Paper short abstract:

A biographic turn has recently taken place in the STS. Paul Ricoeur's phenomenology of historiography can be a unifying theoretical framework, in this respect, by tackling both stability and change in sociotechnical systems, and account for the plurality of narrative biases among researchers.

Paper long abstract:

There has been recently a turn in STS towards the biographies of artefacts and practices. It arose out of discontent with the excessively localized and overly situated studies of technologies and practices. Most of the current research in this area suffers from a rather fragmented overall research focus as well as from an eloquent absence of a unifying theoretical framework. The biographic turn attempts to bring to light the life cycles of artefacts and practices, hardly observed on a local and situated level of enquiry, by strategic ethnography, that is, by designing multi-site and longitudinal studies.

According to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, historians are narrators, but unlike fiction writers they have to deal with objectivity and truth. Furthermore, historians invent ''quasi-characters'' with historical agency for their narratives, such as nations, peoples, or mentalities, and describe ''quasi-events'' ranging over graduated temporalities from a political assassination to the lifespan of an empire. Finally historians propose ''quasi-plots'' as causal explanations of the social-historical phenomena they study, such as a class struggle, or the protestant ethic.

In this respect, Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological approach to historiography can provide an enriched theoretical-biographical framework that can tackle both stability and change in sociotechnical systems and environments. Furthermore, Ricoeur's typology of a generic historiographical narrative can be incorporated into the research design of a strategic ethnography, solving, thus, the problems of multi-site observations and multiple interpretations and accounting for the plurality of narrative biases among various schools of sociological analysis.