Socio-technical Ensemble Research Articles

Learning to work with the black box: Pedagogy for a world with artificial intelligence

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrating into our society. University education needs to maintain its relevance in an AI‐mediated world, but the higher education sector is only beginning to engage deeply with the implications of AI within society. We define AI according to a relational epistemology, where, in the context of a particular interaction, a computational artefact provides a judgement about an optimal course of action and that this judgement cannot be traced. Therefore, by definition, AI must always act as a ‘black box’. Rather than seeking to explain ‘black boxes’, we argue that a pedagogy for an AI‐mediated world involves learning to work with opaque, partial and ambiguous situations, which reflect the entangled relationships between people and technologies. Such a pedagogy asks learners locate AI as socially bounded, where AI is always understood within the contexts of its use. We outline two particular approaches to achieve this: (a) orienting students to quality standards that surround AIs, what might be called the tacit and explicit ‘rules of the game’; and (b) providing meaningful interactions with AI systems. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Artificial intelligence (AI) is conceptualised in many different ways but is rarely defined in the higher education literature. Experts have outlined a range of graduate capabilities for working in a world of AI such as teamwork or ethical thinking. The higher education literature outlines an imperative need to respond to AI, as underlined by recent commentary on ChatGPT. What this paper adds A definition of an AI that is relational: A particular interaction where a computational artefact provides a judgement about an optimal course of action, which cannot be easily traced. Focusing on working with AI black boxes rather than trying to see inside the technology. Describing a pedagogy for an AI‐mediated world that promotes working in complex situations with partial and indeterminate information. Implications for practice and/or policy Focusing on quality standards helps learners understand the social regulating boundaries around AI. Promoting learner interactions with AI as part of a sociotechnical ensemble helps build evaluative judgement in weighting AI's contribution to work. Asking learners to work with AI systems prompts understanding of the evaluative, ethical and practical necessities of working with a black box.

Digitization of urban bicycling data

Urban bicycling data collection with mobile digital devices has become ubiquitous in cities across the globe in the last decade. However, planners, developers, data and city scientists often struggle to process, avoid biases, clean datasets, and select relevant data points, when processing, analyzing and modelling vast troves of data, when engineering applications for urban mobility. This paper aims to shed light on these data sources and bases using a descriptive and comparative analysis of the social layers embodied into this data. These ultimately and inadvertently might result in algorithmic analysis and predictive simulations with inadequate sensitivity and specificity outputs for desired requirements. Actors and social groups have vested and specific interests in these bicycling databases, which in turn shape data bases biases or disclosure policies. Therefore, their data will reflect mostly the way they interact with bicycles, cyclists and cities. How pervasive, available for academic research, and which uses are currently made with bicycling bulk data collections in the case of Berlin? Sixteen social groups that operate or hold digital bicycling data systems in that city are investigated. Results show that a clear distinction between the data produced by public and private social groups, as different uses and disclosure polices for it are identified. These contrasts significantly reduce the range of models and applications that can derive from this data. In the development of diagnostic and prognostic systems, public owned are more suitable, whereas private is for commercial application. Digitization of urban bicycling data appeared to produce different data quality and quantity. The brief description and grouping of a specific sociotechnical ensemble dynamic, such as the one conducted here, is particularly useful for the early stages of research, data collection planning and modelling, and in the design of requirements for technology development.

Confl icting Threads. Technological Innovation and the Socio-technical Ensemble of Weaving

This paper refers to two new approaches to conceive the relationship between technological innovation and society as one of anchoring: The TASC concept (Technologies as Anchors for Societal Conflicts) aims to show how societal conflicts are anchored in technologies that, as such, are not responsible for the conflict. The ‘Anchoring Innovation’ research program of the Dutch Research School in Classical Studies (OIKOS) aims to explain how technological in- novations were anchored in ancient society. Our paper trials these concepts along the threads that connect the social and the technical in the weaving of contemporary India and archaic Greece. The first part of the paper examines the Indian government’s efforts to provide technological upgradation to a community of weavers who insist on their loin loom that is embedded in their local ecology, making them appear backward and ignorant of innovation. In the second part, we examine how innovation in ancient Greece was anchored in the socially ubiquitous technology of weaving. In both cases, the social turns out to be an essential part of (the technology of) weaving. Conflicts arise where technology claims to be ahead of a society that must constantly adapt to it.

