The Machine at Work E-Book

Keith Grint

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 425

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This highly topical book is a concise and accessible account of the relationship between technology and work. Firstly, it reviews and critically assesses a variety of recent approaches to the social and cultural dimensions of technology. Secondly, it examines the implications of these new approaches for existing ideas about the nature of technology and work organization.

At the core of much thinking about technology is the assumption that the technical character and capacity of artefacts is given. The enduring image of deus ex machina captures the idea that it is the essential capacity 'within' a technology which, in the end, accounts for the way we organize ourselves, our work and other life experiences. Recent work in the sociology of technology, by contrast, sets out relativist and constructivist accounts of technology, which begin to challenge this central assumption.

The Machine at Work includes a reinterpretation of the Luddites; a review of the social processes of development in information technology; a reassessment of theories of the role of technology in work; and an analysis of the common limitations of some constructivist and feminist perspectives on technology. The book argues that only a commitment to a particular conception of constructivism enables the kind of radical rethinking about technology and work relations that is needed.

This engaging and informative text will be of interest to students in a range of subject areas - from sociology, organizational theory and behaviour, to industrial relations, management and business studies.

Leseprobe

The Machine at Work

Technology, Work and Organization

Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar

Polity Press

Copyright © Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar 1997

The right of Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grint, Keith.

The machine at work : technology, work, and organization / Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–7456–0924–4 (hardcover).—ISBN 0–7456–0925–2 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–7456–6917–5 (ebook)

1. Employees—Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Human -machine systems. 3. Work—Forecasting. I. Woolgar, Steve.

II. Title

HD6331.G75        1997

          331.25—dc2196–37740           CIP

Typeset in 10 on 11 pt Times

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Lindsay Ross International Ltd, Oxfordshire

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Deus ex Machina

1 Theories of Technology

Introduction

Defining the issues

Technological determinism as myth

Socio-technical systems

The social shaping approach

Socio-technical alignments

Actor-network theory

Anti-essentialism

Conclusion

2 The Luddites: Diablo ex Machina

Introduction

Background

Competing traditional explanations of Luddism

The establishment perspective: rational technology, irrational Luddites

The traditional anti-establishment perspective: rational technology, irrational capitalism

The symbolic perspective: machine as metaphor

Anti-essentialist explanations of Luddism

An actor-network perspective on the Luddites

The entrepreneurs’ case: machinery as a Trojan horse

Conclusion

3 Configuring the User: Inventing New Technologies

Introduction

The technical/non-technical dichotomy

Technology as text

An ethnography of computer development

Configuring the user

Organizational knowledge about users

Difficulties of knowing the user from within

Alleged deficiencies in company knowledge about users

Stories about users

User singular and users multiple

Users don’t necessarily know best

Articulating the configured user: usability trials

Boundary work: the importance of the case

User documentation: correct readings of the manuals

Enacting the users’ context

Constructing natural users

Error and identity: the ‘wrong’ socket episode

The new machine meets its users

Conclusion

4 Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology

Introduction

Technological determinism, essentialism and anti-essentialism

The metaphor of building in/embodiment

Specifying antecedent circumstances

Having effects

Technological determinism and textual determinism

Feminism and technology

Reproducing technology?

Computerized genders

Conclusion: Deus Ex Machina or Machina Ex Dea?

5 Technology and Work Organizations

Introduction

Assembling organizations: from Fordism to flexible specialization

Organizations as consumers of technologies

Organizations as technological panopticons or empowerers?

Conclusion

6 What’s Social about Being Shot?

Introduction

‘Excessive’ relativism

The moral and epistemological case against scepticism

An onion model of the sociology of technology: between Russian roulette and a ‘hard case’

Conclusion: truth as the basis for political action

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

Parts of the argument in this book evolved as the result of our teaching the course ‘Work, Organization and Technology’ at Brunei University. Our thanks to students on that course, and to colleagues in CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology), especially Donna Baston, Chris Carne, Geoff Cooper, Clare Fisher, Rosalind Gill, Christine Hine, Leslie Libetta, Janet Low, Janet Rachel and Stuart Shapiro. Further afield many others have provided encouragement and assistance, including: Olga Amsterdamska, Richard Badham, John Burnett, Mark Elam, Hans Glimmel, David Held, Magnus Johansson, Nick Jardine, Oskar Juhlin, Steve K, Mihaela Kelemen, Marianne de Laet, John Law, Val Martin, Ulf Mellstrom, Russell Mills, Janet Moth, Adrian Randall, Howard Rosenbrock, Leigh Star, Lynn Winkworth, Ray Thomas and Frank Webster. Finally, we would like to thank Jacqueline and Sandra, Katy and Alex, Madeleine and Beki, and Kris and Francesca for everything else.

An earlier version of part of chapter 3 appeared as S. Woolgar, ‘Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials’ in Law, J. (ed.): A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. Sociological Review Monograph 38 (London: Routledge, 1991), 58–100. A version of chapter 4 was published as K. Grint and S. Woolgar, ‘On Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology’ in Woolgar, S. (ed.): Feminist and Constructivist Perspectives on New Technology, a special issue of Science Technology and Human Values, 20, 3 (1995), 286–310; and also in K. Grint and R. Gill (eds.), The Gender–Technology Relation (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 48–75.

We would also like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC’s Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) and EASST (European Association of Studies of Science and Technology).

