Understanding the role of the technical in the build-up of sociotechnical constituencies
In Technovation
Volume 19, Issue 1, November 1998, Pages 1–29
This paper aims to advance the systematic understanding of the role of the technical in innovation and technology development. Many studies show explicitly or implicitly that the term technology merely black-boxes the true complexity of an enormous population of specific technologies, each with its own practical implications for technological processes and innovation strategies. The paper signals a direction for future research and lays down the foundations for a generic open-ended taxonomy of technologies designed to help raise the role of the technical in the analysis and practice of innovation. The theoretical case makes use of the author’s sociotechnical constituencies approach and includes a selective review of concepts and taxonomic definitions of technologies. The taxonomic instrument is applied to two empirical cases of strategic development of technology—formal methods and microprocessors. A concluding section situates the perspective of the paper within the general relationship between the social and the technical and suggests directions for further research.
