Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler

Vorlesung: Introduction to Sociology of Technology and Innovation

Dozent:innen: Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler
Kurzname: V Technik Innovation
Kurs-Nr.: 02.149.16810
Kurstyp: Vorlesung

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches

Zielgruppe:

  1. Bachelor Studierende im Studiengang Soziologie (Kern- und Beifach) [PO 2011, 2016]
  2. Bachelor Studierende im Studiengang Wirtschaftspädagogik (Schwerpunktfach "Sozialwissenschaften")
  3. Master Studierende im Studiengang Humangeographie im Kontextfach „Soziologie“
  4. Master Studierende im Studiengang Sportwissenschaft

Stellung im Studiengang:

  1. B.A. Soziologie Kernfach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung A)" [PO 2011]
  2. B.A. Soziologie Kernfach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung B)" [PO 2011]
  3. B.A. Soziologie Beifach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung A)" [PO 2011]
  4. B.A. Soziologie Beifach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung B)" [PO 2011]
  5. B.A. Soziologie Kernfach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung)" [PO 2016]
  6. B.A. Soziologie Beifach: Modul "Gegenstandsbezogene Soziologien (Orientierung)" [PO 2016]
  7. B.Sc. Wirtschaftspädagogik Schwerpunktfach "Sozialwissenschaften": Modul "Aufbaumodul Soziologie"
  8. M.Sc. Humangeographie: Modul „Kontextfach Soziologie“
  9. M.Sc. Sportwissenschaft: Modul 9 „Schlüsselqualifikationen“

Empfohlene Literatur

See literature for each session and Course Reader at Jogustine.

Inhalt

Overview:
Every year since 2002, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has published its list of the ten technologies it predicts will have the greatest innovative impact long-term. For 2019, these are: Robot Dexterity, New-Wave Nuclear Power, Predicting Preemies, Gut Probe in a Pill, Custom Cancer Vaccines, The Cow-Free Burger, Carbon Dioxide Catcher, An ECG on your Wrist, Sanitation without Sewers, and Smooth-Talking AI Assistants. Such lists are created annually; some technologies prove to be just bubbles, others exceed all expectations eliciting challenging societal debates such as the current ones about energy transition technologies, e-mobility or Industry 4.0. However, one issue is beyond all question: Technology changes society, and, vice versa, societal institutions and organisations shape and influence technologies as „social projects“ by fostering, funding, enabling, producing, limiting and preventing them. 
Connecting technologies to application, utilisation, deployment and exploitation contexts, i.e. what we call innovation, provides additional social dynamics. Besides technological innovation targeting new commercial products and processes, social innovation applying new organisational structures gains in increasing importance. Often, technological innovation and social innovation meet such as with digitalising public sector services. New technologies and innovations are „radical game-changers“: they have the potential of changing the world we live in quickly and drastically. However, as future objects they are neither predictable nor accessible; with these characteristics they challenge the institutions concerned with societal planning, policymaking and coordination. 
This lecture introduces to Sociology of Technology and Innovation – the field, which analyses social phenomena around the production, the structures and the consequences of technologies and innovation. The lecture will provide a brief history of both, Sociology of Technology and Sociology of Innovation. Then, major concepts in both areas will be discussed. For technology, issues will be addressed such as: technology as actor, socio-technical systems, technology and social structure, technology assessment, emerging technologies, techno-futures, technology and foresight, technology and ethics, technology and gender etc. For innovation, introductions will be provided to concepts such as innovation models, innovation systems, technological innovation, social innovation, open innovation, innovation networks, responsible research and innovation, Nexus innovation etc. The lecture will suggest a joint approach to an integrated Sociology of Technology and Innovation using some illustrative examples from recent developments in Artificial Intelligence to demonstrate why this is a useful perspective for understanding the complex social dynamics in technology and innovation.
Finally, the lecture will address governance issues around technology and innovation and connect their sociological analysis to complexity-adapted methodologies in the social sciences. 

Learning outcomes:
This course comprises basic texts and programmatic contributions of central scholars in Sociology of Technology and Innovation. It provides an overview of the field and a first introduction to its concepts, debates and state of the art. 

Course Requirements and assignments:
For this lecture, no pre-class preparation or class presentation is required. Students will receive an agenda with literature references in the first session of the course, and can obtain a slide deck of the lecture after each session. 

Assignment: Exam 
The only assignment of this lecture is a written exam as post-class work (Klausur). 