Introduction: Deus ex Machina

If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent him. Now this eighteenth century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable.

Shaw, 1946: 227

It is a truism that technology is increasingly central to modern life. Of course, in a general sense, taken to include all kinds of objects, systems and artefacts, life has always been organized around and in response to technology. In more recent times, the fascination with and concern about technology has become more intense. This is due, in part, to the rate of emergence of new technologies and, in part, because the origins (inception and design) of new technology have become increasingly remote from everyday experience. Is technology now an indispensable part of lives? Do we have adequate resources to understand technology and to assess its relationship to our work and organizations?

This book evaluates various ways of thinking about technology. It asks whether existing analytic perspectives give us sufficient guidance in making decisions about its development and deployment. In particular it develops a critique of conceptions of the essential characteristics of technology. What is the basis of, what the consequences of and what, if any, the alternatives to, the idea that technologies have an essence?

The concept of ‘the machine’ has long provided the focus of concern, analysis, protest and speculation. Contempt for the machine has been a ‘stock literary attitude’ (Marx, 1964: 146), and provided the focus of neo-Romantic critiques of science in the early nineteenth century (Marx, 1988: 165). In the 1960s, radical protesters urged that we ‘rage against the machine’. This kind of metaphorical usage deploys idealized conceptions of machine without reference to the design, development and deployment of technology. Like many similar invocations of technology, it tends to be informed neither by considerations of how in fact technology operates – the machine at work as opposed to the idealized machine (see, for example, Button, 1993) – nor by what happens in practice when technology is deployed for certain organizational purposes – the machine at work as opposed to, say, in leisure and recreational usage.

The term deus ex machina provides a helpful motif in confronting idealized conceptions of the nature of technology. It is a term drawn from the world of Greek and Roman drama (appropriately enough, an arena replete with rhetoric, performance, persuasive accounts and irony), and refers to the timely appearance of a god to unravel and solve the plot. Deus ex machina refers to the convention of the god appearing in the sky, an effect which was achieved by means of a crane (Greek: mechane) drawn up over or on the stage and containing an actress or actor in the role of a goddess or god.1 The symbolic nature of a divine spirit being encased within a machine represents a typical response by many people to technology itself; indeed, the Enlightenment was, and modernism is, very much movements bound tightly to the idea of freedom through reason, a reason often manifest as technology.2

In the epigraph to this introduction, Shaw scorns those who rely on the notion of deus ex machina. For him, faith in this form of deity bespeaks a kind of intellectual laziness, whereby deus ex machina becomes an all-too-convenient prop. We might say that this imagery detracts from our appreciation of the social circumstances which generate and support technology; in Marxist mood, that deus ex machina is the technological opiate of the masses. In the context of the long-term development of culture, other commentators have remarked upon the naïvety of our persistent reliance upon technology to produce dei ex machina (Kuper, 1994).

Shaw was speaking of eighteenth-century conceptions of deity. But to what extent do contemporary ideas about technology still rely upon this image – the idea that it is the essential capacity ‘within’ a technology which, in the end, accounts for the way we organize ourselves, our work and other life experiences? The aim of this book is to examine to what extent and in what ways the imagery of deus ex machina endures. How does it constrain contemporary thinking about technology? Is it possible to escape the view of technology as containing essences? What are the practical and policy consequences of an alternative view? If we hold to a sceptical view of ‘the machine at work’ does it make any practical difference? Doesn’t the machine carry on working irrespective of our assumptions about its performance? Indeed, isn’t this precisely the notion conjured up by the very term ‘machine’: an unstoppable artifice that tramples all before it; what Thomas Carlyle (describing a railway journey in 1839) referred to as ‘Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle’ (quoted in Jennings, 1995: 212)?

Since ancient times the phrase deus ex machina has also been applied to an unexpected saviour, or to an improbable event that brings order out of chaos. ‘Now the term has come to mean any rescuing agency introduced by the author to bring about a desired conclusion, usually without regard to the logic of character or situation’ (Lass et al., 1994: 62). This more general application of the phrase suggests that the image of deus ex machina provides a resource for the discussion of issues and arguments that go far beyond technology. Notably, this general usage denotes conventional acceptance of the definitive effect on a situation of an introduced agency or event, the essential characteristics of which are understood as being capable of overriding ‘the logic of character or situation’. The essentialism associated with discussions about technology is thus part of a much wider set of interpretative conventions.

The central intuition we address is that many long-standing ideas about technology can be revised as a result of a critique of essentialism. Critiques of essentialism are evident in several interrelated currents in contemporary intellectual thought: post-structuralism, relativism, social constructivism, deconstructionism and post-modernism all exercise greater or lesser degrees of scepticism about the idea that phenomena contain essences. This book sets out to expose some fairly well established themes in the sociology of organizations and work – especially those clustering around the relations between technology and work – to some of these recent critiques of essentialism. In particular, we suggest, ideas about the relations between technology and work stand to be reworked and revitalized in the light of anti-essentialist currents in the sociology of technology.

Our goal is both to introduce and to assess this relatively new way of thinking about technology and work. Of course, in an introductory volume, it is not possible to offer a comprehensive review of, for example, constructivist sociology of technology, nor of technology and work. Instead, we have drawn selectively from each area upon those issues and arguments which seem most illuminating and controversial. For example, there are many varieties of ‘social constructivism’, and others are still emerging. In this volume we attempt no more than to outline some of the more significant differences within this broad church. We hope this will at least encourage a more extended assessment of the value of anti-essentialism for problems in technology and work.

