ABSTRACT
A prevalent feature of policy documents related to technology, health technology in particular, is high optimism over how new technology will enhance productivity and improve citizens’ lives.1 The present volume stresses that techno-socio-economic transformation is a complex reconfi guration process that takes place gradually. It tends to feature painstaking diffi culties in interweaving the novel with old technologies and work practices as well as developing new kinds of work, concerns, and arrangements that need to be iterated many times over before any actual productivity gains are achieved. This concerns both the form and functions of the emerging technologies, as well as the makeup of the work practices. In this view, too great a trust in the capacities of the latest technology is a dangerous artifact of far too simplifi ed analysis of techno-socio-economic transformation.
