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Paper short abstract

We present our sociological concept of repair for the empirical study of technology use in work contexts, illustrated by examples of industrial and care robotics.

Paper long abstract

Repair practices have been a recurring concern within Science and Technology Studies over recent decades. Much of this work has focused on the repair of technical devices (see, for example, Graham and Thrift 2007; Orr 1996; Suchman 1987; Schubert 2018; Jarzabkowski and Pinch 2013). By contrast, in our research on the use of collaborative robots in care facilities and industrial manufacturing, we are concerned less with the repair of discrete artefacts than with the repair of entire sociotechnical workflows. We use the term repair to describe systematic ways of dealing with disruptions that arise as blockages within originally scripted sequences of action and that, in turn, compromise the achievement of the practical goal of a particular work activity.

Our approach is particularly suited to the sociological investigation of technology integration and the associated transformations of work processes. Our concept of repair draws attention to the additional work processes that may arise for employees when new technologies are introduced and when sociotechnical scripts (Akrich 1992) need to be repaired in order to accomplish action goals.

In the presentation, we illustrate our concept of repair through several detailed empirical case studies (30+ interviews) of robot deployments in industrial manufacturing and nursing homes. Particular emphasis is placed on abstracting typical sequences of repair practices. In connection with the concept of distributed agency (Schulz-Schaeffer et al. 2024), we use this framework to examine more closely which sociotechnical groups of actors are involved in the respective stages of repair.