The Politics of Socio-technical Intervention: An Interactionist View

In this article, we apply concepts from symbolic interactionism - a well-established tradition of interpretivist sociology - to investigate the social and political processes involved in a sociotechnical intervention. The intervention was designed to elicit operator involvement in an experimental trial of an advanced manufacturing system at an industrial site in Australia. The interactionist concepts of social worlds, boundary objects and trajectories are used to explore the interrelationships among the theoretical, practical and contextual elements of intervention. We believe that these concepts are flexible intellectual resources that can extend and enrich our understanding of the politics involved in the shaping of work and technology. Such an understanding is necessary if the fields of user participation and sociotechnical design are to move beyond the production of normative discourses and methods into effective interventions in the complex social environments in which technical decisions are made.     

Sociotechnical regimes,technological innovation and corporate sustainability: from principles to action

Increased environmental and social responsibility awareness, while producing unique opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovations, has generated important challenges for companies. The path to sustainability requires corporate strategies that guarantee profitability, managing simultaneously environmental and social responsibilities. An attempt is made to provide an understanding of sustainable development thinking in business, discussing how the combination of the transition management, adaptive planning and sociotechnical approaches can contribute towards an effective implementation of sustainability-oriented innovations in business context. The article proposes a conceptual model, which incorporates this contribution, developed through a four-year action-research project carried out within a large Brazilian energy company – Petrobras. The authors argue that the adoption of the proposed model by other large firms operating in different societal sectors might trigger organisational changes related to current corporate practices of technological innovation management.     

Towards Sustainable and Democratic Urban Transport: Constructivism,Planning and Policy

This paper takes a constructivist technology studies approach to understand the changing shape of transport and mobility, tracing in particular the growing importance of discourses around sustainability and democratic involvement in transport and urban planning as well as in wider public debate. The concept of sociotechnical frames is used to capture the interaction between the technical, social and cultural dimensions of transport and mobility; sociotechnical change comes about when these different elements begin to pull apart from each other. In light of this framework, the paper examines shifts within the sociotechnology of transport and mobility since the late 1980s and draws on a case study of a controversial development dispute in the UK to examine how notions of sustainability and public involvement are constructed within local contexts. The case study highlights especially issues around the relative power to bring about change of different actors within a frame.     

Managing the Technological Transition to Sustainable Construction of Buildings: A Socio-Technical Perspective

The construction of buildings brings about a substantial ecological load: about 40% of energy consumption and about 25% of material moved by our economy is due to the construction of buildings. New construction technologies and new building components would allow us to reduce the ecological load of buildings to a fraction of its present value. However, the problem of making our building stock more sustainable is only to a minor extent a technical one. The required change of technologies can only be managed by simultaneously taking into account technical potentials and their social context. Social studies of technology, with their focus on the construction of technologies as an interactive effort of various actors and on the inseparability of the social and technical side of sociotechnical systems provide a perspective to better understand the processes involved in the construction and dissemination of sustainable buildings. A number of strategies to manage technical change towards sustainability will be discussed: better integration of various actors at the supply side, shift to a market for innovative and ecological building services, improvement of user-producer relationships and integration of consumers into the innovation process.     

Managing the Technological Transition to Sustainable Construction of Buildings: A Socio-Technical Perspective

The construction of buildings brings about a substantial ecological load: about 40% of energy consumption and about 25% of material moved by our economy is due to the construction of buildings. New construction technologies and new building components would allow us to reduce the ecological load of buildings to a fraction of its present value. However, the problem of making our building stock more sustainable is only to a minor extent a technical one. The required change of technologies can only be managed by simultaneously taking into account technical potentials and their social context. Social studies of technology, with their focus on the construction of technologies as an interactive effort of various actors and on the inseparability of the social and technical side of sociotechnical systems provide a perspective to better understand the processes involved in the construction and dissemination of sustainable buildings. A number of strategies to manage technical change towards sustainability will be discussed: better integration of various actors at the supply side, shift to a market for innovative and ecological building services, improvement of user-producer relationships and integration of consumers into the innovation process.     

Upstream-downstream transactions and watershed externalities: Experimental evidence from Kenya

Where environmental policies or projects seek behavioral change, understanding underlying norms and preferences is essential to securing environmental outcomes. This study models a payment for environmental services intervention in an experimental field laboratory in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Upstream and downstream individuals are paired in a standard investment game, in which the upstream mover's investment represents land use decisions and the downstream mover responds with a choice of compensation payment. The experimental intervention introduces an enforcement treatment on the downstream movers' compensation decisions for a single round. Underlying social preferences and identity appear to shape individual transactions between upstream and downstream individuals. Upstream first movers are sensitive to the removal of the enforcement on their downstream partners in the second round, and make decisions consistent with crowding out of social preferences. The results suggest that environmental interventions may affect resource decisions for individuals who are not themselves direct targets of enforcement.     

