Condición laboral de los graduados

Work in the constructivist tradition is concerned with the way organisational, political, economic and cultural factors influence the process of technological innovation and change (MacKenzie, 1996).⁴² It provides an alternative to technological determinism by proposing that technologies are shaped by the conditions of their creation and use. In other words, technology and society are mutually constitutive. On the other hand, it also denies simple social determinism by maintaining that technology does not emerge from a single social determinant.

Instead technological change evolves through choices (not necessarily conscious) between different technological options. These choices are in turn shaped by social factors. Thus there are always a number of possible outcomes (Williams & Edge, 1996).

The constructivist approach introduces a concept of technology as interpretively flexible, i.e. expressing the notion that technological artefacts are both culturally constructed and interpreted (Woolgar, 1996). Orlikowski proposes the notion of the duality of technology:

“[T]echnology is created and changed by human action, yet it is also used by humans to accomplish some action” (Orlikowski, 1992:405).

Based on the application of Giddens’s (1979, 1984) structuration theory, Orlikowski (2000) suggests that the notion of technology embodying fixed characteristics and thus leading to the perception of technology as an embodiment of structure is misleading. First, because the presumption that technologies embody specific stable structures is problematic, as technologies are not static and they are continuously modified by their users. Second, Orlikowski (2000) argues that only technologies-in-use, when this use is routinised and habitual, can be seen as rules and resources (structures), not the technology itself. That is, the structural consequences of technology come through habitual use. In this study, we see technologies as indeed socially shaped and, although embodying certain fixed characteristics, they can be (and will be) appropriated and re-interpreted by users in different ways. This means

42 Within the constructivist tradition there are three main schools: (i) the systems approach (Hughes, 1986, 1987); (ii) actor-network theory (Callon, 1986); and (iii) the social construction of technology approach (Bijker, Hughes & Pinch, 1987; Bijker & Law, 1992).

that the consequences of technologies are not pre-determined but are enacted through their use.

Technology can only be successful when it makes sense within the existing social relations within which it is to function, suggesting the crucial role played by the translation and even re-invention of technology into everyday contexts of use (Grint

& Woolgar, 1997). This articulation between technologies and the context of use through which their meaning and utility are constructed is, of course, a key theme within social studies of science and technology (McLaughlin et al., 1998). The

‘technical’ is always socially shaped and the socio-technical system can be re-invented, reconfigured in different contexts and take on greater or lesser degrees of

‘mutability’ and ‘mobility’ (Mol & Law, 1994; Latour, 2000). In this way technologies reflect the ‘congealed social relations’ (Grint & Woolgar, 1997) and heterogeneous networks that inform their construction (Akrich, 1992). The deconstruction of the ‘technical’ to reveal its ‘socially congealed’ properties does not mean that the technical has a materiality and functionality that has no value; indeed, one might argue that the more technologies are shaped by the social gauntlet of their construction, the more robust they are likely to be (Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons, 2001:Chapter 11).

3.4 Conclusion

There are two different views regarding the speed and extent of change brought about by ICTs in society. At one extreme, current developments are seen as a continuation of the past, while acknowledging that substantive changes, both qualitative and quantitative, are taking place in society (Beniger, 1986; Mulgan, 1991; Webster, 1995). At the other end, authors such as Bell (1988) and Castells (2001) declare that a fundamentally new kind of society (i.e. an ‘information society’) is emerging, in which ICTs have an all-pervasive revolutionary potential. Both strands in the debate do accord information a special place in understanding contemporary society, but differ with respect to their perception of the relationship between technology and social change.

It is the contention of this study that we are simply witnessing the effects of a new and powerful technology on historically determined social structures (Webster, 2000;

Thomas, 1995; Edge, 1995; Lyon, 1988). The study subscribes to Webster’s (1995) argument that the assumption that a technological innovation results in social change is the wrong point of departure to study technology and society. Webster (1995) proposes that it is misleading to separate the social realm from technology (i.e. to see no influence of beliefs and values on technological developments) and then to bring these two together when describing the ‘impact’ of technology on society.

In this chapter we attempted to assess both the analytical and evaluative claims of the

‘information society’ thesis. In doing this we have aimed to steer clear of the ‘hype’

of futurologists such as Toffler (1991) and Naisbitt (1998) and evangelical ‘techno-boosters’ such as Negroponte (1996) and Tapscott (1996), and have focused more on the historical and contextual assessment of the information society concept found in the scholarly social science literature. Scholars like Manuel Castells and Daniel Bell have argued that we have or are set to enter an information society based on criteria ranging from technology, to occupational changes, to spatial features. Though these criteria appear at first glance robust, they are in fact vague and imprecise, incapable on their own of establishing whether or not an information society has or will arrive sometime in the future. The sum of the changes inherent in what proponents refer to as the information society, which supposedly amounts to a shift beyond industrial capitalism, is at best debatable. It seems more a matter of faith than hard evidence.

In the next chapter we will show that the ‘hype’ surrounding the information society, and the accompanying technological determinism, has filtered into the ICT, poverty and development literature. The ‘technology-driven modernisation’ model of development advocated by the ICT optimists is grounded in assumptions of technological determinism which allow the complex political factors influencing poverty and inequality at local, national and international levels to be hidden, or at least to go largely unquestioned. The implicit assumption that the new technologies are apolitical and value-neutral, and that technology is separate from society and acts to define social structures and human interaction, is also quite pervasive in the ICT, poverty and development discourse of the international donor community and of many Third World governments, including South Africa.

The problematic nature of apparently neutral assumptions of technological development and the emergence of a ‘new’ information society has been underscored in this chapter. Such a purely technological reading of technical capabilities inevitably neutralises or renders invisible the material conditions and practices, place-boundedness and thick social environments within and through which these technologies operate. Failure to address these assumptions may lead social scientists to become complicit in distracting attention away from the very ‘real’ global economic, social and cultural inequalities, to ‘virtual’ inequalities which merely hide an unwillingness to address the core failings of the ‘development’ paradigm.

Chapter 4