Zusätzliche Informationen

CLASS SCHEDULE

  1. Tuesday, October 15th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 1: Introduction; Sociology of Technology – Early Voices
    The lecture starts with an introduction by the course instructor (setting the scene, presentation of the lecture agenda, administrative details).This will be followed by the first lecture on „Sociology and technology – early voices” dealing with technology as object, process and medium, and providing working definitions of the terms „technology“ and „sociology of technology.

Literature:
- Joerges, B. (1989): Soziologie und Maschinerie – Vorschläge zu einer „realistischen“ Techniksoziologie“. In: P. Weingart (Hg.): Technik als sozialer Prozeß. Frankfurt, S. 44-89.
-  Rammert, W. (1989): Technisierung und Medien in Sozialsystemen. In: P. Weingart (Hg.): Technik als sozialer Prozeß. Frankfurt, S. 128-173.
-  Weingart, P. (1989): Einleitung. In: ders. (Hg.): Technik als sozialer Prozeß. Frankfurt, S. 8-14.

  1. Tuesday, October 22nd: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 2: Science and Technology Studies STS
    This lecture will introduce to controversies on the role of technology for social change, and how perspectives changed from just looking at (good or bad) consequences of technology to issues of technology production and how society is and gets involved. It will look at early conceptions of Technology Assessment (TA) and at concepts in STS focussing on collaborative arrangements such as „Mode 2“ and „Triple Helix“.

Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P.: Skript
- Ahrweiler, P. (2001): Informationstechnik und Kommunikationsmanagement. Netzwerksimulation fuer die interdisziplinaere Wissenschafts- and Technikforschung. Campus: Frankfurt/New York. (Information Technology and Communication Management. Network Simulations for Science and Technology Studies): 183-205.
- Etzkowitz, H. and L. Leydesdorff (1997): A triple helix of university-industry-government relations. In: H. Etzkowitz and L. Leydesdorff (eds.): Universities and the global knowledge economy. A triple helix of university-industry-government relations. London and Washington: 155-162.
- Gibbons, M., C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman, P. Scott and M. Trow (1994): The new Production of Knowledge. London: Pinter.

  1. Tuesday, October 29th
  2. and Tuesday, November 5th: 10.15 – 11.45
  3. Session 3: The Role of Knowledge: Sociology of Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence
    This lecture introduces Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an illustrative example for a cutting-edge technology, which is supposed to change society dramatically. The two main approaches in AI, symbolic and connectionist, are presented and discussed. A specific focus is on the way knowledge is represented and interpreted in this technology. This is contrasted with the ways Sociology of Knowledge is dealing with the subject. In the wake of this, realist and constructivist approaches are critically appraised with a view how they manifest themselves in our technologies.


Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P.: Skript
- Ahrweiler, P. (2001): Informationstechnik und Kommunikationsmanagement. Netzwerksimulation fuer die interdisziplinaere Wissenschafts- and Technikforschung. Campus: Frankfurt/New York. (Information Technology and Communication Management. Network Simulations for Science and Technology Studies): 19-35.

  1. Tuesday, November 12th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 4: The Role of Knowledge: Innovation Economics
    This lecture discusses how technology challenged economic growth theory and how this gave rise to a new economic approach especially centred round the issue of innovation. It is about the death of the “homo oeconomicus”, about systems out of equilibrium, about evolutionary perspectives and “creative destruction”.

Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P. (2010): Innovation in complex social systems. Some conclusions. In: Innovation in complex social systems. Routledge: London and New York, 315-322.

  1. Tuesday, November 19th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 5: Innovation Systems
    This lecture is about the systematic features of innovation in the wake of Neo-Schumpeterian approaches. Different system concepts such as National Innovation Systems (NIS), Sectoral Innovation Systems (SIS) and Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) will be discussed.

Literature:
- Schrempf, B., Kaplan, D. and Schroeder, D. (2013) National, Regional, and Sectoral Systems of Innovation – An overview, Report for FP7 Project "Progress", progressproject.eu.

  1. Tuesday, November 26th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 6: Innovation Networks
    Joining up forces, the innovation networks approach integrates the systemic perspective of Neo-Schumpeterian economics, and the Mode 2 / Triple Helix perspective of sociology. In terms of methods of analysis, it nicely blends with social network analysis.

Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P. (2010): Innovation in complex social systems. An introduction. In: Innovation in complex social systems. Routledge: London and New York, 7-13.
- Ahrweiler, P. (2001): Informationstechnik und Kommunikationsmanagement. Netzwerksimulation fuer die interdisziplinaere Wissenschafts- and Technikforschung. Campus: Frankfurt/New York. (Information Technology and Communication Management. Network Simulations for Science and Technology Studies): 198-203.

