ABSTRACT
Understanding how and why new technologies become embedded in health services, and how they shape – and are shaped by – the social contexts in which they are enacted has become an important focus of recent sociological writing about health and medicine. Crucial to the emergence of this body of literature have been theories of ‘social shaping’ which are largely drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that focus on the reciprocal relations between society and technology, and argue that technologies, the actors that employ them, and the conditions in which they are employed are socially constructed (Fox 1996; MacKenzie 1998;Wajcman 2002). While much important research in sociology has focused on the construction, trajectory and forms of innovation in science and technology, other work has pointed to their implementation in practice as a core problem (Linton 2002; Greenhalgh et al. 2004). It is implementation, as well as innovation, that is the focus of this chapter.
