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Instructors: Prof. Dr. Petra Ahrweiler; Blanca Luque Capellas
Event type:
Lecture
Displayed in timetable as:
02.149.16811
Credits:
3,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | -
Contents:
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 2023, these are: CRISPR for high cholesterol, AI that makes images, A chip design that changes everything, Mass-market military drones, Abortion pills via telemedicine, Organs on demand, The inevitable EV, James Webb Space Telescope, Ancient DNA analysis, Battery recycling. 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).
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