A recent post comments on the value of biography as a source of insight into history and thought. Currently I am reading Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), which I am finding fascinating both for its portrayal of the evolution of a brilliant and unconventional mathematician as well as the honest efforts Hodges makes to describe …
Worker-owned enterprises as a social solution
Consider some of the most intractable problems we face in contemporary society: rising inequalities between rich and poor, rapid degradation of the environment, loss of control of their lives by the majority of citizens. It might be observed that these problems are the result of a classic conundrum that Marx identified 150 years ago: the …
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Designing and managing large technologies
What is involved in designing, implementing, coordinating, and managing the deployment of a large new technology system in a real social, political, and organizational environment? Here I am thinking of projects like the development of the SAGE early warning system, the Affordable Care Act, or the introduction of nuclear power into the civilian power industry. …
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Social construction of technical knowledge
After there was the sociology of knowledge (link), before there was a new sociology of knowledge (link), and more or less simultaneous with science and technology studies (link), there was Paul Rabinow's excellent ethnography of the invention of the key tool in recombinant DNA research -- PCR (polymerase chain reaction). Rabinow's monograph Making PCR: A …
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Marx’s thinking about technology
It sometimes seems as though there isn't much new to say about Marx and his theories. But, like any rich and prolific thinker, that's not actually true. Two articles featured in the Routledge Great Economists series (link) are genuinely interesting. Both are deeply scholarly treatment of interesting aspects of the development of Marx's thinking, and …
Thinking about disaster
Katrina flooding Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system. He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay). …
Transmitting technology
How do large technological advances cross cultural and civilizational boundaries? The puzzle is this: large technologies are not simply cool new devices, but rather complex systems of scientific knowledge, engineering traditions, production processes, and modes of technical communication. So transfer of technology is not simply a matter of conveying the approximate specifications of the device; …
Technology innovation in Chinese agriculture
It is a commonplace in world history to observe that China had achieved a high level of sophistication in science, medicine, and astronomy by the Middle Ages, but that some unknown feature of social organization or culture blocked the further development of this science into the expansion of technology in the early modern period. Chinese …
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Is a rail network a social structure?
figures: RER map of Paris; E. J. Marey's graphical representation of Paris-Lyon train schedules, 1885 What role does a rail network play within an adequate ontology of society? Is a rail system primarily a set of physical assets, a set of administrative procedures, or a set of embodied opportunities and constraints for other members of …
Technology and culture
Photo: Charles Sheeler, "Power, wheels", 1939; MFA, Boston Technology is sometimes thought of as a domain with a logic of its own -- an inevitable trend towards the development of the most efficient artifacts, given the potential represented by a novel scientific or technical insight. The most important shift that has occurred in the ways …
Understanding Society 