Glossary
Content
Compiled by Stewart Russell and Robin Williams and reproduced from: S Russell & R Williams, ‘Social Shaping of Technology: Frameworks, Findings and Implications for Policy’, in K Sørensen & R Williams (eds.), Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2002)
| Term | Representative authors | Concept and comments |
|---|---|---|
| Actor network | Callon, Law, Latour | An actor, sociotechnical entity or technology, conceptualised as an emerging and increasingly stabilised network of associations between diverse material and non-material elements - artefacts, humans, texts, symbols, concepts, etc. ANT usually follows the network-building strategies of a central actor. It stresses the mutual constitution and transformation of elements in the process, and the generation of social phenomena - agency, knowledges, institutions, power - as effects of network-building. |
| Alignment | Molina | Processes in which the views and interests of innovation players - members of a sociotechnical constituency, potential customers - are aligned in successful innovation. |
| Appropriation | various | Processes in which technologies are adopted and incorporated by users into particular social and technical settings, including local practices and culture. |
| Closure | Pinch & Bijker | By analogy with the emergence of scientific consensus, a process by which, or the point at which, interpretations of an artefact (or an institution or process) by different social groups - conceptions of design and use, value and significance, or in particular, its 'self-evident' essential character - are brought into agreement or one interpretation becomes dominant. |
| Codes / encoding | Feenberg, Mackay & Gillespie, Mollinga & Mooij | System of rules (/process) through which broader social structures pattern local technological practice, dominant social objectives and criteria are incorporated, or (Feenberg 1991) 'the construction and interpretation of technical systems [is brought] into conformity with the requirements of a system of domination'. |
| Co-evolution, co-production, mutual shaping | various | Process in which technologies and social organisation or culture, or specific elements of each, are jointly created - in contrast to depictions of two separate spheres interacting or of one determining the other; e.g. industrial automation products are condensations of past work organisation as much as tools for transforming organisation. |
| Configurations, configurational technologies | Fleck | '[M]ore or less unique assemblies of [material, organisational, procedural] components, some standardly available, others specially developed, built up to meet the particular requirements of user organisations' (Fleck 1988b). Stresses that complex technologies, especially IT systems, are often not acquired as integrated systems but assembled to suit specific applications and contexts. Highlights the scope for innovation during implementation and diffusion, and different possible technology supply strategies. |
| Constructive technology assessment | Rip, Schot | Strategy for steering and managing technological change which seeks to integrate continuous or iterative anticipatory assessment of sociotechnical outcomes and effects into design and development as well as implementation. CTA aims to overcome the traditional institutional and temporal separation of policies for innovation and control. |
| Critical events | Vergragt, | Crucial points in innovation processes at which directions are decided, changed or consolidated, and which profoundly affect subsequent possibilities. |
| Delegation | Latour | Strategy, process or act of allocating a social control function to a material artefact - in contrast to organisational or cultural mechanisms. |
| Development arena | Jørgensen & Sørensen | '[C]ognitive space that holds together the settings and relations that comprise the context for product and process development that includes: a number of elements such as actors, artefacts and standards that populate the arena; a variety of locations for action, knowledge and visions that define the changes of this space; and a set of translations that has shaped and played out the stabilisation and destabilisation of relations and artefacts' (Jørgensen & Sørensen). Accommodates analysis of the development and interaction of multiple networks. |
| Distributed innovation | various | Structure of innovation process with constitutive activities dispersed in space, connected in diverse and asynchronous ways and involving heterogeneous actors (Rammert). Contrasts with depictions of predictable sequence, stability and functional organisation in innovation. |
| Domestication | Lie, Sørensen, Silverstone | Process by which technologies are made to work and are given meaning by individuals, collectives, institutions - acquired, placed, interpreted and integrated into practices. Emphasises the active role of users in defining the use and significance of technologies in everyday life. |
| Embedding/disembedding/re-embedding | Rip, Schot | Process of integrating technologies into/extracting from/ reintegrating into local contexts of use. |
