Knut H Sorensen

Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU · Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture

Professor emeritus, Institutt for tverrfaglige kulturstudier, NTNU knut.sorensen@ntnu.no «Digitaliseringen slår innover oss som en enorm bølge», hevdes det i ingressen til et seminar i regi av Norsk Arbeidslivsforum. 1 Slike påstander florerer og forsterkes av utviklin-gen innenfor kunstig intelligens og maskinlaering, kanskje saerlig såkalte språk...

Concepts like 'the metric society' and 'the tyranny of metrics' suggest that quantitative information increasingly shapes and steers policy and governance. This paper engages critically with such assumptions by using domestication theory to analyse how Norwegian climate and energy policy actors make sense of, assemble, and employ numeric informatio...

Trykt i I. Frønes & L. Kjølsrød, red. Det norske samfunn, 8. utgave, bind 2, kapittel 23, s. 156-178. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. For endelig versjon, se trykt utgave. Omstilling og endring er blitt nøkkelbegreper, saerlig i sammenheng med klima og andre miljøutfordringer. Det er bred enighet om at forskning og nyskaping-innovasjon-skal bidra til å...

In this chapter, we explore gender issues in/of so-called smart technologies, drawing on analytical tools provided by the field of feminist technoscience. We begin by discussing some major approaches of this area of study, including the work of Cynthia Cockburn, Wendy Faulkner and Donna Haraway. Our review continues by addressing the issue of gende...

In this paper, we analyse how the socialisation of new science and technology (technoscience) is performed through newspapers. Newspapers remain an important source of information about emerging technosciences, such as bio-and nanotechnology, even in the age of new social media. This includes communication about scientific and technological develop...

Policy documents suggest that quantitative information is important in the development of climate and energy policy. This is supported by quantitative studies research into the use of numbers in governance, which tends to assume that numbers have sufficient epistemic authority to be used by policymakers because they are believed to be trustworthy s...

Policy discourses regarding sustainability transitions intersect with a host of quantitative targets, articulated to guide efforts to achieve such transitions. This paper analyses ‘superior numeric targets’ in climate and energy policy; overarching, quantified articulations of missions for sustainability transitions. We use interviews and political...

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS,...

In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on t...

The problem of developing research and innovation in accordance with society’s general needs and values has received increasing attention in research policy. In the last 7 years, the concept of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) has gained prominence in this regard, along with the resulting question of how best to integrate awareness about...

The sociology of technology needs more nuanced conceptualizations of the temporal aspects of sociotechnical change. In this article, we propose liminality as a useful analytical entry-point to study technologies that seemingly remain in a ‘no man’s land’ – what we call liminal technologies. Drawing on anthropological accounts and technology studies...

Technologies called infrastructures are often considered to be inherently and opaquely political, but how they exert their politics has been both empirically and conceptually debated. Infrastructure studies have largely focused on (in)visibility or ‘infra’ qualities as central criteria for assessing who and what is included and excluded, and when....

It has been a common assumption that the knowledge practices of environmental organisations (ENGOs) is largely based on interaction with environmental research. Implied in such assumptions is the idea that ENGOs are so-called boundary organizations brokering knowledge between science and environmental policy decision-making. In this article, we cha...

Denne artikkelen introduserer begrepet lokal kunnskaping som betegner prosesser med en samtidig utvikling av kunnskap, mening og handling som vi finner er nødvendige for å sette i gang endring og bidra til forbedret kjønnsbalanse. I tillegg kreves utvikling av det vi kaller inklusjonsaktører. Kjønnsbalanse i akademia har vært et tema for politikk o...

This paper analyses sustainability transition agency among consulting engineers, who exercise considerable influence in a wide spectrum of environmental decision-making through advice, calculations and design. They work in an ambiguous space of governmental requirements, environmental politics, cost considerations, and professional standards. Never...

In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have...

span>This paper analyses technology policy as a scholarly concern and political practice that needs to be taken beyond the present somewhat singular focus on innovation and deployment. We also need to include an interest in the making of infrastructure, the provision of regulations, and democratic engagement. Consequently, this paper introduces the...

This paper addresses possible effects of the growing focus on global warming on households’ domestication of energy and the dynamics of energy consumption by comparing data pertaining to the domestication of energy within Norwegian households from two time periods: first, 1991–1995, when climate change was given little public attention, and, second...

