Key Ideas

Here are some key ideas and concepts.

Social lives and social things

As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues (The Social Life of Things, 1986), things can provide a fascinating way in to understand social and cultural worlds.

"Even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context."

Researching 'things' is a back door to understanding people. In Harvey Molotch's book, anthropologist of consumption Danny Miller puts it thus: "objects are social relations made durable." From a straightforward research perspective it is worth remembering that simple, everyday objects within the home remind people of loved ones, memories, places and their values and identity. They tell wider stories about a culture and an individual's sense of place within it. If, as researchers, we attend a little more to the material environment of consumers, we may learn a lot more about their social and cultural contexts.

Configuring the user

If we think of objects (a car or computer, say) less as isolated objects that we do things to, and more as objects that have complex relations with other entities, with the ability to shape the way they are used, we can see how these things can 'configure the user' (Woolgar, 1991). The car is connected to road networks, supply chains of fuel, systems of control (licensing and tax) and at the same time the design of cars implies specific driver types (able bodied and agile). Cars, in turn, create certain driving modes and experiences. We would challenge, therefore, the extent to which the 'driving experience' is purely a social experience in the mind of the driver. Rather, it relies on a socio-technical network.

Socio-technical change

Anyone remember the headline: 'Bolivian Boffin Heralds Internet Breakthrough Set to Change the Future of Mankind'? Probably not this particular example, but it may sound strangely familiar. We want to put to work this caricature of how and where objects and technologies are developed and their impact upon people and society, to introduce new ways of thinking about the relationship between people and things.

The first thing to note in our fictitious headline is the distinction between technology or things and people, that technologies once developed are let loose on society and result in social change. Second, note the implication that technologies are the result of single-minded technological or scientific endeavour.

To take the first issue, the example of our Bolivian Boffin relates to well-rehearsed debates or, as some might put it, 'moral panics', associated with new technological innovations. For example, the internet heralds the demise of the high street. History and common sense tell us that such technological determinism, the view that "technology impinges on society from outside of society" (MacKenzie, Wajcman, 1985), is far too simplistic an explanation of social change. Technology and objects do have an impact, but so do economic, cultural and political conditions. We tend to think too much about the impact of technology on society and not enough about the impact of society on technology.

Designers consume. Consumers design

Now for the second observation from our Bolivian Boffin example: the development and innovation of 'things' is often represented as an isolated process (the 'boffin' in the laboratory). Such development is, however, more social than such accounts suggest and may result from a conversation at the canteen, information exchanged through professional bodies, or via reward structures and the social organisation of a business. In short, social processes are key to the very genesis of things to the extent that, as STS writers argue, it makes little sense to split the social from the technical or material. The development of most products or technologies is an iterative process, between designer and user; consumers shape technologies and technologies shape consumers in a 'context warping whirl'. The claim that the technological is never just technological but social (and vice versa) lies at the heart of the idea of path dependency.

Path-dependency

Path dependency describes how past events continue to influence things. For example, consider the qwerty keyboard, the one you're likely to have sitting on your desk. It doesn't dominate due to its efficiency or ease of use. The arrangement of its keys was designed to minimise the frequency with which mechanical typewriters became jammed. Even though this imperative is now obsolete, the arrangement remains.

Chicken or egg?

If social relations impact on technology and objects and technologies also influence social relations, are we in danger of collapsing into a chicken or egg argument? Enter the STS writers such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and Madeleine Akrich. For them the mistake in such a formulation is in holding the technological or material world and the social world to be two separate entities. Instead, they argue that technology or objects and society are mutually constitutive; each shapes and is intertwined with the other to the extent that it makes little sense to separate them. To talk of social relations as if they are somehow independent of objects or technologies is a nonsense.

In short, there's no such thing as pure social relations but only socio-technical relations.

This is a major challenge for social theory because it has hitherto largely ignored things. Following the STS tradition, we think qualitative researchers should adopt such symmetry in the analytical treatment of human and non-human actors alike. Thus the starting point for analysis is not how humans use technology, or how technology shapes society, but the networks, flows and movements linking humans and non-humans. Latour recommends that as researchers we should "see only actors, some human, some non-human, some skilled, some unskilled, that exchange their properties".

What this view of social reality involves is that we surrender our view that people are capable of doing certain things but other entities are not. This challenges us to think not of the 'computer user', the individual who uses the servile machine, but instead to consider the 'computer-user', the more fluid combination of the individual who works to complete an activity and the computer that structures or shapes that activity and the way it is organised and conceived. This is challenging since it threatens a cherished view of humanity, that we are in control, omnipotent over the machines or objects we create, and suggests that things frame or configure our actions. Agency, in short, is not a capacity but 'a relational effect that is generated in different configurations of (human and non-human) materials' (Mulcahy, 1997). Such a view of agency suggests that we should look further afield than 'consumers' and turn our attention to the material world that surrounds them.
 

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