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  • Vernetzte Steuerung: Soziale Prozesse im Zeitalter technischer Netzwerke
  • Ulrich Wengenroth (bio)
Vernetzte Steuerung: Soziale Prozesse im Zeitalter technischer Netzwerke. Edited by Stefan Kaufmann. Zurich: Chronos, 2007. Pp. 160. €19.90.

“Networked Control,” the title of this collection of essays, seems almost an oxymoron in today’s technology studies. Networks have long since displaced control and the technocratic fantasies that went with them as the main paradigm in studying technology in society. This displacement happened within the wider movement of substituting governmentality for disciplinary power and evolution for planning, not least given the historical failure that was associated with the latter. It did not take the 2008 financial crisis, however, to substantiate suspicion that some forms of adamant control kept hiding in and making use of networks and that the stochastics of unregulated systems were not always docile.

The eight chapters of this slim book originated in a history of technology workshop in Zurich in 2005. While Stefan Kaufmann, the editor, has subdivided the book into a section on “genealogy, virulence, and future of networks” and another on “practices of socio-technological networking and regulation,” an alternative subdivision into two more theoretical chapters by Erhard Schüttpelz and Paul N. Edwards respectively and five case studies—some of which can also be found in other publications—would also have been appropriate. [End Page 680]

The two theoretical chapters fruitfully overlap to some extent inasmuch as both refer to the history of the “network” paradigm in comparison to earlier paradigms like system, control, and cybernetics. While starting on similar ground, these chapters follow very different paths and enrich each other in a most fortunate way.

Schüttpelz discusses the intersecting of networks as technological infrastructures and networks as social relations during which the networks conceptually develop from objects to subjects of systems, losing much of their normative stigma on the way. Rather than threatening big systems or hotbeds of corruption and clientelism, networks today appear to be legitimate and often preferable forms of organization—seen to be more efficient and even more democratic than their heavily regulated and formally organized predecessors. To Schüttpelz “the victory of the absolute concept ‘network’ coincides with its advancing blindness” (p. 42).

The idea that everything is connected fails to do justice to continuing hierarchies and exclusion. Edwards takes his cues from Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and Mark Granovetter’s socially powerful “weak ties.” In his analysis, networks were a way out of the impasse that the system discourse had run into by the 1970s. In view of unending failures to control ever more complexity, systems had lost their credibility. One way out was to develop intellectual tools for non-linearity; the other, a loose concept of uncircumscribed networks. It was the very fuzziness of networks that made them attractive as a tool of both cost-effective organization and empirical social research. To Edwards, “weak discipline” is the new modality of power—weak discipline that can be as powerful as weak ties. The blindness Schüttpelz was identifying is part of a new modality that can rely on the subjectivation of discipline and power that left older critical theory speechless.

The five case studies test-run the idea of networked control with examples ranging from air traffic control and self-service banking to “land warriors,” communication technologies in financial markets, and online communities. An outstanding contribution is Jörg Potthast’s chapter on breakdowns of semiautomatic baggage-handling systems at airports. When things run afoul, hierarchies switch to networks, and bureaucracies and planning give way to skills on the ground. But not for long. Hierarchies recover when it comes to claims-management and getting back to normal operation. Potthast identifies heterogeneous moral economies operating side by side to overcome tricky situations. Problem solving was governed neither by networks nor by formal organizations alone. As so often, it is not A or B but A and B. “Networked control” might not be such an oxymoron after all. [End Page 681]

Ulrich Wengenroth

Ulrich Wengenroth is a professor at the Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology.

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