ABSTRACT
The field of human factors is discussed across chapters and is not represented by a chapter of its own. This deserves some explanation-where did we get these perspectives that we are talking about? Members of some communities of practice are not closely connected to other communities. For instance, until the recent emergence of the study of the sociology of expertise (e.g., Fleck & Williams, 1996; Mieg, 2001), sociologists who studied scientific practices and the sociology of technological innovation were generally not involved in dialog or collaboration with researchers in the area of Expertise Studies. Although some researchers in Expertise Studies are very active in the human factors community, a great many are not. Until recently, ethnographers who studied the modern workplace were largely not involved in dialog and collaboration with Cognitive Systems Engineers, and even saw the Cognitive Systems Engineering view as antithetical to theirs because of Cognitive Systems Engineering’s roots in an information processing approach. Researchers in ethnography and in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge would see little benefit in referring to their methods as CTA. Indeed, they might be a bit oἀ-put at the notion, because their field is, in part, a reaction against information processing psychology, and from their perspective CTA has its main roots in mainstream cognitive psychology. Such contrasts define and shape the boundaries of the various perspectives, boundaries that emerged and persist despite historical and contemporary cross-influences.