For similar reasons, we are wary of attempting the straightforward application of one set of arguments and perspectives to another. The very heterogeneity of anti-essentialist perspectives is reason enough for being wary of attempting their straightforward application to issues in work and technology. ‘Application’ in any case connotes far too mechanical a relation between areas of research: it conjures the idea of disembodied methods and techniques which are transportable between substantive domains; it is as if we can – to quote the title of this book – see ‘the machine at work’ if we simply move it round the world. Instead we construe the relation between these areas more in terms of a conceptual conjunction. Anti-essentialism, we suggest, offers challenges about the ways we think of technology and of its various relations to work and organization. It suggests ways of recasting problems, perhaps more than solving them. Accordingly, our emphasis throughout is on examining the questions which anti-essentialism can provoke, rather than on championing any particular ‘ism’ as the final arbiter.

At the same time, our attempt to conjoin anti-essentialist approaches to technology with the sociology of work has a significance for wider debates in at least three main ways. Firstly, although perspectives such as social constructivism are sometimes regarded as ‘radical’, it is possible to show how limitations arise from their inability (or unwillingness) to carry through the scepticism about technical capacity. The identification of these limits provides useful pointers to where we should ask further, more searching questions about the ways in which our conventions of representation tend to make us take for granted the ‘essence of technology’. Secondly, we anticipate that our specific focus on the implications of anti-essentialist perspectives for views on technology and work will add to current debates about the nature and status of anti-essentialist arguments in general. In particular, our discussion points towards a major issue of general significance: namely, what is the utility of sociological perspectives which espouse a form of relativism? Thirdly, we note the strategic significance of social analyses of technology for issues in social theory. The history of technology can be usefully understood as a history of fundamental questions about the nature of humankind. Thus, new technologies with purportedly human capabilities often give rise to renewed questions about what it is to be human (Woolgar, 1987). At the same time, precisely because ‘technology’ (like science) is so often defined in opposition to ‘society’, reconceptualizations of technology provoke a reappraisal of the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘social’ (Woolgar, 1994, 1996a).

Our discussion begins with an introduction to varieties of anti-essentialist approach to technology, stressing in particular their common antipathy to technological determinism. We show that, on close inspection, there are significantly different varieties of technological determinism. We suggest that despite frequent (and often vociferous) programmatic disavowals of ‘technological determinism’, much recent scholarship reduplicates the apparent target of criticism, often by displacing rather than confronting the problem. This enables us to identify those points at which further and more virulent forms of the anti-essentialist question should be posed.

Chapter 2 illustrates this argument using a particularly infamous historical instance of relations between technology and work: the case of the Luddites. We show that by reinterpreting this historical episode with the benefit of anti-essentialist lenses, we can open up many of the tensions and problems which have lent the Luddites episode such resonance. We suggest that this is best done by pressing a particularly strong variant of anti-essentialism.

In chapter 3 we pursue the contention that the revision of ideas about the role of technology in work requires close attention to the social process of technological development. Here we discuss anti-essentialist perspectives which focus on processes of technological development, for example the argument of the ‘social shaping of technology’ thesis that contends the interpretatively flexible character of technological development. We are particularly keen to examine the extent to which anti-essentialist accounts of the production of technology provide useful insights into the consumption of technology.

In chapter 4 we turn to anti-essentialist arguments about technology as they feature in recent feminist writing. By drawing parallels between some of the aspirations and approaches in feminist and in constructivist accounts of technology, we point out their common limitations. Again we suggest that ambitions to counter technological determinism are compromised by the failure – in both feminist and constructivist accounts – to embrace a sufficiently thoroughgoing critique of essentialism.

This then enables us, in chapter 5, to focus in particular on the relation between technology and work organizations. We consider what anti-essentialism implies for existing views about the significance of technical developments for organizations and conclude with a brief review of the similarities between contemporary assumptions about the revolutionary and deterministic essences of information technology and those characteristics attributed to technology during the First World War, which were bound up with the killing ‘work’ of the tank.

Finally, this brings us to a key issue in the understanding of technology which we broached right at the beginning. In the context of widespread concern about the political and practical impotence of the anti-essentialist nexus (relativism, constructivism, reflexivity), what is the import of this alternative view for policy and practice? To what extent do these alternative approaches matter? In chapter 6 we consider the utility of sceptical approaches driven by anti-essentialism. We review aspects of the moral and epistemological debate over relativism and constructivism, concluding that only a commitment to a particularly virulent species of the genre will enable the kind of radical rethinking about technology and work relations which is needed.

1

Theories of Technology

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847

Introduction

It is commonly said that technology is consequential for the way we organize our lives. This book sets out to interrogate this aphorism. We take issue with its implicit assumption that some inherent property or characteristic of technology accounts for the impact of technology on our lives. We propose instead that myriad other aspects of our relation with technology must be taken into account if we are to achieve a useful understanding of its consequences. These other aspects include: our attitudes towards technology, our conceptions of what technology can and cannot do, our expectations and assumptions about the possibilities of technological change, and the various ways in which technology is represented, in the media and in organizations. We aim to provide a critical exploration of the view that these latter aspects of technology are pre-eminently consequential for the ways in which we organize our work, institutions, leisure and learning activities. This approach requires us to understand different ways of thinking about and representing technology at least as much as differences in the technology itself. Indeed, in what follows we argue for the need to treat the very idea of ‘the technology itself with considerable caution.

