Science, Technology & Human Values current issue

Fallacies of Virtualization: A Case Study of Farming, Manure, Landscapes, and Dutch Rural Policy

Boonstra, W. J., Bock, B. B. — 2009-06-08

The recent rapprochement between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Science (PS) is induced by the broadened understanding of political action. The debate concerning the nature of ``the political'' produces an important question concerning the possibilities of an issue- or object-oriented focus for understanding political action. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate through an analysis of how relations between material and social entities are continuously recontextualized and decontextualized in social and political interaction. The authors discuss established approaches to explain the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is then used in a case study on the implementation of manure regulation in East Fryslân, the Netherlands, to illustrate how cases or issues are virtualized in political decision making, which produces initial presumptions that carry conclusive weight. The authors conclude that a broad understanding of the political in both STS and PS can only be sustained through an understanding of how relations between social and material entities are continuously decontextualized and recontextualized in political and social interaction.

G-COT: The Geographical Construction of Technology

Norcliffe, G. — 2009-06-08

This paper explores the process of technological innovation from a geographical perspective. Some explanations of technological change concentrate on the development of technology itself - in which makers play a central role, while other explanations focus more on consumption and the users of technology. In this paper, discussion will focus on interactions between makers and users, and on the particular places in which such interactions occur. It is proposed that these interactions, especially during the early phase of rapid product development, produce creative spaces. An adaptation of the social construction of technology (SCOT) model is therefore proposed which stresses the geographical settings in which rapid innovation occurs, and therefore is called geographical construction of technology (G-COT). The G-COT model is illustrated by the case of the Coventry bicycle industry from its foundation in 1869 to 1880 when this town had become the world's largest center of bicycle production.

National Innovation System: The System Approach in Historical Perspective

Godin, B. — 2009-06-08

In the late 1980s, a new conceptual framework appeared in the science, technology, and innovation studies: the National Innovation System. The framework suggests that the research system's ultimate goal is innovation, and that the system is part of a larger system composed of sectors such as government, university, and industry and their environment. The framework also emphasized the relationships between the components or sectors, as the ``cause'' that explains the performance of innovation systems. Most authors agree that the framework came from researchers like Freeman, Nelson, and Lundvall. In this article, the author want to go further back in time and show what the ``system approach'' owes to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its very early works from the 1960s. This article develops the idea that the system approach was fundamental to OECD work, and that, although not using the term National Innovation System as such, the organization considerably influenced the above-mentioned authors.

Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future Users

Wilkie, A., Michael, M. — 2009-06-08

This article considers how the figure of the ``user'' is deployed to imagine the assembling of location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we address the performativity of the ``user'' in the think tank Demos' publication Mobilisation. In the process, we analyze how discourses about users enact particular futures that feature arrangements of, for example, persons, mobile phone technologies, and political institutions. We present two narrative strategies operating in Mobilisation: first, the purification of the social and technological in the portrayal of futures and their impediments; second, how existing, emergent, and future users serve as ``narrative joints'', reconnecting the social and technological in the enactment of preferred policy trajectories. In conclusion, we explore Mobilisation as a `catalogue of expectations' in which the representation of a multiplicity of users is itself performative, enacting a particular future policy terrain while bracketing off others.

Prepaid Card Technology and the Concept of the Socio-Technological Aggregate

Koizumi, K. — 2009-06-08

This paper compares two case studies of prepaid card technology where the same ``technology'' is applied in two separate industries, the public telephone industry and the pachinko game industry in Japan. The different outcomes in the two areas are analyzed in terms of the functions of what is introduced here as ``socio-technological aggregates'' (STA). A socio-technological aggregate is composed of an initiating innovator component and heterogeneous components necessary for the technology to function in a given society. The analysis of technology as an STA gained insights from the phenomena of aggregates in other areas: the socio-literary aggregate created by Russell McCormmach in Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist; by the ``collage'' phenomenon created by Picasso, Braque; and others, and the socio-musical aggregates of John Cage. Two important aspects of an STA are: the bonding/managing component that dictates how a technology is applied; and the evaluator component that triggers multimodality.