Situated Ethics in Development: STS Insights for a Pragmatic Approach to Development Policy and Practice

Technology has played a central role in development programming since the inception of development assistance. Recent development organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, believe technological innovation can improve development outcomes. Development ethics, a field of study focused on the ethical questions posed by development policies and practices, has yet to fully appreciate the ethical dimensions of the science and technology. Addressing this important research and policy gap, we contend that science and technology studies (STS) offers important insights that can be used in combination with development ethics to influence development policies and practices. Utilizing a case study of a private development program in Uganda, we illustrate how STS offers important insights for understanding how a sociotechnical ensemble placed pressure on already scarce water resources. Two dimensions of STS scholarship, the power asymmetries of technological development and the incomplete or partial nature of technoscientific knowledge, are examined and help us to understand how sociotechnical ensembles in development increase the likelihood of the emergence of publics who are negatively impacted by sociotechnical ensembles in development programs. Leveraging STS insights, we argue for the importance of situated ethics—a pragmatic approach to ensuring responsiveness to the emergence of these publics.

Using socio-technical analogues as an additional experience horizon for nuclear waste management A comparison of wind farms, fracking, carbon capture and storage (CCS) with a deep-geological nuclear waste disposal (DGD)

Energy technologies can be described as socio-technical ensembles, in which social, political, economic and technical dimensions are embedded. Based on this concept as well as other theoretical approaches dealing with the deployment and development of technologies (e.g. the multi-level perspective of Geels (2002)) this contribution investigates the dynamics and interactions that can occur within the socio-technical ensemble of a deep geological disposal (DGD) for high-level radioactive waste (HLRW). We compare socio-technical analogues and relate findings of three energy technologies with large-scale infrastructures to a DGD. The analysis is based on a systematic literature review and aims to gain indirect knowledge for nuclear waste management (NWM) deduced from the dynamics within the socio-technical ensembles of wind farms, fracking and carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). The analysis is based on a systematic literature review along four central dimensions with eight respective criteria e.g. public participation, conflicts, role of science, etc.

Health technology identities and self. Patients’ appropriation of an assistive device for self‐management of chronic illness

In recent years, assistive technologies have gained acceptance as tools for supporting chronically ill patients in achieving improvements in physical activity. However, various healthcare and sociological studies show contradicting results regarding the physical and social impact of using such devices. This paper explores real-time user appropriation of an assistive monitoring/tracking device, the pedometer, in a healthcare intervention, with a particular focus on the technology identities users attribute to the pedometer. The study site was a rehabilitation programme at a local Danish health centre supporting patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As part of this empirical study, six focus-group interviews were conducted with patients before and after they used pedometers. The analysis of respondents' accounts shows that monitoring devices become part of users' complex socio-technical ensembles in which the use of the device and its tracking of activity is constantly negotiated through experimentation with type and frequency of use; interpretation of knowledge and experience gained via the device; and negotiation of expectations, wellbeing, and the value of quantified knowledge for the management of chronic illness. On the basis of these findings the paper brings together and advances sociological scholarship on chronic illness, embodiment, the quantified self and technology adoption.

‘We Do Not Want Fake Energy’: The Social Shaping of a Solar Micro-grid in Rural India

During the last two decades, numerous policy actors have advocated multiple models for the diffusion of solar energy-based technologies in India. In recent years, the social development-based energy business model was promoted by some NGOs, civil society groups and academicians for reaching the poor for meeting their energy needs. Using a case study approach, this article explores the social shaping of a solar micro-grid established in rural Bihar through the hybrid model of environmental governance. The article employs the social shaping of technology framework to explain the top-down and bottom-up interpretations of the solar micro-grid in rural India. By focusing on the idea of citizens and consumers, it explains the influence of the wider socio-political context in closing down the debate and stabilising the choices. The article illustrates the implications of the narrow framing of the socio-technical ensemble by the NGO’s and civil society groups (top-down perspective) on the diffusion potential of the solar micro-grid. The bottom-up perspective adds more layer to the interpretation of the socio-technical ensemble. An integrated, comprehensive understanding based on both the top-down and bottom-up perspective would help in developing a responsible research and innovation paradigm.

A socio-technical analysis of internet of things development: an interplay of technologies, tasks, structures and actors

PurposePrior research on the area of internet of things (IoT) development has primarily emphasized the overview descriptions and rarely investigated this area from a socio-technical standpoint. However, IoT development is a socio-technical ensemble, which requires analysis with a simultaneous focus on both technical and non-technical issues. Hence, this paper aims to analyze the development of IoT through the lens of the socio-technical system (STS) theory.Design/methodology/approachHaving reviewed the STS theory, the key components of the IoT development are identified using prior literature review and semi-structured interviews with experts involved in the Iranian IoT development effort.FindingsAs a result, this paper provides insight into the key socio-technical issues in the IoT development classified under technology, tasks, structure and actors as four components of STS. Moreover, the close connections between the components are clarified.Originality/valueThis research is among the earliest studies, which use the STS theory to investigate the IoT development. The conducted socio-technical analysis of this study may assist the governments, industries and entrepreneurs as the chief stakeholders of IoT development to better align their actions with each other and achieve a balance between both technical and social sides.

