oneself with the routine social actions of a separate community. In addition, the private sphere of the technical is often distanced in time. The costs involved in journeying into the future are analogous to those of penetrating alien cultures. Ideas of progress and advance are often associated with the invocation of ‘the technical’. These connote a notion of timing which reinforces the distance and difference of – and hence depicts the costs involved in penetrating – removed sets of social relationships. Technical a. Appropriate or peculiar to, or characteristic of, a particular art, science, profession, or occupation (OED).

Read this and change the way you feel about software engineering

Abstract The paper is concerned with bridging the interdisciplinary divide between the technical and social aspects in the enterprise of software engineering. We do this by developing a postmodernist perspective on software engineering, disputing the notion of a grand narrative of software engineering (that is, an exclusive and embracing account of software engineering as a technical, rational project) by offering a series of accounts of a key meeting in a software project. These accounts both trade-off and disrupt a technical, rational narrative and indicate that the current situation in software engineering is one of stasis. However, our analysis indicates also a potential for diversity in software engineering with the valorization of differences, pluralities and heterogeneities at the expense of grand theory.

Balancing acts: reconciling competing visions of the way software technologists work

The practice of software development has been viewed by some as marked by anarchy and fragmentation and by others as characterized by order and universalism. How is it that two essentially opposite stereotypes of the way software technologists work have gained such prominence? The paper argues that both characterizations are valid and explores them in the context of an ethnographic and historical investigation of software process standards in a computer company. These tendencies toward order and disorder manifest themselves in several different ways which suggest that both forces are an inescapable concomitant of working with software. As a result, these tendencies must be managed in tandem to achieve an equilibrium rather than dealt with in isolation. This is likely to require sophisticated forms of professional judgement on the part of practitioners.