Building The Trident Network: A Study Of The Enrollment Of People, Knowledge, And Machines (inside Technology)
by Maggie Mort /
2001 / English / PDF
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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.
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.
