Issue 2
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Item Science, Technology & Innovation Studies Vol. 2 (2006), No 2 (November)(Technische Universität Dortmund, 2006-11) Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo; Werle, Raymund; Weyer, JohannesItem Modes of Governance of Hybrid Systems(Technische Universität Dortmund, 2006-11) Weyer, JohannesThe paper deals with hybrid systems, where human actors and non-human agents meet and interact. Different from most of the literature on autonomous technology, which mainly deals with the question of agency of non-humans, the paper puts forward the assumption that the release of smart technology may lead to a deconstruction of order or even a regime change, thus raising the question of how order emerges in hybrid systems. Discussing different sociological concepts, the paper identifies two modes of governance: central control and decentralized selforganization. However, smart technology allows implementing different system's architectures, some of which may go beyond this traditional distinction. Referring to a case study on collision avoidance in aviation (and especially the mid-air collision at Ueberlingen in 2002), the paper shows that hybrid systems create new opportunities, but entail new risks as well. The release of smart technology seems to intensify well-known problems of automation, especially when systems get out of control. Aviation is one of the societal fields, where experiments with new modes of governance currently take place that combine features of central control and decentralized self-organization.Item Means of Communicating Innovations(Technische Universität Dortmund, 2006-11) Lösch, AndreasCommunications about the future potentials of current innovation processes of nanotechnology are often accompanied by visionary scenarios anticipating future applications of nanotechnological products. The analysis and evaluation of the mediality of such scenarios has for some time been an important research topic of both sociological expectation- and Leitbild-research as well as, more recently, the vision assessment of German technology assessment. However, problems arise in these research traditions when they analyze and evaluate the mediality of highlyfuturistic visions whose speculative contents correspond neither to current trends in nanotechnological research and product development nor clearly to strategies and interests of the actors of innovation processes. Based on a case study on the mediality of visionary images of nanomachines used in medical journals, popular science magazines, business press and daily and weekly newspapers, my article shows that highly-futuristic scenarios can by all means be analyzed and evaluated as means of communication which facilitate communication between scientific, economic and mass medial discourses about future potentials of nanotechnology. The use of these futuristic and visionary scenarios for communicating nanotechnology s futures influences discourse-specific assessments of the innovative potentials of current nanotechnological product developments. To enable an analysisand evaluation of the mediality of highly-speculative visions which are not directly related to practical affairs, my article extends the theoretical and methodological instrument of the current vision assessment program. I suggest a systems-theoretical reorientation of vision assessment which is currently dominated by actor theoretical models.Item Land Warrior(Technische Universität Dortmund, 2006-11) Kaufmann, StefanThe U.S. Army is currently working on the development of a new hybrid type of infantryman. Land Warrior is the name for the project which aims at equipping the dismounted soldiers with wearable computers, head-up display, permanent online connection and other technical components. The idea is to link up the dismounted soldier to an information and communications network spanning the whole field of operation. This project sets the stage for the introduction of a completely new type of soldier. It aims not merely at securing a new armament technology, but the complete technical and disciplinary reconfiguration of the soldier. The project transfers to the micro-level of the soldier the whole set of expectations which the military command units and advisers have in mind as a consequence of the epochal changeover to the "Information Age". The change introduced by information technology, so the argument goes, brings with it new kinds of opponents and dangers, but also new opportunities for military strategy. It transforms the entire fabric of geo-political and armament technology. Thus it brings the need for a change of the rationality of organisation of the military: founded on the plan of a "Networkcentric warfare", there is to be a programmatic re-structuring which extends right from the ideas of warfare to the design of the individual soldier. The combination of two research perspectives is used as a heuristical guideline for the empirical presentation. Fundamental assumptions of actor-network theory, and the idea that technical expectations can be seen as far-reaching "prospective structures", lead the gaze to the decisive significance of the main expectation, that of standing at the threshold of the information age. And they bring into sharper focus the idea of network-centric warfare as a programmatic analysis, which translates the technical developments into social demands made on organisational structures, procedures and cultures; and which, conversely, interprets the military definitions of situation, strategic and tactical, as a technological challenge. Drawing on Foucault s analysis of forms of governance and its further extension within governmentality studies, this not only allows a systematic treatment of the reconfiguration of the soldier which this process of change entails, it also shows how thorough-going and farreaching are the transformations of the soldier-subject which are envisioned. And the recourse to the Foucauldian perspective at the same time shows us how a network-type coordination of action, encouraging decentrality and self-organisation, implicitly requires for its precondition a specific kind of subjectivity structured by processes of power.Item Editorial(Technische Universität Dortmund, 2006-11) Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo; Werle, Raymund; Weyer, Johannes