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Paper short abstract:

Social studies of technology have produced an understanding of technological change that is, paradoxically, at odds with its dominant research templates. We propose a possible remedy, the biographies of artifacts and practices approach and discuss its rationale, principles and substantive results.

Paper long abstract:

The sophisticated understandings of technological change emerging from recent social studies of technology are, paradoxically, at odds with the dominant research designs and methodological guidelines. The key insight from social shaping of technology from 1980s to 2000s was that new technologies are shaped in multiple interlinked settings, by multiple actor groups and processes, characterized by high contingency and choice. Nonetheless, the dominant S&TS research designs continue to involve intensive ethnographic engagement with particular contexts or overall historical studies with less detailed depictions. At the background reside frameworks such as ANT stressing flat ontology or commitment to detailed local accounts as in ethnomethodology.

A longitudinal multi-site research approach called "biographies of artifacts and practices" (BOAP) has emerged for remedying this S&TS methodology paradox. From its onset in mid 2000s, BOAP has evolved to a point that over 20 long term research engagements have been conducted within it. In this paper we review the origins of BOAP within SST in the UK and Finland. We outline the basic rationale and principles of BOAP and discuss the key variations how it has been pursued. We recount the substantive results that have followed from BOAP studies, most of which have called into question a taken for granted assumption in innovation studies or research on sociotechnical change. These have been largely due to avoiding the strong framing effects produced by "snap-shot" and "single granularity" studies.