The Processes of Production of Artifacts and Knowledge in Peripheral Contexts: Socio-technical Dynamics and Trajectories

HERNÁN THOMAS; MARIANA VERSINO; ALBERTO LALOUF

Paris

Conferencia; 4S/EASST Conference; 2004

Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Studies of Science and Technology

The available conceptualizations focused on the analysis of the technological artifacts and knowledges’ production phenomena –belonging to the economy of innovation and the constructivist sociology of technology disciplinary matrices- shows several theoretical and methodological drawbacks: a priori determinism, difficulties to analyze diachronic processes, inadequacy to be applied on peripheral contexts. In this paper, the notions ‘socio-technical dynamics’ and ‘socio-technical trajectories’ –and, complementarily, the concepts ‘socio-technical style’ and ‘resignificance of technologies’-, are proposed as analytical tools to overcome those drawbacks. The notions ‘socio-technical dynamics’ and ‘socio-technical trajectories’ allows the sinchronic and diachronic analytical re-construction of processes of making and using technological artifacts and knowledges, considered as localized phenomena of co-evolution of technologies, products and productive processes, organizations and institutions. The concept ‘socio-technical style’ allows to distinguish socially embedded innovative dynamics inside the scope of those socio-technical trajectories. The concept ‘resignificance of technologies’ describes the change of significance operations, particularly prevailing on the socio-technical styles corresponding to peripheral contexts. The paper is structured on three axes: a) the developing of ‘socio-technical dynamics’, ‘socio-technical trajectories’, ‘socio-technical style’ and ‘resignificance of technologies’ notions; b) the application of the proposed notions on an empirical-based analysis of processes of technologies development inside peripheral contexts; c) the exploration of the analytical potential of the proposed concepts on an enlarged scale.