This chapter reviews existing perspectives on technology and explores the nature and implications of approaches which promote scepticism about ‘the technology itself. We start by examining a variety of definitions of technology in order both to illustrate their wide diversity and to note the implications of these definitions for attempts to understand technology. In particular we note the central importance of assumptions about the capacity and capability of technology – what it is and what it does. We then consider some of the more significant perspectives on, or theories of, technology, starting with technological determinism. This perspective holds that humans (human behaviour and even the course of history) are largely determined by, rather than having influence over, technology. It is a position which has acquired the status of a shibboleth. But, although ‘technological determinism’ has become the target of widespread criticism, it is difficult to find many who admit to holding this position.

We then proceed to examine various responses to technological determinism: socio-technical systems theory, the social shaping approach, socio-technical alignments and actor-network theory. It turns out that many of the more popular current approaches to the topic rescue technology from the clutches of technological determinism, only to reaccommodate it as one among several independent variables which determine action and behaviour. Although pluralist approaches no longer treat technology as the single (or even necessarily predominant) determining variable, it is still usually treated as a variable which stands outside social analysis. Thus, whereas in recent years many traditional sociological variables such as class, gender, organization and power have been increasingly treated as social constructions, many pluralist approaches continue to treat technology as largely impervious to the interpretative activities of humans. In these pluralist treatments, technology is assumed to have objective effects which can be measured and predicted and which are largely unaffected by the human actors involved. We refer to this tendency as ‘technicism’.1 We suggest that despite disavowals of technological determinism – in the sense that technology is no longer treated as straightforwardly facilitative or constraining – many recent accounts retain elements of technicism because they do not regard the capacity of the technology as analytically problematic.

This then enables us to examine the possibilities of pushing the sceptical line further. We consider what benefits accrue from a perspective which tries to maintain a sceptical stance with respect to technology as well as to all other actants, human or non-human. The possibilities of sustained scepticism are developed and refined throughout the rest of the book in order to demonstrate how this approach might be fruitfully employed in areas beyond the conventional remit of technology studies.

Defining the issues

What is technology? The answer carries a huge array of conceptual baggage that colours our assumptions about the significance of technology. The term technology derives from the original Greek ‘tekhne’ meaning art or skill. According to Collins English Dictionary (1979), technology is (1) the application of practical or mechanical sciences to industry or commerce; (2) the methods, theory and practices governing such application; (3) the total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc.

Several authors have emphasized the need to distinguish different aspects of technology. For example, Jayaweera (1987) suggests that ‘technology’ should first be distinguished from ‘invention’. ‘Inventions’ in themselves are neutral; ‘technologies’ are inventions which are organized expressions of a particular culture’s productive structures. Thus, developments such as gunpowder and the printing-press were Chinese in origin but since, according to Jayaweera, they did not affect the way the Europeans used them to expand their empires, they should be considered (neutral) inventions rather than technologies. Technologies only occur where ‘within that society there is a particular meeting of economic, social and political circumstances which automatically guarantees its exploitation and conversion into an instrument of economic and social power’ (Jayaweera, 1987: 202). This approach thus advances a model of technology based on the realization of technical potential through the operation of conducive structures and circumstances. Notably, it is not that the technical potential of an artefact is perceived differently by various actors. Instead, the take-up and exploitation of the (actual) artefact depends upon (extraneous) social factors. We shall meet a similar form of argument later when discussing the ideas of Habermas and Hill.

Penn (1982) proposes a distinction between ‘technology’ and ‘technicality’. ‘Technology’, for Penn ‘does not simply mean machinery around which there is a given “logic” of working or pyrotechnical relations; it involves negotiated structures of producing.’ Technology, as opposed to ‘technicality’, is dependent upon ‘the conflict between agents of capital and representatives of sections of workers’ (1982: 108). Although he underlines the importance of linkages between machinery and humans, Penn appears to substitute the independent nature of technology with the independent nature of ‘technicality’, which remains undefined.

Kaplinsky (1984) distinguishes between technology and technique. Technology refers to the general material content or process, such as microelectronics; technique refers to the way in which the general technology is developed for a specific purpose, often in conjunction with other technologies or work processes. A numerically controlled machine tool, therefore, is a technique. This distinction, between the broad technology and its particular application within a technique, allows Kaplinsky to resolve what he calls ‘the paradox of technology’: ‘the very technology which has the potential to liberate human beings has in fact had the consequence of making life considerably more uncomfortable for the mass of the population’ (1984: 170). For Kaplinsky, the movement from technology to techniques is the result of social rather than technical factors. These social factors include class relations which ensure the technology is refined into a technique that deskills workers, furthers the division of labour and supports a hierarchical system of control. They also involve the ‘military imperative’ which secures research funding for technological research, especially that leading to greater levels of sophistication. Finally, Kaplinsky notes the role of gender relations, especially the role of patriarchy in stimulating militarism and its associated techniques. As he concludes:

Neo-Luddism – the response drawn by many whose jobs are being destroyed by the technology’s diffusion – is not just futile ... but also seriously misspecifies the analysis. The problem lies not with the technology, but in a form of social organization which misuses its potential to produce frighteningly destructive weapons, inappropriate products and undesirable work processes. (1984: 180) (our emphasis)

Note here the assumption that technology has both an actual (inherent potential) capacity and a ‘normal’ form of deployment which is distorted (misused) as the result of contemporary social circumstances. This is a point to which we return below.