Ring and bring drug services: Delivery dealing and the social life of a drug phone

BackgroundIllegal drug dealers no longer compete for customers only through the quality of their products, but also in convenience and speed of delivery. This article investigates "ring and bring" drug dealing, and argues that a focus on dealers' use of mobile phones is useful for exploring current changes within retail level drug markets. MethodsThe article is based on 21 face-to-face in-depth interviews with active drug dealers in Denmark all of whom were involved in the delivery of drugs (mainly cannabis and cocaine) often to buyers' homes. ResultsContrary to studies emphasising how drug dealers often take up new communication technologies with enthusiasm, the dealers in this study displayed a technological conservatist stance. Moreover, mobile phones have become key to dealers' construction of in-group hierarchies, and have led to retail level drug selling becoming more flexible, individualised and more of a service on par with other services in the consumer society. Finally, the increasing use of mobile phones has also created a situation where portfolios of drug customers, held on cell phone SIM cards, are today traded and sold alongside other commodities in the drug economy. ConclusionWe show how a social constructivist approach to technology can provide a more detailed and nuanced account of the socio-technical ensemble and the meaning-making processes giving shape to retail level "delivery dealing."

Constructing Common Knowledge: Design Practice for Social Change in Craft Livelihoods in India

From a policy point of view, the nine million craftspeople in India are underdeveloped economically and in need of expert design interventions to adapt to the market. Within nationalistic projects those same craftspeople are transformed into a heritage that needs to be preserved, rather than having a trajectory into a promising future. Is there an escape from these discourses of poverty or museumization when thinking about craftspeople? In response, this article investigates how design can be key to achieve social change that craftspeople desire. I propose that designers intending to mitigate vulnerability in livelihoods of craftspeople have to design not towards a pre-determined set of desirable economic outcomes, but include social and cultural outcomes. Using empirical examination of designer narratives as base, this article extends constructivist STS concepts of “cultures of technology” to “cultures of design” to elaborate three lenses to analyze design practice: Intervention, which focuses on the economic impact of development; Interaction that focuses on symmetric social relations between actors, within socio-technical ensembles that respond to nascent aspirations and needs of craftspeople; and Mediation, which includes constructing cultural worlds where craftspeople's expertise is common knowledge—as active producers of culture, rather than passive consumers of design.

Merging ICT and informal transport in Jakarta's ojek system

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses how information and communication technologies (ICT) may influence travel behavior of an informal transport system, and whether and in which ways merging digital technologies represents disruption for a specific sociotechnical ensemble. For decades, ojek has been a form of informal passenger transport, based on motorcycles in Jakarta, and recently smartphone apps have become available in that sociotechnical arrangement. We randomly surveyed passengers and drivers in the central district, for both those who do and do not use these apps. Despite many similarities between both groups, the drivers who use smartphones for their trips reported higher daily incomes, longer average trip distances and a larger coverage area. Passengers using conventional ojek transport reported lower levels of both safety perception and satisfaction when compared to app-based ojek users. For both categories of user, ojek seems to compete with, complement, and be an alternative to bus rapid transit and the suburban rail system (KRL) in the area covered by our sample. The areas covered by regular buses and vans roughly match the origins and destinations of ojek trips.

Models for Understanding Collective Intelligence on Wikipedia

Through examining established and evolving conceptions of intelligence across natural and social science and applying them to Wikipedia, this article argues that the world’s largest encyclopedia and broadest implementation of the wiki is an online instance of collective intelligence (CI), as it fits key models for this concept. Further, by relying on sociotechnical ensembles of human intelligence, programmed bots, social bureaucracy, and software protocols, a more humanistic CI, as proposed by Lévy, is realized in a virtual knowledge space that embodies information as both product and process while empowering its community to explore the cultural possibilities of its collectivism.