This paper reports on a study of how economists engaged in energy policymaking and household consumers frame the electricity market, based on interviews with prominent energy economists and focus group interviews with household consumers. Drawing on economic sociology, and above all the contribution of Michel Callon, we analyse framing processes in...

Local governments' websites are important gateways for residents wishing to interact with public institutions online, and the establishment and development of such websites stand out among governmental initiatives to improve their performance. Drawing on domestication theory to apply a change-oriented perspective, the paper analyses how Norwegian l...

Research policy and research councils increasingly demand responsible innovation and socially robust knowledge. But what does that imply? Theories say little about how to translate social robustness into practice. In this essay, we report from an integrated project on solar cells where ELSA-oriented scholars interacted with material scientists. The...

This paper revisits some technologies that, in the 1970s, were considered as 'low-tech' alternatives to mainstream versions, but more recently have been developed using high-tech elements. This change from alternative to advanced is analysed as a process called sociotechnical mainstreaming, whereby technologies are transformed by the dominant R&D i...

The process of creating a specific building - Miljobygget in Trondheim, Norway - is analyzed in order to understand how the project team's ambitions expanded to embrace 'green' issues and create new targets. The decisions and roles of key actors are investigated regarding these goals and criteria. The analysis draws on two concepts. First, translat...

This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed e...

Norwegian local governments electronically out of step? From social to geographical digital divides The development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has raised a kind of ethical–political challenge usually referred to as a digital divide. Traditionally, this has fomented concerns about social inequalities with respect to individ...

This paper is an analysis of how local government employees domesticate climate science for the purpose of climate adaptation. Employees in Norwegian municipalities perceive the consequences of climate change as a serious challenge, but while placing trust in climate science they consider it too difficult to use. The paper discusses how these emplo...

Norwegian local governments electronically out of step? From social to geographical digital divides The development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has raised a kind of ethical-political challenge usually referred to as a digital divide. Traditionally, this has fomented concerns about social inequalities with respect to individu...

Science, mathematics and the liberal arts have been used to strengthen the social status of engineers. Insofar as social science subjects were made part of engineering curricula, the underlying reasoning seems to have diverged. In an era that seemingly celebrates interdisciplinarity where technology is no longer the exclusive preserve of engineers,...

This article shows how professional communication practices with customers are accounted for in software engineering. It looks at how communication and related activities are enacted and placed in relation to the so-called social/technical binary while also critically engaging with analyzing how this dualism is performed. Empirically, the article i...

This paper examines how energy efficiency fails in the building industry based on many years of research into the integration of energy efficiency in the construction of buildings and sustainable architecture in Norway. It argues that energy-efficient construction has been seriously restrained by three interrelated problems: (1) deficiencies in pub...

The issue of gender and ICT and the concern about an emerging digital divide in Norway have been dominated by a fear that the symbolic content and practices around ICT—epitomized in the hacker stereotype—are turning women off by making them feel like entering a “boy's room” when using ICT. State feminist policies have been developed to cope with th...

In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such init...

Environmental impact analysis (EIA) was developed in the USA in the late 1960s, but was not mandated in Norway as a tool for environmental planning until 1989. In this paper, we investigate how EIA in the Norwegian context contributes to the production of knowledge about the environment. Starting from the fairly broad diagnosis provided by the conc...

Feminists have produced different conceptions of women in science - suppressed, reformers, or revolutionaries - all of which have proved controversial to many women who are actually working in science and technology. This paper approaches some of the issues raised by feminist analysis through an empirical investigation of engineering students and R...

Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved th...

This paper discusses the phenomenon of genderized technology. A model of genderized technology is outlined, identifying mechanisms of gen derization at three levels: institutional, symbolic, and characteristics of research work. Usmg survey material from Norwegian engineering students, it is shown that technology is genderized through all three set...

The issue of the possible impact of technology on industrial democracy is explored theoretically, using two different approaches — sociotechnical theory and the Marxist labour-process approach. Within each of these approaches, a model of the interaction between technology and democratization is developed to illustrate how different theoretical conc...

This paper is concerned with learning needs, learning behaviour, and the planning of education programmes in health institutions. The approach is oriented towards mapping out various factors that may affect learning behaviour and thus the participation in education programmes, and it is marked by a sex role perspective.The data consist of 362 inter...