By contrast, Winner (1977) notes that definitions of technology alter through time and place. Thus, for the ancient Greeks, technology meant ‘practical arts’, as opposed to science or even art itself. Then, during the twentieth century, the term was expanded to include the tools, the process of work and even the total work organization. Relatedly, MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985: 3) note three different meanings: physical objects; objects in conjunction with related human activities; and knowledge. Winner’s proposed solution to the conceptual confusion is to describe the physical, inanimate devices, tools and so on as ‘apparatus’; technical activities, that is, those involving human action such as the application of skill, the use of procedures and so on, he calls ‘technique’; the social arrangements that combine ‘apparatus’ and ‘technique’ he labels ‘organization’; while ‘networks’ are ‘organizations’ that link ‘technique’ and ‘apparatus’ across space.

Common to all these definitions of technology is the attempt to distinguish between its human and non-human elements. ‘Non-human’ tends to be associated with the material, intrinsic, technical content whereas ‘human’ tends to connote the (merely) circumstantial context (social factors). The former category tends to correspond to an essential inner core of technical characteristics, whereas the latter is portrayed as merely transitory and epiphenomenal. However, despite the implicit tendency of many authors to fashion their discussions of technology in terms of this dichotomy, it is difficult to sustain the boundary between human and non-human, if only because humans do not act without some form of ‘artificial’ (i.e. humanly constructed) construction (clothes, tools, buildings, machines, etc.), and non-humans of this ‘artificial’ form do not act in the absence of humans. As we shall discuss, this mutual dependence of elements has led some sociologists to reconceptualize the link between technology and humans as a network rather than as parallel but separate systems. That is, they argue that we should consider the unity of human and non-human actors in terms of a ‘seamless web’ (Hughes, 1979) or as ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (Law, 1986). For others, however, the conflation of human and non-human undermines the procedures by which the real significance of technology can be assessed, for this is to ‘extend the definitions [of technology] so widely that it becomes virtually impossible to assess its independent influence on work and organization’ (Clark et al., 1988: 13).

However, much recent research has taken issue with the notion of the ‘independent influence’ of technology. For example, in broad terms, ‘social constructivism’ contends that technology does not have any influence which can be gauged independently of human interpretation. Instead, the influence of technology is constructed through human interpretation. Just as ‘facts’ neither speak for themselves nor exist independently of some agency which constructs them, technologies neither speak for themselves nor exist independently of human interpretation. Technologies, in other words, are not transparent; their character is not given; and they do not contain an essence independent of the nexus of social actions of which they are part. They do not ‘by themselves’ tell us what they are or what they are capable of. Instead, capabilities – what, for example, a machine will do – are attributed to the machine by humans. Our knowledge of technology is in this sense essentially social; it is a construction rather than a reflection of the machine’s capabilities. Of course, not any construction is possible; the construction of technological capacity is not itself unconstrained.2 However, the important point at this juncture is to resist the idea that constructions result from some imagined intrinsic properties of the technology. (As we shall see below, the constructivist literature is admittedly ambivalent about the nature and range of sources from which constructions result). Certainly, some constructions turn out to be more resilient and robust than others. Not every construction carries equal authority. Indeed, a central aim of social constructivism is to ask how and why this is so. Given that accounts of technological capacity are not a reflection of an inherent property of the technology, why do we believe some people’s accounts but not others’? How is it that some accounts are so convincing that we end up treating them as a direct reflection of the ‘actual capacity’ of technology, finally, and ironically, convinced that we never have been convinced? Before returning to these questions, we need to retrace our steps in the quest for that elusive and mythical beast: technological determinism.

Technological determinism as myth

As MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985) suggest, since not all technical ‘advances’ are enacted, since the same technology appears to have different ‘effects’, and because this implies that the specification of cause is an extremely complex task, models of technological determinism are suspect. However, as we have already indicated, it turns out to be difficult to identify straightforward examples of technological determinism which are susceptible to this knock-down argument.

At its simplest, technological determinism portrays technology as an exogenous and autonomous development which coerces and determines social and economic organizations and relationships. Technological determinism appears to advance spontaneously and inevitably, in a manner resembling Darwinian survival, in so far as only the most ‘appropriate’ innovations survive and only those who adapt to such innovations prosper. This perspective has a long history as well as an apparently radical future, from Saint-Simon and Comte (Kumar, 1978), to the rather more recent arguments of Leavitt and Whisler (1958), Bell (1960, 1973), Kerr et al. (1964) and Blauner (1964).

