Download or read book The Social Production of Technical Work written by Peter Whalley and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineers appear in recent social science as central, though somewhat elusive, figures. They play a particularly critical role in the various attempts to understand the impact of 'science-based' industry on the class structure of advanced capitalist societies. In this book, Peter Whalley brings these engineers into sharper focus. He argues that engineers should not be seen as members of a glamorous 'new class' of professionalized knowledge workers, nor as a radicalized 'new working class' or partially de-skilled technical proletariat. Rather, they should be viewed as 'trusted employees,' selected, socialized, trained, and rewarded to perform the discretionary tasks necessarily delegated by employers in the complex organizations of advanced capitalism. The book draws extensively on observations and interviews to compare engineers' work and understanding in the high- and low-tech settings of two British companies: "Computergraph," an advanced electronics firm, and "Metalco," a traditional British engineering giant. Whalley compares the technical work structure of Britain with those of France and the United States. He argues that the impact of technological change on class structure is critically mediated by nationally specific modes of organizing technical work and producing trusted workers. The book goes beyond cultural explanations of these national variations to examine how they are created and reproduced in the organization of work and the structuring of occupations.
Download or read book Social Production of Technical Work written by Peter Whalley and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Wealth of Networks written by Yochai Benkler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.
Download or read book The Social Production of Art written by Janet Wolff and published by Palgrave. This book was released on 1981 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Work and Occupations written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Social Construction of Technological Systems anniversary edition written by Wiebe E. Bijker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.
Download or read book The Production of Space written by Henri Lefebvre and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1992-04-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.
Download or read book The Social Production of Indifference written by Michael Herzfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Michael Herzfeld argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing primarily on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, he suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility. He points out that both formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices rely heavily on the symbols and language of the moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders; a ready means of expressing prejudice and of justifying neglect. It therefore happens that societies with proud traditions of generous hospitality may paradoxically produce at the official level some of the most calculated indifference one can find anywhere.
Download or read book Forces of Production written by David Noble and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the design and implementation of computer-based automatic machine tools, David F. Noble challenges the idea that technology has a life of its own. Technology has been both a convenient scapegoat and a universal solution, serving to disarm critics, divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities that continue to beset America. This provocative study of the postwar automation of the American metal-working industry—the heart of a modern industrial economy—explains how dominant institutions like the great corporations, the universities, and the military, along with the ideology of modern engineering shape, the development of technology. Noble shows how the system of "numerical control," perfected at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and put into general industrial use, was chosen over competing systems for reasons other than the technical and economic superiority typically advanced by its promoters. Numerical control took shape at an MIT laboratory rather than in a manufacturing setting, and a market for the new technology was created, not by cost-minded producers, but instead by the U. S. Air Force. Competing methods, equally promising, were rejected because they left control of production in the hands of skilled workers, rather than in those of management or programmers. Noble demonstrates that engineering design is influenced by political, economic, managerial, and sociological considerations, while the deployment of equipment—illustrated by a detailed case history of a large General Electric plant in Massachusetts—can become entangled with such matters as labor classification, shop organization, managerial responsibility, and patterns of authority. In its examination of technology as a human, social process, Forces of Production is a path-breaking contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon in American society.
Download or read book In the Backrooms of Science written by Stephen R. Barley and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Production Ergonomics written by Cecilia Berlin and published by Ubiquity Press. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Production ergonomics – the science and practice of designing industrial workplaces to optimize human well-being and system performance – is a complex challenge for a designer. Humans are a valuable and flexible resource in any system of creation, and as long as they stay healthy, alert and motivated, they perform well and also become more competent over time, which increases their value as a resource. However, if a system designer is not mindful or aware of the many threats to health and system performance that may emerge, the end result may include inefficiency, productivity losses, low working morale, injuries and sick-leave. To help budding system designers and production engineers tackle these design challenges holistically, this book offers a multi-faceted orientation in the prerequisites for healthy and effective human work. We will cover physical, cognitive and organizational aspects of ergonomics, and provide both the individual human perspective and that of groups and populations, ending up with a look at global challenges that require workplaces to become more socially and economically sustainable. This book is written to give you a warm welcome to the subject, and to provide a solid foundation for improving industrial workplaces to attract and retain healthy and productive staff in the long run.
Download or read book The Social Shaping of Technology written by Donald A. MacKenzie and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic -- something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production: domestic and reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise -- though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all -- the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology andsociety. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book States of Knowledge written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index
Download or read book Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering written by Michael O'Loughlin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes even more invisible, as each generation’s attempts at coping push the pain further below the surface. Consequently, that pain becomes increasingly ineffable, haunting succeeding generations. In each story the contributors offer, there emerges the theme of difference, a difference that turns back on itself and makes an accusation. Themes of knowing and unknowing show the terrible toll that trauma takes when there is no one with whom the trauma can be acknowledged and worked through. In the face of utter lack of recognition, what might be known together becomes hidden. Our failure to speak to these unaspirated truths becomes a betrayal of self and also of others. In the case of intergenerational and cultural trauma, we betray not only our ancestors but also the future generations to come. In the face of unacknowledged trauma, this book reveals that we are confronted with the perennial choice of speaking or becoming complicit in our silence.
Download or read book Working Papers written by and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Exploration of Technology and its Social Impact written by Savvas Andreas Katsikides and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a set of important articles dealing with technology’s role and its social impact within the new information age. Taking into consideration the rapid changes within the modern social sphere, the book will be of interest to those seeking to understand how technology is currently reshaping life, as well as its capacity to influence social change in the contemporary era. The book is of analytical and critical value, and concerns vital research issues within the context of the emerging information age. It draws together research devoted to key questions examining the relationship between the various new developments of technological systems and their social impact.
Download or read book Industrial Pioneer written by and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
