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

Mort, Maggie

ISBN 10: 0262133970 / ISBN 13: 9780262133975

Published by The MIT Press, 2002

About this Item

This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has hardback covers. In good all round condition. Dust jacket in good condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,600grams, ISBN:9780262133975.

Seller Inventory # 5759242

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Inside Technology: Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge and Machines
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262133970
• ISBN 13: 9780262133975
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 600 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • War & Militarism

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.