Moreover, Noble stressed that there were many diferent levels of social determination of technology. While management’s demand for control over workers was critical, so was the role of the military, as well as the ideology and interests of engineers. Importantly, he argued that “engineering rationality” takes the view that the most eficient production process is the most automated. This impulse, to eliminate the human element from production because it is the potential source of “human error,” still prevails.
In brief, the social shaping approach was concerned with emphasizing that politics and negotiation are the key processes through which technical possibilities are, or are not, put into practice. That is, the technologies of production we have are in some sense a reflection of the social relations of production. Our technological infrastructure and the material configuration of specific devices create more or less favorable conditions for job autonomy, control over efort, and the parameters of working time.
It is worth recalling, however, that this focus on design does not imply that the makers or marketers of a technology can reliably predict its final use. According to the textbook model, innovation is an activity restricted to engineers and computer scientists and, thereafter, technologies are autonomous and permanently fixed. In reality, studies have repeatedly shown that the way people adopt technologies is not necessarily in line with their intended usage.6 Nor are the afordances of technologies utilized in the same way by all users. Treating technologies as sociomaterial practices allows us to see that long after machines leave the industrial laboratory, their formation is still taking place. Technological change is thus a thoroughly contingent and heterogeneous process. There is nothing inevitable about the ways technologies evolve and are used in daily temporal practices.
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