Reflexivity and the Sociology of Science and Technology: The Invention of "Eryc" the Antibiotic

Until recently, the social-technical process of invention has fallen between sociological investigation of the genesis of a new idea (an ideational phenomenon) and the production of a new technology (a material phenomenon). The advent of post-modernism and post-structuralism offered new avenues for theorising invention, accounting for, on the one hand, its material nature, and, on the other, its ideational nature, through the notion of socio-technical ensembles: phenomena constructed through the co-producing, mutually constitutive action of actants (both human and otherwise). This paper argues that despite its potential, theorising within the sociology of science and technology is hampered by insufficient attention to the role of the researcher and the concept and practice of reflexivity. Reflexive practices within this field of knowledge are explored, and drawing on an empirical case study of an antibiotic preparation, a case is made for the necessity of reflexivity in the production of knowledge about invention.

Could the SNA Complete the SCOT Model? Computer development in the USA between 1931-1950: a case study approach

Analyzing the literature of computing history we can establish that computing stories of different epochs are concerned with an array of problem areas, thus the authors of the accounts posed various questions - from the misunderstood inventions and forgotten genius to the community revaluation role of the Internet in the post-modern society. J. V. Atanasoff, J. Mauchly, J. P. Eckert, H. Aiken, G. Stibitz and J. Neumann all played their parts in the history of computing between 1930 and 1950 in the USA. Bowing before their notability the authors of institute-specific accounts recognised all of them as founders of electrical-digital computing technology. In this study I will argue that any discussion about claims to priority is an outworn conception because the first electrical- digital computer in the USA came into being in a network of ``socio-technical ensembles´´. The argument is based on a social construction approach (SCOT) of the history of technology combined with social network analysis as during our investigation the SCOT model proved inadequate for studying the history of computers. Following the improvement of key concepts and methods applied by SCOT-ists in different case studies I endeavour to choose the best suitable framework which can be applied to a description of a technological artefact more complex than the bicycle.

Understanding the Evolution of Rice Technology in China – From Traditional Agriculture to GM Rice Today

This paper provides an historical survey of the evolution of rice technology in China, from the traditional farming system to genetically modified rice today. Using sociotechnological analytical framework, it analyses rice technology as a socio-technical ensemble – a complex interaction of material and social elements, and discusses the specificity of technology development and its socio-technical outcomes. It points to two imperatives in rice variety development: wholesale transporting agricultural technology and social mechanism to developing countries are likely lead to negative consequences; indigenous innovation including deploying GM technology for seed varietal development and capturing/cultivating local knowledge will provide better solutions.

Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City

Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City Nick Scott (bio) The street yearns for action nobler than traffic. Leonard Cohen Montreal 1964 Most canadians depend on a Car, Truck, or Bus for everyday travel and worry about congestion and the price of gas. The recent bailout of the auto sector and stimulus spending on roads, bridges, and highways reveal the commitment of Canadian governments to expanding traffic through motor vehicle use. As a shared way of flowing and idling in the world, however, traffic, in spite of mass participation and immense ecological import, remains a relatively elusive idea, and one too frequently dominated by a functionalist engineering approach. As a technoscientific attempt to eliminate congestion, this approach overlooks social understandings of traffic, its politics, and its cultural significance. I aim to extend an alternative understanding of “traffic” as irreducible to either congestion or itinerancy but marked instead by multiple relations of stasis and flow among human and nonhuman actors. To this end I draw on two different literatures, mobility studies and narrative approaches to urban planning, to explore how people imagine and practise traffic in a spatial culture of automobility. [End Page 149] This narrative approach to urban planning highlights the multiplicity of traffic and the agency of material infrastructure (see Latour). By foregrounding the different voices of streets, I aim to defamiliarize the habitual voice of automobility. In contrast to modernization cum motorization narratives which follow a teleological plot line, the stories that streets tell from different temporal and spatial perspectives have the potential to disrupt a natural, apolitical culture of car-dependence. The mobilities literature that I will rely on argues that buildings, roads, and other kinds of places gain meaning through the ways in which they carry or constrict the flows of subjects, ideas, and objects. It views streets as sociotechnical ensembles of tarmac, electricity, hydrocarbons, values, juridical systems, and habitus. Built for particular bodies and machines, streets evoke the discursive and political construction of traffic alongside hard infrastructure. After situating traffic within mobilities and narrative approaches to planning, I follow the stories of five prominent streets in Canada’s capital city. Ottawa represents a strategic case study of mobility and planning. Like Canberra, Brasilia, and New Delhi, Ottawa is a living product of muscular, modernist planning of the last century which equated national progress with mass automobility. To a greater degree than other conurbations in Canada, traffic in the National Capital Region reflects a totalizing vision of the good city in which the car is tied to modernity, national identity, and power. By engaging what some have called a relational “politics of mobility” (Cresswell, “Politics”; Simpson; Henderson), I argue that Ottawa’s streets articulate a deeply contested process by which automobility has become systematically invested with forms of material and immaterial power denied to other forms of traffic. To build my case I draw on media discourse, photographs, planning documents, developmentese, and field observations. Through these materials I show that, along with the daily lives of street users, cars, and their manifold interactions, a critical if frequently forgotten world of traffic resides in the stories of streets themselves. Assembling a Politics of Automobility Over the last decade, research on the movement of people, goods, and ideas has enjoyed increasing attention. A growing interdisciplinary literature on “mobilities” explores how movement mediates social life and the creation of meaningful spaces in which people live together. The “mobilities paradigm,” as some refer to it, includes “studies of corporeal movement, transportation and communications infrastructures, capitalist spatial restructuring, migration and immigration, citizenship and [End Page 150] transnationalism, and tourism and travel” (Hannam et al. 9–10). These studies have two things in common. First, they explore the proliferation of mobilities, exploring how interdependent institutions and novel sociotechnical networks, from currency markets and exurban commutes to mobile social networking, bring individual biographies unevenly into contact with globalized flows of people, products, and information. Second, mobility studies just as importantly form a response to dominant conceptions of movement. In particular, mobility contrasts with conceptions in transport geography and engineering geared toward maximizing the economic efficiency and productivity of movement. Cresswell usefully distinguishes mobility from movement as one might...