Such is the significance of technology that it provides a whole new battery of metaphors to interpret ourselves: the steam age helped us to ‘let off steam’ and to become mere ‘cogs in a machine’; the current computer technologies provides us with ‘default positions’ and ‘interfaces’, while the notion of technology out of control is perfectly encapsulated by Shelley’s Frankenstein (Badham, 1990; Edge, 1973; Turkle, 1984; Winner, 1977). Yet, for Veblen, technology is not wild and irrational but amoral, cold and rational; it is in, not out of, control:

The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation of the work to the worker ... the machine process gives no insight into questions of good or evil, merit or demerit, except in point of material causation, nor into the foundations or the constraining force of law and order as may be stated in terms of pressure, temperature, velocity, tensile strength etc. (Veblen, 1904: 310–11)

A familiar theme is evident here: mechanization generates mechanical cultures and routinized life-experiences. The long-term result is a decline in the ‘pecuniary’ or ‘business’ spirit of capitalism, based, as it is for Veblen, on individualism and private property. In effect, technology determines the shape and content of society. The relationship is isomorphic: society mirrors technology.

It is important here to highlight the modernist foundations of this approach to technology: in the Enlightenment tradition the machine, and the absorption and refining of human reason into the machine, lead to the most rational forms of human institutions. Moreover, since the design principles are themselves nurtured in the scientific laboratory of objective truth and reason, the organizational results should be universally applicable. Thus science, rather than human ‘needs’, prevails in organizations; and since technology is the carrier of human reason, organizations should be driven by technological requirements. The traces of scientific management (see Grint, 1991: 184–97), and indeed of many of the arguments grounded in models of economically rational behaviour, are easy to detect here. This contrasts markedly with models of organizations entrenched in notions of universal human needs, such as human relations, or rooted in psychoanalytic theories, like those emanating from the Tavistock Clinic (see Gergen, 1992; Stein, 1992).

In the literature on the sociology of work, technological determinism has a similarly ambivalent status. For example, although Woodward (1958) and Blauner (1964) are frequently cited as supporters of technological determinism, neither are cast-iron devotees of the approach. Woodward’s later work (1965) shifted away from this perspective towards socio-technical systems approaches. At one point, even Blauner seems to suggest something other than straightforward technological determinism: ‘modern factories vary considerably in technology, in division of labour, in economic structure, and in organizational character. These differences produce sociotechnical systems in which the objective conditions and the inner life of employees are strikingly variant’ (1964: 5). Nevertheless, he still maintains that ‘the most important single factor that gives an industry a distinctive character is its technology’ (1964: 6).3

Heilbroner (1972), regarded by many as an arch-determinist (see Bimber, 1990), actually calls for a ‘ “soft determinism” with regard to the influence of the machine on social relations’ (1972: 35). By this he means that technology is itself the result of social activity, that the direction of technological advance is responsive to social influences and that it must be ‘compatible’ with existing social conditions. For example, Heilbroner argues that labour-saving devices are of little significance for societies with plentiful labour. Thus technology should be relegated from ‘an undeserved position of primum mobile in history to that of a mediating factor’ (1972: 37). That said, Heilbroner goes on to argue that under certain conditions technology can become autonomous and can determine advance. However, this is ‘peculiarly a problem of a certain historical epoch – specifically that of high capitalism and low socialism – in which the forces of technical change have been unleashed, but when the agencies for the control or guidance of technology are still rudimentary’ (1972: 38–9). In other words, technology is sometimes allowed to determine the future as a result of inadequate social controls; by default, humans sometimes allow technology to become autonomous.

This is close to Winner’s (1977) sense of the term ‘autonomous technology’: politics become inscribed in technology in such a way that the technology appears neutral. Its apparent neutrality, according to Winner, then encourages us to adopt somnambulist habits: we are unaware of our real situation; we think we take choices but actually we make responses to a situation preordained by politically impregnated technology – the ‘technological imperative’.

Winner (1977) and Lewis Mumford (1966) assert that Marx, as the quote at the beginning of this chapter implies, lies within the determinist camp. However, both MacKenzie (1984) and Bimber (1990) insist that social (and economic) forces are more significant than technology for Marx. Cohen (1978) argues that the only theories that really count as technologically determinist are those which assert the irrelevance of human will and its replacement as the motive force of history by technology. That is, only those who claim technology is the sole cause of social change are technological determinists. From this point of view, Cohen and Bimber deny Marx’s determinist tag. They argue instead that he ‘is portraying technology more as an enabling factor than an original cause, autonomous force or determining agent’ (Bimber, 1990: 345).

Suffice it to say that most reactions against technological determinism amount to a call to place technology ‘in context’, where ‘context’ is interpreted in a variety of ways to suit the analytic predilections of the author. One symptom of this is the general recognition, in recent years, that ‘technology’ comprises much more than just machines. The sociology of technology thus has a focus much wider than just hardware. ‘Technology’ can include social arrangements as diverse as the postal system, transportation, refuse collection, voting mechanisms, education and so on. To emphasize the sense in which this definition encompasses social arrangements, the term ‘technological system’ is sometimes used. The advantage of this broad definition is its insistence on including consideration of (narrowly conceived) technologies within a wider context. The argument is that machines can only be understood in terms of their use, and hence in terms of the context in which they are situated. The disadvantage is the implication that there remains, at the centre of the technological system, a residual, non-social or neutral, machine which is malleable according to its social location/context etc.

Little wonder, then, that it is so difficult to identify anyone willing to admit to the label of technological determinist. The various definitions of technology are complex and overlapping. The discussions of technological determinism seem always to accept the significance of factors other than technology, such as social and economic forces, in the determination of human development.