The economics of education and policy: Ideas for a principles course

There are many aspects of the “economics of education” that would make excellent examples for introductory economics students. The author presents two topics that are central to the economics of education and to human capital theory: the economic benefit (or “returns”) to schooling and educational attainment as an investment. There are two key concepts the author hopes students get from this discussion. The first is that there are both private and social benefits of schooling whence we derive the rationale for government intervention. The second is that educational attainment is an investment decision with both costs and benefits, and some risk.     

Theoretical issues of gender in the transition from socialist regimes

This article applies a gender perspective to a consideration of the recent economic and political reforms in Eastern and Central Europe. After an introduction and a brief overview of recent empirical studies of the impact of women's economic, political, and social status, the paper explores the difficulties inherent in attempts to create an East-West dialogue on women's interests. The article proposes that these difficulties can be articulated by 1) identifying whether a political regime uses an essentialist (men and women have fundamentally different biological natures) or a social constructionist (most observed differences between men and women are socially created) view to define the nature of women; 2) identifying how these distinct views of gender relations are articulated in the philosophical underpinnings of the two political regimes (the liberal Western system that strictly separates the public and private spheres while assigning different activities for men and women and the socialistic/communistic system that subordinates social reproduction to the sphere of production); and 3) comparing how these views have been articulated in social and institutional arrangements of gender relations in the two regimes. The article then claims that an understanding of the interaction between gender relations, political theory, and social practices in both the West and the East is essential for understanding the problems involved in discussions of the political-economic transition and how it affects men and women.     

HEALTH CARE ACCOUNTS—A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE*

Canadian statistics of the health care delivery system are generated under a variety of concepts, methodologies, definitions, and classifications by the numerous individual units, institutions, and organizations involved. This paper presents an overview and a framework for satellite accounts on health care delivery. Its objective is to enable the organization of economic and financial information on health care delivery activities from different sources into a set of consistent statistics detailing current expenditures, current revenues, purposes of spending, and source and application of funds in the health care delivery system. It is recognized that this economic framework is only a first stage in establishing a complete health information framework which could link economic with social and demographic data. A sample set of accounts for the province of Ontario in the fiscal year 1977-78 is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of establishing such satellite accounts.     

Dynamics of social factors in technological substitutions

Diffusion models of technological innovations are often based on an epidemic structure which has a good fit to historical data but whose communication assumptions lack explanatory power. They assume a simplified decision process, uniform decision criteria across adopters categories, and a fully interconnected social structure. The objective of this paper is to show that the dynamics of social factors during technological substitutions have significant effects on substitution patterns. The success of a paradigmatic shift is not only a function of technological characteristics but also depends on change agents and many social dynamics. Such complexity requires analysis at several levels of granularity. We start with cognitive processes at the individual level using concepts from cognitive psychology and decision making under uncertainty and then move to interpersonal communications at the aggregate social level. We show that population heterogeneity generates different decision criteria and a social topology which greatly affect perceptions and the formation of expectations. The structure of interpersonal networks also explains how the relevance and credibility of information impact the critical mass dynamics of technology adoption. A more complete model accounting for social interactions provides a useful framework for understanding complex substitution patterns and reducing the risk of misreading the market.     

Beyond the profit motive: The post-industrial corporation

Global approaches to solving the world problematique are augmented in this paper by a grassroots approach which may encourage the business corporation to evolve into an organic post-industrial form. This post-industrial model embodies two main concepts. One involves the development of social accounting frameworks that encourage the pursuit of social welfare rather than financial profit alone. Results are presented of a computer simulation of such a framework, called the “return on resources” model. The second concept suggests that systems of corporate governance be extended to form a corporate community composed of investors, employees, customers, the public and others involved in corporate affairs in order to facilitate collaborative policy making. These two complementary principles comprise a broader equivalent of free enterprise that provides more appropriate decision-making processes for post-industrial society. This post-industrial paradigm of corporate behavior is believed to be technically feasible, and trends suggest that its adoption is quite possible. The power of business corporations could thereby be transformed into a humanitarian force for achieving sustainable increases in human welfare.     

Learning in,through, and about participatory technology assessment: the case of Nanotechnologies for Tomorrow's Society (NanoSoc)

In participatory technology assessment (pTA), technical and nontechnical communities convene to share their views on a sociotechnical challenge, in an attempt to render technology research and development more socially robust. Taking these commitments to transdisciplinary collaboration and co-construction of technology as entry points, this article describes key tensions that emerged in a Flemish pTA project on nanotechnologies, entitled ‘Nanotechnologies for Tomorrow's Society’ (NanoSoc). The tensions relate to how the terms of participation were enacted, the potentially conflicting aims embedded in the project's mission and methods, the various roles initiating pTA researchers (social scientists) assumed throughout the project's duration, and the deliberative-democratic rationale that sustains pTA frameworks at large. The article is a response to a pressing question posed to the author by pTA professionals, project participants and policymakers who ask publics to partake in science and technology decision making: now that NanoSoc is concluded, what can we learn from it?     