At Home in the Seamless Web

Political responses to metropolitan growth in the United States and elsewhere should include careful ethical deliberation, but ethical judgment and action are limited by the involvement of individual moral agents in the complex processes that give shape to the built environment. I propose that casting the built environment as a heterogeneous sociotechnical ensemble can provide useful insight into the limits of ethics, particularly through the concept of obduracy. To the extent components of an ensemble are obdurate, they can stop or deflect even well-considered actions even as they impose constraints on moral agency itself. From this possibility spring a number of worthwhile lines of inquiry at the confluence of ethics and technology studies.

Amazon Noir

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Socio-Technical Deliberation about Free and Open Source Software: Accounting for the Status of Artifacts in Public Life

This essay investigates the rhetorical practices of socio-technical deliberation about free and open source (F/OS) software, providing support for the idea that a public sphere is a socio-technical ensemble that is discursive and fluid, yet tangible and organized because it is enacted by both humans and non-humans. In keeping with the empirical shift manifest in recent public sphere scholarship and Bruno Latour's idea that socio-technical deliberation is characterized by the inscription of non-humans, I describe the rhetorical manners in which volunteer citizens define and mobilize a mundane artifact—a web site—in a deliberation over the value of F/OS technologies for their government-funded project. Through inscription of the web site as a rhetorical resource and as the embodiment of their disposition toward computer technologies, the volunteers formed and expressed competing understandings of the role of F/OS technologies in sustaining a public sphere. I argue that these competing views are consequential, for they link technical artifacts and political agents in practice, by way of aspirations, obligations, and forms of authority. Furthermore, by claiming a form of agency for technologies in the public sphere, the proponents of F/OS technologies are inviting scholars of the public sphere to question the status assigned to technical artifacts in their investigations and theories of the public sphere.

Socio‐technical analysis of IPTV: a case study of Korean IPTV

PurposeThis paper seeks to investigate the prospects for internet protocol TV (IPTV) from the social, economic and regulatory perspective to gain a better understanding of how IPTV will evolve and stabilize in next generation network environments.Design/methodology/approachQualitative and quantitative data were collected from multiple data collection methods. The analysis is based on theoretical frameworks derived from socio‐technical theories and web of stakeholder analyses.FindingsFrom the socio‐technical analysis, the development of IPTV implies that IPTV has been through internally‐driven change (more or less technology‐driven and regulatory‐constrained), but from now on it will likely be driven by external factors (market and user). The web of stakeholder analysis implies that the further development of IPTV in Korea is likely to comprise multiple stages, predicated by several significant events: the deployment of Broadband Convergence Network and FTTH, the resolving of content issues, establishing standards, and the introduction of new regulatory frameworks.Practical implicationsThe case of Korea offers implications for other countries that are pursuing IPTV development strategies.Originality/valueBy looking at IPTV as a sociotechnical ensemble, this paper seeks a firm understanding of the interaction among IPTV technology, its market, industry, and regulation regarding IPTV. A stakeholder analysis helps this study to address such interactions.