Socio-technical systems

While some of the more populist notions of technology imply that technological determinism is commonplace (Toffler, 1980), there is little evidence amongst academic texts for this. Rather, it seems to have been the ascription of rampant technological determinism to writers like Blauner (1964) and Woodward (1958) which stimulated resistance to the approach. This is evident in the writings of some of those who disputed the possibility of technology playing a significant part in the explanation of workers’ behaviour. As Gallie concludes his research on the topic:

The principal conclusion of the research is that the nature of the technology per se has, at most, very little importance for the social integration of the workforce ... Advanced automation proved perfectly compatible with radically dissimilar levels of social integration and fundamentally different institutions of power ... Instead our evidence indicates the critical importance of the wider cultural and social structural patterns of specific societies for determining the nature of social interaction within the advanced sector. (Gallie, 1978: 295)

But this kind of swing away from technological determinism to social determinism in turn generated a backlash against those who were seen to be too readily jettisoning technology in toto. The resulting model portrayed itself as one which avoided extreme determinism of either kind in favour of a conceptual apparatus that included many different elements: technology, people, organizations, genders, interest groups and many others besides. This literature thus concedes varying degrees of consequence to both technology and social forces in a pluralistic net. The disparate amalgam of approaches following this line is extensive (for example, Freeman, 1987; Markus and Robey, 1988: 588; Noble, 1979; Pfeffer, 1982; Pool, 1983; Rose et al, 1986; Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Wilkinson, 1983; Winner, 1977, 1985); but it still tended to carry the implicit assumption that the nature and capacity of technology remained beyond the remit of sociological analysis; in effect, the nature and capacity of technology was treated as given, objective and unproblematic. We call this assumption technicism.4 One of the most significant practical advances in Britain, in this vein, was the collaborative work of Rice (1958) and Trist and Bamforth (1951).

The socio-technical systems theory, as it became known, focused on the links between the technical system of production and the social system of work. The latter was essentially social rather than individual and, as such, technical production methods which undermined such social activity were necessarily problematic. Although a theoretical model of optimum efficiency could be construed from the technology of production, and a concomitant human model of social efficiency could also be developed, the combination of social and technical systems inevitably produced a somewhat disjointed amalgam, and, equally significant, a system of disequilibrium. The trick, therefore, was to mesh the two in such a way as to develop an optimum socio-technical system that would, if separated into its component parts, not appear to be the most efficient use of resources, and not retain any long-term equilibrium. There was some disagreement about the significance of the economic system as a potential third leg of the theory, but the general position was that the economic system was a product of the functioning of the other two. From the very beginning, then, what starts out as a radical assault upon traditional conceptions of technology actually reproduces the very same conventions which regard the capacity of technology as inherently unproblematic.

The model was explicitly grounded in a ‘scientific’ approach to organizational analysis, seeking to apply such methods both to the technical and the social aspects of organizations. As Trist argued, ‘the technical and social systems are independent of one another in the sense that the former follows the laws of natural sciences, and the latter those of social/human sciences’ (quoted in Van Eijnatten, 1991: 11). The approach also construed such organizations as open systems – in opposition to the ‘machine-like’ analysis proposed by Taylor and Ford. Researchers were interested in promoting a double-edged form of participation: all those involved in the work process should engage in the design and implementation of the labour process itself and, furthermore, the researchers themselves should be involved, through ‘action-research’ in the reorganization (Van Eijnatten, 1991).

Armed with this composite approach, and a historical appreciation of the need for participatory groups, Trist and Bamforth began investigating the low levels of productivity then experienced by the British National Coal Board (NCB) in an account that has long been regarded as a classic and the details of which need not detain us here (see Grint, 1991). However, two major theoretical conclusions were drawn.

First, that the social and technical systems had to be jointly optimized, thereby eliminating at a stroke the pretensions of the technical determinists. Organizational problems occurred in the misfit between the characteristics and requirements of the technological system and those of the associated social system. Thus, ‘the technological demands place limits on the type of work organization possible, but the work organization has social, psychological properties of its own that are independent of the technology’ (quoted in Elliott, 1980). As Heller (1987) argued, the problems occur when there is ‘an improper application of the technological imperative’ (1987: 23). In effect, the issue is that technology does not determine the social system but provides for ‘options’, that is ‘choices based on particular contingencies’ which may reconsider the ‘impact of technology on people’ (1987: 24–5). Given the significance of the interpretative approach to both social and technical issues it is evident that the socio-technical approach is gravely weakened by its assumption that technology still has certain determinate needs and objective ‘effects’ which necessarily constrain the appropriate social system. From the constructivist perspective it is the contingent interpretation of technologies and their putative constraints and capabilities which is crucial for explaining their relationships with humans. Heller is right to deny the determinism of technology, but to retain the idea that technology still has independent effects is to underestimate the significance of the interpretative component of human-technology interaction.

The second major conclusion of the Tavistock group was that semi-autonomous groups of workers provided the best structure for maintaining morale, defusing interpersonal frictions and therefore increasing productivity. The ultimate use of many of these ideas may have been overtly managerialist and productivist, but it would seem fair to argue that the post-war reconstruction of homo gregarious was as much an attempt to institutionalize the ideals of justice and equity at work that so many had just died for in the Second World War (see Rose, 1989: 92–3). This model of work organization was grounded in psychologically based theories of human need and motivation – as indeed were the human relations approaches (see Grint, 1991).

