I think the following papers are excellent and I encourage everyone to read them. Wes Sharrock and Graham Button, Empirical investigations: Practical sociological reasoning in the work of engineers, in Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner, and Les Gasser, eds, Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997. It is often held that social scientists and technical people have trouble working together. They use different languages and methods, study different problems, identify results in different ways, and so on. Sharrock and Button, however, argue that engineers are actually to a large extent practical sociologists. Through their case studies of real engineers at work, they describe engineers engaged in situated deliberations of their user communities, the institutional dynamics of their firms, and their own processes of work, both when it is happening and especially in review afterward. This reasoning is driven not by research agendas but by the necessity of anticipating and managing contingencies while working against a deadline and cooperating with people from other professional groups. The objects of design are thoroughly affected by social processes, and Sharrock and Button describe some of the detailed work through which this happens. Nathan Rosenberg, Why in America?, in Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. This short, remarkable paper offers an explanation of an important historical phenomenon: the reason why mass manufacturing based on standardized products and methods, and particularly interchangeable parts, first arose in the United States. A rapidly growing population led to the rapidly increasing demand which, as Adam Smith argued, leads to an increased division of labor. New transportation infrastructures such as canals and railroads also increased the effective size of the market. The heavily agricultural nature of the society meant that consumers generally had the same needs, thus greatly increasing the returns to standardization and favoring the simplicity of mass manufactured products over the customized fanciness of artisanal products. The abundance of natural resources and relative and capital rewarded automated manufacturing, which in its early days did not use such resources efficiently. As markets become increasingly global, Smith's argument implies that the division of labor is likely to increase even further. Rosenberg's work is likely to help in reasoning about the changes in production and consumption that result. Fred W. Riggs, Bureaucracy and viable constitutionalism, in Abdo I. Baaklini and Helen Desfosses, eds, Designs for Democratic Stability: Studies in Viable Constitutionalism, Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997. I am very interested in what I call partial theories: theories that start from a single simple idea and use that idea to explain as much as they possibly can. These theories can persuade their authors or readers that they are entirely self-sufficient, and that no other theories will ever be needed. People can spend their whole lives working on such theories and ignoring all others. At the same time, partial theories, especially when compared and contrasted a half dozen at a time, can be usefully taken as starting points for other, more complex theories. In this paper, Fred Riggs presents a remarkably valuable partial theory of the success and failure of democratic governments, starting with the relationship between the legislature and the administrative bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that is too strong is incompatible with democracy, and one that is too weak cannot do its job and is certain to be taken over by particular interests. Riggs taxonomizes various kinds of bureaucrats: mandarins, retainers, military officers, professionals, transients, and so on, depending on their respective structural relationships and career paths. He argues that the United States is distinctive in its transition historically from a retainer to a career bureaucracy -- a transition that might be undergoing some reversal today. His argument is extremely helpful in understanding, for example, why Latin American polities have had so much trouble becoming democratic despite the formal analogies between their constitutions and that of the United States. In short, this is an exemplary work of institutional theorizing, and no work on the role of information technology in institutional change can explain much unless it analyzes institutions on this sort of level among others. Stephen R. Barley, The alignment of technology and structure through roles and networks, Administrative Science Quarterly 35(1), 1990, pages 61-103. This is a very impressive study of the way that a social system -- the diagnostic department of a hospital -- reorganized itself after adopting a new technology -- CT scanning. Central to the story is knowledge and the ways that knowledge affects how people from different professional backgrounds work together from day to day. Knowledge is a valuable form of capital, and changing distributions of knowledge go a long way to explaining the relative positions of groups. In the case of the hospital, these relative positions rapidly turned into a social system. Divisions of labor changed in other ways as well. All of these arguments are grounded both in detailed study of interactions among individuals, for example in the kinds of formal and informal teaching and learning that take place between individuals from different groups, and in analyses of social networks. These social dynamics depended heavily on the detailed workings of the technology, as well as on the social structure as it existed before the technology arrived. Although I find his theory of social roles a little clumsy, overall this is an outstanding example of the ways that qualitative and quantitative methods can be combined