Inside the Politics of Technology: Agency and Normativity in the Co-Production of Technology and Society (review)

Ever since the development of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), STS researchers have been studying the intersection of active agencies—human, social, and material—shaping the "seamless web" of technology and society. According to this volume's editor, ANT researchers typically take a dualistic view, affording prominence either to the human agents or to the materiality of technology. Inside the Politics of Technology articulates a somewhat different view, emphasizing what the contributors uniformly call the "co-production" of human and nonhuman agents in the making of technology and society. This working premise results from the contributors all participating in the aptly named Mumford Program at the University of Twente (the Netherlands) between 1998 and 2000. There must have been a fruitful exchange of ideas, because the volume enjoys a unique degree of coherency across the nine case studies, which are neatly set off by editor Hans Harbers's useful introduction and forward-looking epilogue.

The contributors seek to understand how material technologies are active agents in shaping the normativity of human beings, who in turn are the socially constituted meaning-designers and users of instruments. But their goal is to emphasize the co-production of science, technology, and society as a matter of interrelationships. The volume is organized into three sections, although there is significant overlap: "The Distribution of Agency" reformulates the agency question to emphasize the hybridity and co-production of technology and society; "The Mediation of Agency" pushes the concept of co-production by exploring the collective (i.e., normative) production of human agency and how human subjectivity is mediated in (not "by") emerging sociotechnical networks; and "The Politics of Agency" explores the ethical and political consequences of this co-productive process.

In "The Distribution of Agency," the chapters by Cornelis Disco and Philip Brey shed light on how nonhuman agency is "distributed" within actor networks, stressing the relational nature of the human/nonhuman hybrid. And in their case study of the medical video-communication technology known as Baby Watch, Nelly Oudshoorn, Margo Brouns, and Ellen van Oost employ this distributed view to evaluate the co-productive agency of human and nonhuman constituencies, which variously include designers, parents, nurses, hospital management, babies, laptop computers, and TVs. They find that between its early development, initial use, and subsequent design modification, the agency of these various co-producers was distributed asymmetrically.

In "The Mediation of Agency," Dirk Stemerding and Annemiek Nelis study the co-productive network involved in diagnosing and treating colon cancer. While the normative ideal espoused by gastroenterologists proclaims the patient's autonomy in treatment options, in actuality decision-making is in the hands of a medical establishment increasingly dependent on DNA-diagnostic regimes. Peter-Paul Verbeek articulates a "post"-phenomenological approach (based on Ihde's "technological intentionality") to investigate the workings of Eternally Yours, a Dutch industrial-designer association dedicated to sustainable designing. Eternally Yours designers seek to overcome the normative psychology of conspicuous consumers by turning the agency of material factors to their advantage when designing such products as heaters and ink-jet printers. Petran Kockelkoren also employs a phenomenological standpoint to investigate how the mediation of nonhuman agency disciplines human sensibilities. To appreciate the material factors contributing to our normative, albeit artificial, sense of (dis)embodiment—and rather than blame Descartes alone—he discusses examples as diverse as the linearity of Renaissance art, the camera obscura, theaters of anatomy, train sickness, and telestereoscopy.

In "The Politics of Agency," Boelie Elzen investigates three innovative traffic-transport systems to understand the co-production interweaving the daily habits (normativity) and agency of drivers with the material agency of automobiles and governmental pollution-reduction initiatives. Tsjalling Swierstra and Jaap Jelsma study the moral agency of engineers, concluding that everyday practice on the work-floor can be modeled after the actions of "exceptional" whistle-blowers; that is, engineers can act individually yet frame their ethical sensibilities within...