  1. Tuesday, December 3rd: 10.15 – 11.45 
  2. Session 7: Elective Affinity of Innovation and Social Network Analysis
    This lecture is about the elective affinity between „Sociology of Technology and Innovation“ and the notion of „Networks“ (concepts and methods). This will be discussed using the  ?example of the Biotech Pharma industry. For connecting the topic and the example to issues of interest for General Sociology, the theory debate between agency- and structure-oriented approaches will be related to the innovation networks under consideration.


Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P., Gilbert, N. and Pyka, A. (2011) 'Agency and Structure. A social Simulation of knowledge- ?intensive Industries'. Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 17 (1):59–76.
- Bourdieu, P. (2005), The Social Structures of the Economy. Polity Press, Cambridge.
-Powell, W. W., D. R. White, K. W. Koput and J. Owen-Smith (2005), “Network dynamics and field evolution: the growth of inter-organizational collaboration in the life sciences,” American Journal of Sociology, 110, 1132-1205.

  1. Tuesday, December 10th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 8: Applying SNA in Innovation Research
    This session introduces to practical examples of Innovation Research using Social Network Analysis: How does it work? What can it do? Examples are provided from various past and current research projects.

No additional literature.

  1. Tuesday, December 17th  and
  2. Tuesday, January 7th: 10.15 – 11.45
  3. Session 9 and 10: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)
    This lecture presents various definitions of RRI, explains the policy context where this concept has been developed, and discusses an illustrative example from a highly-sensitive technology production area. The current research issues around RRI are considered using examples from RRI projects. The notion of responsibility is critically appraised within the framework of Sociology of Technology and Innovation.

Literature:
- Von Schomberg, Rene (2013)."A vision of responsible innovation". In: R. Owen, M. Heintz and J Bessant (eds.) Responsible Innovation. London: John Wiley.

  1. Tuesday, January 14th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 11: Nexus Innovation
    This lecture is about Nexus Innovation, i.e. innovation in so-called „Grand Challenges“ areas such as climate change and energy transition, which require behavioural changes, societal transformation and co-design rather than techtransfer for new products and processes in the market. ?This new approach to Innovation Research leads to a new kind of coordination issues and to changes in scientific policy advice.

Literature:
- Greenhalgh, T. et al. (2016): Achieving Research Impact Through Co- creation in Community- Based Health Services: Literature Review and Case Study. Milbank Quarterly Volume 94, Issue 2, June 2016, pp. 392– 429.
- Stirling, A. (2015): Developing ´ Nexus Capabilities’: Towards transdisciplinary methodologies. Discussion Paper ESRC Nexus Network workshop, University of Sussex, 29-30th June 2015.

  1. Tuesday, January 21st: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 12: Elective Affinity of Innovation and Complexity Science
    This lecture is about the elective affinity between „Sociology of Technology and Innovation“ and the notion of „Complexity“ (concepts and methods). The lecture will introduce Complexity Science as a conceptual framework and connect it to Systems Theory in sociological theory. It will explain why Innovation Research applies complexity concepts and how it benefits from them.

Literature:
- Casti, J. (1985): On System Complexity: Identification, Measurement, and Management. Working Paper International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria.

  1. Tuesday, January 28th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 13: Innovation Policy
    This leads to the question how the entire innovation process could or should be organised to make it most effective, which is a question of innovation policy. The lecture will discuss the so-called linear model of innovation as one of the early policy ideas how the innovation process works and can be supported and reports experience with this model leading to more complexity-adapted alternatives in innovation policy.

No additional literature.

  1. Tuesday, February 4th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Session 14: Innovation and Agent-based Modelling (ABM)
    This lecture will introduce a methodology dealing with the issue of technological forecasting and planning innovation policies: it will discuss the problematic issues of prediction and scenario modelling facing complexity issues in Innovation Research. ABM is discussed as a method of choice when it comes to participatory modelling for policy.

Literature:
- Ahrweiler, P. (2017): Agent-based Simulation for Science, Technology,
and Innovation Policy. Scientometrics Vol. 110 (1): 391-415.

  1. Tuesday, February 11th: 10.15 – 11.45
  2. Written exam (Klausur)


 

 

Termine

Datum (Wochentag) Zeit Ort
15.10.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
22.10.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
29.10.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
05.11.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
12.11.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
19.11.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
26.11.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
03.12.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
10.12.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
17.12.2019 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
07.01.2020 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
14.01.2020 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
21.01.2020 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
28.01.2020 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude
04.02.2020 (Dienstag) 10:15 - 11:45 01 105 HS 7
1111 - Hauptgebäude