EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines, vol 1

Maggie Mort ()
Additional contact information
Maggie Mort: Lancaster University

in MIT Press Books from The MIT Press

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Trident program; sociotechnical network; disenrollment; absent intermediaries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J45 L23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0-262-63362-0
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtp:titles:0262633620

Access Statistics for this book

More books in MIT Press Books from The MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262633620