to study the interaction between technology and social structure on multiple levels. Bruno Latour, On interobjectivity, Mind, Culture and Activity 3(4), 1996, pages 228-245. Bruno Latour is a rare animal -- a French philosopher who grounds his philosophy in fieldwork. His work concerns the ways that people and their artifacts are knitted into networks. In this paper, he discusses the ways that societies use artifacts to structure the contexts in which people interact. Dealing with a teller at a bank, one might identify the interaction as a "local" phenomenon, as distinct from the "global" phenomena of the economy or society as a whole. But the bank, as well as the customer and teller, are very much located in networks. The "local" nature of the interaction is something that society has worked hard to construct. Latour thus gives architecture and other human artifacts a central role in his sociology. Sociology, in other words, in not simply "social" -- that is, it is not exclusively concerned with interactions among people, but instead locates those interactions in the artefactual world. Architecture and design, likewise, are now understood as being very much embedded in an institutional order. Karla Hoff and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Modern economic theory and development, in Gerald M. Meier and Joseph E. Stiglitz, eds, Frontiers of Development Economics: The Future in Perspective, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Joseph Stiglitz is an economist of information who has, in recent years, been heavily involved in the institutions of practical economics, for example during his time as chief economist of the World Bank. His central argument is that problems of information force important revisions in the neoclassical picture of efficient market as a mediator of supply and demand. In his recent work, he has increasingly applied this argument to institutional problems such as those encountered by developing economies. It is well-known that some of Stiglitz's neoclassical colleagues often presuppose the existence of economic and political institutions that many societies do not have. Stiglitz's policy advice, by contrast, starts with the necessity of building such institutions alongside the market mechanisms that it is hoped they will eventually enable. In this paper, Stiglitz and Karla Hoff survey the new research area of formalizing economic and political institutions in much the same way that economists have historically formalized efficient market mechanisms. People who believe that institutions should be studied in their full qualitative detail will find these models overly simple. And indeed nobody should be using them uncritically in setting policies. Even so, formalism can be an important method of research when it is directed at the right object, and the institutional substrate of the economy is one of the most important objects of study right now. Daniel Beunza and David Stark, Tools of the trade: The socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room, working paper available at: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/mgt/seminars/downloads/tools_of_the_trade.pdf This is an excellent study of the ecology of knowledge in the arbitrage department of a large investment bank. Arbitrage means making money by noticing and using inconsistencies between different markets. If apples sell for 10 cents uptown and 20 cents downtown, you can make money by buying applies uptown, shipping them downtown, and selling them. At least that is a simple example. In the real world, arbitrage means operating simultaneously in numerous markets whose relationships are much harder to reckon than the relative costs of apples. To reckon profitably, the investment bank needs to assemble teams with diverse forms of advanced knowledge of particular markets, and they need to design transactions that balance out every factor except for the one where the opportunity for profit lies. To do this, the bank puts tremendous thought in the physical work arrangements in their trading room. For example, they deliberately migrate people around the room so that they will be working nearby others with varying types of skill, thus ensuring that skills are continually being mixed in new ways. This is not the market as a form of virtual reality, but quite the contrary a socially distributed type of calculation that is very much embedded in arrangements in the physical world. Ken Alder, Making things the same: Representation, tolerance and the end of the Ancien Regime in France, Social Studies of Science 28(4), 1998, pages 499-545. Mass manufacture based on interchangeable parts arose in a quite different way in France than in the United States. It happened in the context of the French Revolution, and in the transformation of an existing social system rather than the construction of a new one. Interchangeable parts need to be manufactured according to precise tolerances, and this in turn requires a local social system in which that kind of precision can be reliably and consistently produced. Alder describes the role played in this process by particular forms of representation, namely projective drawings as opposed to other free-hand, perspectival, and other sorts of drawings. These drawings, together with fixtures, gauges, and other artefacts, were as central a part of the social system as any other. Alder concludes his paper with a case study of a particular artisanal community whose whole way of life changed as part and parcel of this larger process of technological and institutional change. Like all of the other papers I have reviewed here, Alder's paper provides an outstandingly valuable perspective on the ways that "local" and "global", "physical" and "virtual", interact in the adoption of important new technologies. end
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