Whatever the intentions of the Tavistock theorists their impact, at least in the UK, has been limited. Yet they have had some success elsewhere, particularly in Sweden, Norway and Canada where the initial ideas have now merged into the Quality of Working Life movement that seeks to provide the kind of work experiences for all that are currently the property of the few (Bansler, 1989; Sanderson and Stapenhurst, 1979; Witte, 1980; Zwerdling, 1978). More recently the socio-technical approach has developed in the Netherlands, both amongst academics and major private companies such as Phillips, DAF and Shell (see Dankbarr and Hertog, 1990; Van Eijnatten, 1991). Perhaps the most significant aspect of this approach has been to link the ‘quality of work’ to the ‘quality of organization’, the latter being a crucial prerequisite of the former.

In a review of the relationship between technology and organizations Van Beinum (1988), one of the original members of the Tavistock team, suggested that the study of the relationship between the social and the technical systems was changing to incorporate the environment. Nevertheless, this innovative development is still rooted in a conception of technology as objective. As he argues:

if we arrange the social system without due regard for the demands and characteristics of the technical system, we end up with an ineffective and inefficient work organization. The basic questions with regard to any work organization are therefore: what are the critical requirements of the technology, and what are the characteristics of the human system? The challenge lies in matching people and technology. (1988: 4)

However, the arrival of new technologies does seem to pose some problems for this approach (besides the constructivist critique). As Van Beinum accepts, the boundaries between technical systems are increasingly ambiguous – we would wish to include the human technical boundary here – and the consequence is an ever-increasing, rather than decreasing, reliance upon human skills. Yet there is relatively little concern with technology itself in many of the socio-technical approaches, especially in the recent publications (for example, Dankbaar and Hertog, 1990 and Van Eijnatten, 1991; cf. Berggren, 1992, and Sørenson, 1985).

A rather different plea for pluralism is nicely captured in Rolfe’s (1990) attempt to account for different attitudes towards technological change. ‘Ideological influences’, notably those concerning the notion of ‘progress’, can help explain different attitudes towards technological change in organizations. However, the possibility that ‘different attitudes’ encompass divergent constructions of the technology is not addressed.

Rolfe concludes that ‘research should not attempt mono-causal or simplistic explanations for responses to change but uncover and assess the relative importance of the many, often conflicting, influences’ (1990: 118–20). Sorge similarly opines ‘the socio-economic context impinges on the development, selection and application of technology just as much as the other way round ... Reciprocal determination, then, means that outcomes are ambiguous’ (1984: 23). In neither case, however, is ambiguity considered to apply to the technology itself; it is instead restricted to those social forces that design, surround, adopt and deploy technology. Hence, even approaches which pride themselves on being non-deterministic nevertheless stop short of interrogating the technology and de facto take the ‘effects’ of technology as given. For example, Burnes et al. (1988) provide ‘a number of explanations to account for labour’s compliance with the demands of new technology’ (1988: 7) (emphasis added). Our scepticism about the concept of the essential character of ‘technology itself’ leads us to ask: who says these are the demands of the new technology, under what circumstances, how and why?

A related development, The Human-Centred Systems (HCS) movement, took the socio-technical systems approach a stage further and in direct opposition to the tenets of Fordism which implied that, because humans are the source of error, the less they have to do with production the more reliable it would be. In the words of a founder of the HCS approach:

production systems are designed with attention fixed upon the machines: their needs and their effective use are the main considerations ... If we wish to change the direction of technological development, so that the human input is accepted and valued, we shall have to intervene at the stage where new technology is being designed ... People should not be subordinate to machines; machines should be subordinate to people. (Rosenbrock, 1989a: pp. ix–x)

In conjunction with related projects in Sweden and West Germany (Badham, 1990), Rosenbrock’s team at UMIST set out to design a skill-enhancing technology which would supplement rather than supplant the human operator. Here again the implication is that once the politics of a technology are rewritten – or written ‘properly’ – then technology can take its ‘rightful’ place in the workshop. Once again we see in this argument the key role of the assumption that design determines subsequent deployment. The objective characteristics of the ‘deus’ are built into the machine; the problem is to ensure that it is a politically correct deity.

The social shaping approach

A further set of alternatives to technological determinism derives from research in rather disparate areas: the most coherent is the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), but an equally important source has a rather broader disciplinary background centring around the relationship between work and technology and broadly encompassing industrial sociology. The ‘social shaping’ approach is a generic label for those accounts which suggests that the capacity of the technology is equivalent to the political circumstances of its production. The SSK root argues for the ‘socially constructed’ character of scientific knowledge (for example, Collins, 1985; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Lynch, 1985; Woolgar, 1988a). This work has spawned various social constructivist approaches to technology (for example, Grint and Woolgar, 1992; Woolgar, 1985; Woolgar, 1991a; Woolgar and Grint, 1991) including the so-called social construction of technology (SCOT) (for example, Bijker et al., 1987), the social shaping of technology (Edge, 1988; MacKenzie, 1991; MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985; Williams and Edge, 1991) and, relatedly, various approaches falling under the rubric of actor-network theory (or ‘the sociology of translation’) (for example, Bijker and Law, 1992; Callon, 1986a, 1986b; Latour, 1987, 1988; Law, 1988, 1991). These labels are often used as a generic terms to cover different but related approaches in different countries (see Dierkes and Hoffmann, 1992, for a review of some national differences).5