This chapter introduces the theoretical background of the research. I began my journey by turning to one of the key traditions on detailed studies of innovation – the SST approach – which offered tools and concepts to describe the role of users and user-developer interaction in socio-technical change. Three decades of SST research on the process studies of innovation has demonstrated that innovations are not a linear and orderly processes but are rather long and winding journeys, where the best possible courses of action might be hard to perceive (Williams and Edge, 1996; Van de Ven, Polley, Garud et al., 1999; Höyssä and Hyysalo, 2009). Due to this uncertainty and contingency, learning between users and developers plays a crucial role in successful innovation (Williams, Stewart and Slack, 2005; Russell and Williams, 2002).
4.1 Social Shaping of Technology
The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on the research field of STS, research on SST (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985; Williams and Edge, 1996; Bijker and Law, 1992) and particularly the branches of SST that focus more carefully on users and uses, which are both the social learning in technological innovation (SLTI) framework (Williams, Stewart and Slack, 2005; Sørensen and Williams, 2002) and the biographies of artefacts and
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practices (BoAP) framework (Hyysalo, 2010; Hyysalo, Pollock and Williams, forthcoming; Pollock and Williams, 2008).
STS is a multidisciplinary field of research that, according to Sismondo (2008), looks at how science and technology are constructed. Research on SST, one of the most influential sub- fields of STS, departs from the notion that technologies “might have been otherwise” (Bijker and Law, 1994) and continues to problematize the “black box” of technology by drawing attention to the process through which an artefact has reached its form and contents (Williams and Edge, 1996).
The field of SST grew from critique of technological determinism: [SST] studies show that technology does not develop according to an inner technical logic but is instead a social product, patterned by the conditions of its creation and use. Every stage in the generation and implementation of new technologies involves a set of choices between different technical options. Alongside narrowly “technical” considerations, a range of “social” factors affect which options are selected – thus
influencing the content of technologies, and their social implications. (Williams and Edge, 1996: 866)
According to Sørensen (2002: 21) SST studies typically explore the negotiations between different groups and actors in order to make visible the choices between the different technical options potentially available during design and implementation. The negotiability inherent in the design of artefacts and the direction of larger innovation programmes is accentuated: the design process is seen as a “garden of forking paths”, where “[d]ifferent routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes” (Williams and Edge, 1996: 866). The mission is to indicate, problematize and open up these decisions for investigation. SST research seeks to demonstrate how organizational, political, economic and cultural factors influence technology design and to investigate what kinds of social and political choices were made in the course of the innovation process (Williams and Edge, 1996; Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003; MacKenzie and Wajkman, 1985). SST research offers a complex understanding of technological change which highlights the influence and interaction of a range of different players (Williams, Stewart and Slack, 2005).
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Early SST Research
The first wave of SST studies emerged throughout the 1980s, and the most influential strands were the social construction of technology frameworks (Pinch and Bijker, 1987; Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987; Bijker and Law, 1994) and actor–network theory (ANT) (Latour, 1987; Law, 1991; Callon, 1986; Akrich and Latour, 1992). Whilst the early SST studies privileged sites of design and development as the locus of their analysis, later SST research became interested in the processes of social shaping that take place during the implementation and consumption of new technologies (Sørensen, 2002). Early studies typically concentrated on demonstrating how “technologies embody and reflect dominant social interests in their form and features” and often analysed how “class, gender, military or bureaucratic interests” directed the technological development and its impacts on the surrounding society (Russell and Williams, 2002: 40–41).
In the late 1980s, Pinch and Bijker (1987) studied the interpretative flexibility around technological artefacts through a historical study of the bicycle in order to explain why some variants of an artefact die and some survive. They created the social construction of technological systems (SCOT) approach, which aimed at a multidirectional description of technological development. At the heart of their theory was the charting of relevant social groups around an artefact, which can be organized or un-organized groups of individuals who attach the same set of meanings to the technology. The application of the SCOT approach brought out the conflicts (technical, moral, social etc.) present on the development path and demonstrated how various solutions are in fact possible. Pinch and Bijker also described the process of stabilization, which means that the debate around an artefact reaches closure and one dominant meaning and form become prevalent (Pinch and Bijker, 1987; Bijker, 1987).
Prior to SCOT, another influential strand of SST emerged in the field of science studies from where it was also extended to explain the dynamics of technological change. ANT is a material-semiotic approach to studying questions related to power and controversy in the making of technologies or scientific facts. ANT sees technologies existing as part of a (more or less stable) actor network that consist of human and non-human elements. A central claim of ANT is that non-human elements (e.g. technologies or bacteria) also have the ability to
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act, and thus material elements should be analyzed in the same terms as human actors (the principle of generalized symmetry). By “following the actors” (Latour, 1987) the researcher gets to see the network of connections that make up the specific technological system.
Callon (1986) describes the process of translation through which an actor seeks to stabilize a certain version of the actor network. First comes the problematization phase during which the actor seeks to define the situation or the “problem” in such terms that the definer becomes an obligatory passage point in the resolution of the problem, in other words the programme of investigation. Problematization is followed by intressement, a series of processes through which the actor seeks to “lock” other actors to the roles proposed to them in the programme. Next comes enrolment, a set of strategies through which the actor seeks to define and interrelate the roles allocated to others. The final phase is mobilization, which refers to a set of methods used by the actor to ensure that the spokesmen for different collectivities were able to represent those collectivities (Callon, 1986).
In her influential work The De-Scription of Technical Objects Akrich (1992) followed the tradition of ANT and described how assumptions about the potential user were translated into the form of technical artifacts. She argued that technical objects embody the innovator’s attempts to predetermine the relationship between the object, the actors around it and their surroundings. This included predicting the way different actors interact and deciding what should by delegated to machines and what to human actors.
Designers […] define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways. A large part of the work of innovators is that of “inscribing” this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. I will call the end product of this work a “script” or a “scenario”. (Akrich, 1992: 208)
However, ANT and Akrich emphasize that there is no guarantee that the actors will play the part ascribed to them or that the users will de-scribe the objects in the way anticipated by the designer. Yet, in order to function technical objects must succeed
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in stabilizing the network of actors around them and integrate into the social fabric. And when objects are stabilized, they become “black boxes” and the sociotechnical facts that the objects
produce become “facts pure and simple” (Akrich, 1992: 221). Around the mid-2000s the focus of SST researchers extended to the neglected area of the implementation and use of technology. Research in this area had been advanced in the field of cultural, media and consumption studies, and from these grounds some researchers extended their analysis to include the role of users in shaping technology during phases of appropriation and use. These approaches – described as “SST mark 2” by their proponents (Russell and Williams, 2002) – are introduced in the following subchapters.