Building the Trident Network – A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines - Softcover

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

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262633620 ISBN 13: 9780262633628

Publisher: MIT Press, 2008

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 this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262633620
• ISBN 13: 9780262633628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232