Search

Heeding calls to generate a creative synthesis between business history and organisation studies, this article analyses the emergence, institutionalisation and digitalisation of record pooling practices through the lens of institutional work. By developing an ‘analytically structured history’, this article contributes to the field of business history by demonstrating the value of practice and boundary work as organising categories. Practice and boundary work capture the continuous, recursive relations between structure and agency when constructing narrative explanations. It also contributes to neo-institutionalist history by demonstrating the embeddedness of institutional work – the everyday motivations and actions to revise practices and boundaries are shown to be intimately shaped by the conditions and affordances of historically-situated technologies.

A design team in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx used methodologies of performance and collaborative, location-based storytelling to contend with the effects of urban spatial injustice in the community. Ideation via a series of participatory performances led to creation of a mobile cinema application as the starting point for public, location-based cinema walks. The application accepts user-generated content, acting as a new form of generative monument to the neighborhood as it evolves. The project exemplifies how installing situated technologies for an embodied form of participation can help translate local concerns to outside audiences, in this case using a metaphorical, locative media platform to discuss the evolving nature of environmental discrimination, over-incarceration, and urban spatial justice in New York City.

From a research perspective, enhancing our understanding of interactions between people, the contexts in which they are situated, technologies, systems and information is seen as one of the keys to...

When the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) launched itself in the late 1950s, many U.S. historians found a compelling postwar framework for organizing research around an American consensus. SHOT’s founding generation participated in the scholarly spirit of the time although with its own particular emphases. Cold War ideology and a morally idealistic engineering creed defined technology, if well funded and unfettered by local political passions, as leading in a clean line toward democratic societies. Apart from this technologically specified version of American hegemonic progress, the received stereotype for technological history in the 1950s was no interpretation at all. Half a millennium of curiosity about artifacts had crystallized in a balkanized landscape, islands of passionate attention to minute changes over time in one’s artifact of choice—clocks, trains, automobiles, machine tools, weapons. An antiquarian paradigm and compelling Cold War urgency marked SHOT’s beginnings as a (barely) visible discipline in 1958. 1 Still, a handful of landmark books had begun to suggest new directions. Lewis Mumford and Siegfried S. Giedion, in particular, achieved an international reputation for major synthetic interpretations of western technological style. Louis Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers and I. B. Holley’s Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War One were less broadly known but considered breakthrough works within SHOT, comprehensive histories that situated technologies in the rich economic and political context of their times. 2 The founders understood their journal title as a move from internalism toward the still inchoate approach seen in Mumford, Giedion, Holley, and Hunter. The new journal would emphasize context: Technology and Culture. Two principles more or less defined their emerging methodology. First, every technology has a context of origin. Historical actors, specific in motive, worldview, and resources, shape technologies, as does the ambient social order. Second, technological actors think distinctively; from the beginning, historians of technology almost unanimously rejected the received popular notion of technology as “applied science.” Engineers use science as one

Highly diverse settings such as London (with people from ~179 countries speaking ~300 languages) are unique in that ethnic or socio-cultural backgrounds are no longer sufficient to generate a sense of place, belonging and community. Instead, residents actively perform place building activities on an ongoing basis, which we believe is of great importance when deploying interactive situated technologies in public spaces. This paper investigates community and place building within a complex multicultural context. We approached this using ethnography, complemented with workshops in the wild. By studying the relationships arising between different segments of the community and two networked screen nodes, we examine the place building activities of residents, and how screen nodes are incorporated into them. Our research suggests that urban screens will be framed (and eventually used) as part of this continuing process of social, spatial and cultural construction. This highlights the importance of enabling socially meaningful relations between the people mediated by these technologies.