ABSTRACT
What we know about technologies, their innovation processes and outcomes is closely bound up with how we know them. Though the last chapter was primarily descriptive, this chapter and the one that follows map out the differing ways in which technologies, and in particular workplace technologies, have been interpreted and analysed. The analytical frameworks we adopt in an enquiry are important, embodying, as they do, assumptions about the world and about how we may investigate it. They thus pattern the tools and methods of enquiry and shape the kinds of understanding we are likely to reach. This chapter therefore advances a critique, from the viewpoint of our own
discipline, Science and Technology Studies (STS), of the dominant frameworks through which technologies and their implications have been understood. It identifies some of the key issues and debates around which we seek to carry forwards STS analysis. Chapter 3 continues this intellectual journey, though with a different goal of mapping out our framework for analysis. Following this short introduction to this chapter, we first explore the dis-
courses articulated by the proponents of new technologies, which we describe under the rubric of the ‘rhetorics of technology supply’. STS writings have engaged critically with these rhetorics for their ‘supply-side bias’: the claims advanced about the capabilities of technology were portrayed as coercive – a misleading means of ‘selling’ technology inappropriately to unwary potential users. They held out the promise that new technologies could be rationally and reliably deployed to deliver radical organisational improvement. Social scientific research has engaged critically with the claim that technology can be so rationally and instrumentally deployed. More recently, STS analysis has begun to move beyond critique and see how these discourses are a medium for shaping expectations, requiring serious (as well as critical) analysis. One of the key goals of STS has been to reject the traditional portrayal of
technologies (and the means by which we assess them) as being in a ‘technical realm’, somehow separated from social and political process. From its earliest days, STS has criticised this boundary, insisting that there is a
seamless web between technical and social (Hughes 1983). Much STS research has been concerned to reveal the social, economic and political agendas inscribed in what may be presented as narrowly ‘technical’ choices. An alternative account has emerged (broadly inspired by a ‘social constructivist’ agenda) which emphasises the contexted and contested character of artefacts (and also the criteria and tools by which we assess technologies). Much of this work highlights the role of organisational politics: the struggles between groups with differing organisational settings, expertise and commitments. Some have taken this point further, arguing that, as assessment criteria and assessment are contestable and contested, we can never really know the material properties of artefacts, but only beliefs about these properties. We thus find a marked polarisation between accounts of innovation in terms of the operation of ‘technical’ rationality versus its portrayal as a ‘political process’. Technology decision-making is always subject to potentially conflicting criteria under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information. It can never be a narrowly ‘technical’ rational process. Though some have concluded from this that political processes are in command and that technical assessments are subordinate to this, our analysis seeks to go beyond such dichotomised understandings. Instead, we seek to analyse and take seriously the work of assessment of technology. We explore how various assessment criteria are produced and refined in the course of decisionmaking over technology. Having outlined the perspective that we will be developing in this book,
we then explore some of the main forms of specialised and professional knowledge that bear upon the industrial application of technologies, focusing in particular upon Computer Science, and work emerging from Business Studies and Economics, encompassing both their general views about technology and more specific accounts of the development, adoption and use of packaged enterprise software systems such as ERP. We discuss the consequences of the fragmentation of the knowledge base between different specialist disciplines and the uneven development and fragmentation of research between different kinds of study, addressing the development, implementation and use of new technologies. Finally, we return to the domain of STS and explore the debates within this
field about how to theorise the relationship between technology and society – and, associated with this, about what explanatory models and methodologies are needed for an effective understanding. There has been a debate between various currents within the area of STS, in particular between those that emphasised the influence of broader social structures versus the efforts of particular actors. This has been an area of creative tension that has led, for example, to a reworking of our own analytic framework based upon MacKenzie and Wajcman’s (1985) Social Shaping of Technology (SST) perspective. We show how the Social Learning framework (Williams et al. 2005) emerged as an extension of SST, which seeks an integrated view encompassing, for example, the moments of technology design and implementation.
