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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Politics Of Sociotechnical Intervention: An Interactionist View, Karin Garrety, R Badham Apr 2012

The Politics Of Sociotechnical Intervention: An Interactionist View, Karin Garrety, R Badham

Karin Garrety

In this article, we apply concepts from symbolic interactionism - a well-established tradition of interpretivist sociology - to investigate the social and political processes involved in a sociotechnical intervention. The intervention was designed to elicit operator involvement in an experimental trial of an advanced manufacturing system at an industrial site in Australia. The interactionist concepts of social worlds, boundary objects and trajectories are used to explore the interrelationships among the theoretical, practical and contextual elements of intervention. We believe that these concepts are flexible intellectual resources that can extend and enrich our understanding of the politics involved in the shaping …


Unearthing The Infrastructure: Humans And Sensors In Field-Based Scientific Research, Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman Dec 2011

Unearthing The Infrastructure: Humans And Sensors In Field-Based Scientific Research, Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

Distributed sensing systems for studying scientific phenomena are critical applications of information technologies. By embedding computational intelligence in the environment of study, sensing systems allow researchers to study phenomena at spatial and temporal scales that were previously impossible to achieve. We present an ethnographic study of field research practices among researchers in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a National Science Foundation Science & Technology Center devoted to developing wireless sensing systems for scientific and social applications. Using the concepts of boundary objects and trading zones, we trace the processes of collaborative research around sensor technology development and adoption …