Political Artifacts In Scandinavia: An American Perspective

How does it stand with Scandinavian attempts to democratize technological choice? How can those efforts improve our grasp of the politics of technology? These are questions posed by an outsider. As a reader of books and articles, I have followed the projects carried out during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, work that sought to politicize technological choices in Scandinavian countries and to illuminate a theoretical grasp of what such work entails. The early history of sociotechnical job design, the Iron and Metals project of the 1970s, the work and ideals of the 1980s Arbetslivsentrum, the DEMOS, UTOPIA and Florence projects, and other such initiatives—all are chapters well worth studying. Along with other American social scientists, I’ve consumed with great relish corresponding sociological reports of design experiments in Swedish automobile manufacturing, studies of efforts in community control of technology in Denmark, as well as the writings of Scandinavian scholars in science and technology studies and design theory. Whether these reports portray successes or failures, they have always seemed to me most promising, not only for the ways they might help us understand the origins and dynamics of technological change, but also for possible help in getting a handle on matters that citizens of liberal democratic societies find baffling and inaccessible. My own connection to these matters stems from an ongoing project that interprets technological choices from the standpoint of classical and contemporary political theory. The issues that matter from this standpoint are one that concern a range of entities I call “political artifacts”. Political artifacts are devices and systems Political Artifacts In Scandinavia: An American Perspective