Understanding Agro-Holdings in Russia: A Commonsian Analysis

Agro-holdings in Russia are large-scale vertically integrated farms within the food processing industry which emerged in the economic, political, and social context inherited from the Soviet era and the post-Soviet market transition. Several economic researchers consider agro-holdings either as a transitory phenomenon or as a major innovation that enables economies of scale and scope. However, their sustainability does not support the idea of a transitory organizational form. Meanwhile, important aspects of their activity, as with the financing of social infrastructures and the partnership with public institutions, cannot be explained by the aim of productive efficiency. I argue that applying John R. Commons’ concepts of strategic transactions, going concerns, and futurity offers an insight enabling the understanding of agro-holdings in Russia as the result of actors’ capacity to form new working rules and compromises, reflected in going concerns that incorporate both the productive and distributive dimensions of their activity.     

Putting the ‘Amsterdam School’ in its Rightful Place: A Reply to Juan Ignacio Staricco’s Critique of Cultural Political Economy

This article responds to Staricco’s critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (sense- and meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulationist critique of political economy. Both lines of criticism of CPE are addressed. First, Staricco misinterprets the implications of treating semiosis and structuration as ontologically equal bases of social life. Second, Staricco mistakes our criticisms of the ‘Italian School’ in international political economy for criticisms of the Amsterdam School – an approach we have always warmly endorsed. He therefore misses our more nuanced claim that while the Amsterdam School emphasises the importance of semiosis, it has fewer concepts to explain how semiosis matters and why only some imagined class identities and concepts of control are selected, retained, and institutionalised. CPE addresses this lacuna by integrating critical semiotic analysis into political economy. Third, we provide the first detailed comparison of the Amsterdam School and CPE to provide a better understanding of the merits of each approach and to indicate where they might complement each other without claiming one to be superior to the other.     

Sociotechnical relations and development assistance

Process research is increasingly used to assess and monitor the implementation of development projects. In natural resource management and agriculture, the results have contributed to consensus building amongst village groups, agricultural extension and other governmental agencies, NGOs, and donors. This paper draws on Latour's science studies programme to compare these results with process research in industrial development projects. Process research should reflect sociotechnical relations. Latour's definitions of sociotechnical relations thus allow us to describe the context of development projects and add to the theoretical framework of process research. Ethnographic methods reveal the insider perspective and implementation logic of development interventions also in industry. An interpretation of the ethnographic results according to the layer of sociotechnical relations is proposed.     

Processes and patterns in transitions and system innovations: Refining the co-evolutionary multi-level perspective

This article investigates transitions at the level of societal functions (e.g., transport, communication, housing). Societal functions are fulfilled by sociotechnical systems, which consist of a cluster of aligned elements, e.g., artifacts, knowledge, markets, regulation, cultural meaning, infrastructure, maintenance networks and supply networks. Transitions are conceptualised as system innovations, i.e., a change from one sociotechnical system to another. The article describes a co-evolutionary multi-level perspective to understand how system innovations come about through the interplay between technology and society. The article makes a new step as it further refines the multi-level perspective by distinguishing characteristic patterns: (a) two transition routes, (b) fit–stretch pattern, and (c) patterns in breakthrough.     

海洋生态经济系统界定与构成研究

近年来海洋生态经济系统研究取得了突破性进展,但国内外学者对海洋生态、经济与社会系统及其相互作用的运行规律认识尚不统一、不全面,基础理论研究薄弱,与陆域生态经济系统研究相比,无论是相关概念界定还是运行机理探究都存在滞后性,为此,从生态经济系统的基本内涵出发,对海洋生态经济系统重新进行界定,并对构成海洋生态经济系统的生态、经济与社会三个子系统运行机理与功能进行系统研究,以弥补当前研究不足。     

A Model for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Economic Education in Primary Grades

Understandably, many economists have grave doubts about the possibility of teaching basic economic concepts to primary level children. Davison and Kilgore report on the development and use of their Primary Test of Economic Understanding. Some 500 second-grade pupils and 24 teachers were involved in their experiment. A control group made up of children who received regular social studies instruction was compared with experimental groups using primary level economics materials. Differences in the pupils' general academic ability, socioeconomic environment and teacher preparation were taken into account. The authors found that children in early elementary grades can learn certain basic economic concepts.