Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Inside Technology)

Mort, Maggie; Bijker, Wiebe E.; Carlson, W. Bernard; Pinch, Trevor

ISBN 10: 0262133970 / ISBN 13: 9780262133975

Published by MIT Press, 2001

About this Item

Appears to have hardly been read. Same day dispatch (Mon- Fri) from the UK if ordered by 1pm.

Seller Inventory # SS32221008004

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Inside Technology)
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262133970
• ISBN 13: 9780262133975
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 18 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • History of Medicine & Science

About this title

Synopsis

In Building the Trident Network, Maggie Mort approaches the United Kingdom's Trident submarine and missile system as a sociotechnical network. Drawing on the sociology of scientific and technical knowledge and on actor-network theory, Mort recounts how the Trident program was stabilized in the United Kingdom and brought into successful production. She uncovers the nature of this success by retelling unofficial histories of Trident, of production roads not taken, and of potential technological distractions. The production of Trident, she shows, was not inevitable but contingent and problematic.

Using material from interviews and local texts, Mort explores the emergence of a counternetwork in the form of a workers' campaign for alternative technologies. She develops concepts of disenrollment and absent intermediaries, in which redundant workers and marginalized technologies serve to discipline and reinforce the dominant network as production shrinks. She also examines the maintenance of the barrier between the technical and the social/political in this context. The management of uncertainties within the Trident production program emerges as critical to its successful completion.

About the Author

Maggie Mort is Reader in the Sociology of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Department of Sociology and Division of Medicine at Lancaster University in the UK.