| Enrolment | Latour, Callon | Process in network-building in which actors' support is gained for development of a sociotechnical entity, their role defined and their interests and identities orientated to suit. |
| Entrenchment | Collingridge | Process in which a technology becomes firmly embedded in its use context, particularly through the establishment of supporting institutions or infrastructure, systemic interdependence, economic advantage, shared evaluations, and their mutual reinforcement; or the stable state of such a sociotechnical arrangement. Highlights and accounts for the difficulty of removing, changing or controlling the technology. |
| Guiding principle | Elzen, Enzerink, van de Poel | A rule or a set of fundamental rules - those at the top of the hierarchical set which forms a regime - which patterns innovative activity. |
| Heterogeneous engineering | Law | Practice or process in which engineers and other technical workers grapple with a variety of social relations and actors as well as technical artefacts in producing technological change. Stresses the requirement for diverse forms of knowledge and practice. |
| Innofusion | Fleck | Innovation in the process of diffusion - the way in which artefacts, rather than being fixed at the design stage, are transformed in their implementation and use, in the course of the 'struggle to get the technology to work in useful ways at the point of application' (Fleck 1988a). An important mechanism through which user needs and requirements are discovered and incorporated. Contrasts with conventional notions of diffusion of stable artefacts or techniques. |
| Innovation journey (or biography) | Rip, Rammert | The course of development of an innovation. Stresses non-linearities and branchings, and acknowledges that artefacts may be transformed radically from the original concept. |
| Interpretative flexibility | Pinch, Bijker | Scope for the attribution by different groups of different meanings to an artefact, according to their different backgrounds, purposes and commitments. |
| Network externalities | Arthur, David | Increased benefits of a network technology (e.g. telephone) to an individual as the number of other users increases. May explain both the difficulties in establishing new inter-operating technologies and the stability of entrenched technologies and standards. |
| Niche | Vergragt, Kemp, Schot, Hoogma & others | A protected space for the early development of innovations, in which the effects of selection pressures are lessened or suspended. |
| Obduracy | Law | The difficulty for a technology developer of overcoming technical constraints and problems or of changing an existing entity, often seen as an emerging property of a sociotechnical network and therefore attributable to material and social factors and their interweaving. |
| Paradigm | Dosi | Shared outlook or mindset within a community of technical practitioners which guides and constrains processes and directions of innovation. Consists of exemplars and search heuristics - assumptions about appropriate directions to pursue and problems to work on; knowledge, techniques and materials to draw on; model solutions and explanations; criteria of progress. Indicates means by which wider economic and political objectives and commitments are mediated into technical practice. |
| Path dependence | Arthur, David | Emergence of constraints on change of direction through cumulative investment or progressive entrenchment - in effect, advantages one technological option, often by virtue of its earlier appearance and contributes to the exclusion of alternatives. |
| Product space | Cawson, Haddon & Miles | Conceptual space representing general agreement on the functionality required for a new product but in which competing designs with overlapping functionality are put forward. |
| Promise-requirement cycle | van Lente | Interactive and iterative process in which visions of the form, functionality and significance of a technology are articulated and matched to requirements and expectations of potential users and wider constituencies. |
| Regime | various | Multi-layered set of rules and grammar operating in and derived from the complex of 'scientific knowledges, engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, and institutions and infrastructures that make up a technology' (Geels & Schot 1998). A regime '[guides] technological development and its embedding in society ... [and] orients actions and perceptions' (Rip & Schot). The concept captures structural aspects of institutions - beyond the sociocognitive and technical community focus of paradigm - which pattern innovation and adoption. |
| Script/ inscription | Akrich, Callon, Latour | Set of rules or meanings embedded in an artefact, procedure or representation which attempts to prescribe the behaviours of users and conditions of use so as to enable the realisation at a distance of the function of the entity as intended by the developer or controller. |
| Selection environment | Nelson & Winter | Set of conditions favouring the development and adoption of particular kinds of innovation. Associated with an evolutionary metaphor for technological innovation: technological activity produces variations from which are selected those best suited to the context. |
