[Air-L] REMINDER: EASST 2010 - TRACK 22. TECHNOLOGICALLY DENSE ENVIRONMENTS: A BRIDGE BETWEEN STS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES

[Maurizio]

Call for Abstracts - Apologies for Crossposting

EASST 2010 - TRACK 22. TECHNOLOGICALLY DENSE ENVIRONMENTS: A BRIDGE
BETWEEN STS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES

In the past years, a reflection has emerged around the connection
between STS (Science and Technology Studies) and other domains,
especially management and organization studies. That is exemplified,
for example, by the international
workshop titled “Does STS mean business?” in 2004, the session at
EASST 2006 titled “STS as a boundary discipline: interacting with
Organization Studies”, where a number of established STS scholars
shared their experiences of “becoming” STS researchers, or by the
special issue of the journal “Organization” in January 2009, exploring
the relationship between STS and Organization and Management Studies.
Regardless of these efforts, many are still struggling to engage with
other disciplines, or find the balance between being “STS” and
“practically useful”.
Our intent, with this stream, is to deepen such reflection, focusing
on the empirical issues emerging in Technologically Dense Environments
(TDE). In such an environment complex socio-material practices
mobilize the joint action of heterogeneous elements, both humans and
non-humans, in supporting collective work, blurring the distinction
between natural and artificial ontologies.
The connections that take place in TDE are the locus where the
performance of science and technology is enacted through
organizational and working practices. Proposing such a tightly
integrated STS-informed Organization-oriented view suggests that we
should not speak from the STS perspective only, of which critical
analysis de-constructs the making of technological products or
services or phenomena, but also apply our observation and findings to
the field in a more proactive way, helping to balance the construction
of a TDE.
Through this lens, we would like to call for contributions studying
TDE, that can be seen as sites of scientific and technological
production, as well as sites of working and organizing practices using
scientific and technical means.
Doing this kind of research pushes the STS scholars to confront
situated methodological challenges, act as a boundary worker across
different fields. Such discussion can serve as relationship building
and networking between STS scholars for sharing experiences and
support, as well as a bridge for linking empirical, methodological and
theoretical issues that different disciplines (e.g., STS, Organization
Studies) face, finding a common ground to tackle and/or conceptualise
these issues.
Possible topics are, but not limited to:

 • empirical findings from TDE fields, studying organizing processes
from a STS-informed perspective;

 • theoretical reflections on the bridge building and spanning
between different fields;

 • map, discuss and exchange methods and methodologies used in
different fields.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following
website instructions) by 2010 March 15th.

More info at: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010

Call-for-Abstract PDF:
http://events.unitn.it/sites/events.unitn.it/files/EASST_010_Track_22.pdf

Convenors:

Manuela Perrotta is research fellow at the Department of Sociology and
Social Research, University of Trento. Her main research interests
concern the socio-materiality of working and organizing practices,
technological change and knowing, and collective memories and
technologies. (http://www.unitn.it/rucola/members/perrotta.htm)

Maurizio Teli is researcher at Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali,
Trento. His main research interests concern the political dimensions
of software development, three dimensional environments and the
organizational transformation in the communication of science.
(http://www.maurizioteli.eu)