ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter lays out the principal motivation of this book, which is to demonstrate how technological experiences and technological outcomes are deeply embedded in social contexts. In this chapter, I provide the conceptual foundations of the book, which are derived from the economic sociology of technological change and technological processes. Here, I introduce to the reader a co-constructionist approach to understanding technological change, which argues that technology and society co-construct and influence one another (as opposed to the process being unidirectional, as what most development policy and popular opinion erroneously assumes). This chapter illustrates the treatment that the literature has accorded to understanding and analysing the interaction between technological change and sociological structures and processes. Given that each study employs different conceptual foundations for its particular case, this chapter does not attempt to lay out every single one of these foundations at one go (to avoid the risk of cluttering the book head on with a plethora of concepts and theory) but instead explains why different social groups and different settings require a varied palette of conceptual and methodological frameworks. With this, the book moves on to each empirical study.
