Through this chapter we provide an overview of the sociotechnical premise: the mutual constitution of people and technologies. The sociotechnical premise and its various approaches, including the seminal work of the Tavistock scholars, the Nordic and Scandic approaches, and their evolution, are developed as the historical basis of this work. In the chapter we also cover the role of sociological...

When a set of people interact frequently with one another, they often grow to think more and more along the same lines, a phenomenon we call “collective cognitive convergence” (C). We discuss instances of C and why it is advantageous or disadvantageous; review previous work in sociology, computational social science, and evolutionary biology that sheds light on C; define a computational model f...

Technological innovation is a phenomenon that has been explored from a variety of perspectives, most prominently from the perspective of economics. Recently scholars from organizational and economic sociology have begun to explore innovation. In your view, does this research offer a coherent perspective on innovation? Of what value is an organizational and economic sociology perspective on inno...

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

Culture is a significant concept for sociologists because it both identifies a fundamental set of ideas about what sociologists' study and suggests a major reason for the existence of Sociology itself – that human social behaviour can be explained in the context of the social groups into which people are born and within which they live their lives. In this Chapter we're going to explore a range...

Accepted 2 January 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W ork is the means by which most human beings provide for their daily sustenance. Although many theorists suggest that work occupies a central place in human life, more recently some have questioned the centrality of work, arguing that we are now in a postindustrial, consumer-oriented society where consumption has replaced wo...