| Social learning | various | Protracted process entailed in creating and appropriating new technologies, in which developers, implementers and users learn from experience and interaction. The process is seen not just in individual and cognitive terms but as necessarily social and political and entailing institutional change: the concept stresses negotiation and interaction among a wide range of actors, subject to conflicts and differences of interest and power. It flags the active and reflexive role of actors involved in a 'combined act of discovery and analysis, of understanding and giving meaning, and of tinkering and the development of routines' (Sørensen 1996). The concept serves to alert participants, managers and policy makers to the necessity of the process and what is required to facilitate it. |
| Sociotechnical | various | Character of processes, knowledges and entities in which social and technical elements are closely interwoven. The adjective is used to stress the pervasive technological mediation of social relations, the inherently social nature of all technological entities, and indeed the arbitrary and misleading nature of distinctions between 'social' and 'technical' elements, institutions or spheres of activity. |
| Sociotechnical constituencies | Molina | '[D]ynamic ensembles of technical constituents (expertise, tools, machines, etc.) and social constituents (people and their values, interest groups, etc.) which interact and shape each other in the course of the creation, production and diffusion of specific technologies' (Molina 1992a). Analysis focuses on how the resources needed to build new technologies are assembled, and how this process shapes innovation. |
| Sociotechnical ensembles | Bijker | Continually changing associations of social, technical, semiotic, etc. elements. Stresses the heterogeneity and contingency of assemblages and may avoid the connotations of 'system'. |
| Sociotechnical landscape | Rip, Schot | Context of existing sociotechnical institutions which pattern specific processes of technological change. |
| Sociotechnical systems | Hughes | Assemblages of technical, organisational and other elements. Concept tends to stress interdependence of elements, importance of functional adjustment of elements and linkages for overall performance, and a system-level dynamic determining development and constraining change. Arguably inappropriate for assemblages where the system metaphor would overemphasise stability and internal coherence. |
| Stabilisation | various | Process by which a technological form becomes settled from a period of conflict, negotiation or indeterminacy, particularly as visions for the technology take social and material form, or, for network theorists, by virtue of the stabilisation of the heterogeneous relations of which it is a product or a part. |
| Strategic niche management | Hoogma, Kemp, Schot, Weber | Set of principles and practices for creating and managing the protected spaces in which a set of related innovations can be developed and introduced. Entails both pursuing appropriate changes in regimes influencing those developments and in turn using the emerging cluster of developments to further that shift. |
| Technological frame/framing | Bijker | Structure of rules and practices (or process of applying such) which enable, guide and constrain technological development in specific areas. Contains heterogeneous elements - social and cognitive; includes exemplary artefacts, scientific theories, values, goals, test protocols, tacit knowledge, central problems and related strategies. The analysis depicts the frame being drawn on, and in part constituted, in the process of stabilisation, and both needing sustaining and undergoing continual change. |
| Trajectory | Dosi, Nelson & Winter | Direction of advance of a technology within a generic form, often expressed in terms of change in a specific measure of performance or characteristic accepted as representing improvement. Represents 'the pattern of normal problem-solving activity' (Dosi) - in part the result of constraints exerted by the associated paradigm. |
| Translation | Latour, Callon | One of a sequence of transformations undergone by a developing sociotechnical entity. In contrast to the metaphor of physical diffusion in which artefacts and ideas are transported unchanged from one context to another, translation indicates that they are (and must be) transformed in the process by the actors involved. Or, in the process of building an actor-network, or of alignment and stabilisation more generally, the allocation or (re)definition of attributes or roles of actors, or a change (as in delegation) in the mode of achievement of a function. |
| Translation (or transformation) terrains | Bijker | Local settings which may pattern (parts of) an innovation process. Concept draws attention to features of those spaces - and differences between them - in which crucial changes in an emerging sociotechnical entity take place. |
| Vision | various | Developers' conception of the form and features of a new technology, its functions and benefits, and the required new sociotechnical order in its domain of application. Developers deploy a vision to mobilise support and resources; the vision sharpens and shifts as the constituency is developed. |