Building the Trident network : a study of the enrollment of people, knowledge, and machines / Maggie Mort.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mort, Maggie, author.

Series:

Inside technology.

Inside Technology Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trident (Weapons systems)--Design and construction.

Trident (Weapons systems).

Military-industrial complex--United States.

Military-industrial complex.

Military-industrial complex--Great Britain.

United States. Navy--Procurement.

United States.

Great Britain. Royal Navy--Procurement.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 217 pages ) illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2002.

Summary:

In Building the Trident Network, Maggie Mort approaches the United Kingdom's Trident submarine and missile system as a sociotechnical network. Drawing on the sociology of scientific and technical knowledge and on actor-network theory, Mort recounts how the Trident program was stabilized in the United Kingdom and brought into "successful" production. She uncovers the nature of this success by retelling unofficial histories of Trident, of production roads not taken, and of potential technological "distractions." The production of Trident, she shows, was not inevitable but contingent and problematic. Using material from interviews and local texts, Mort explores the emergence of a counternetwork in the form of a workers' campaign for alternative technologies. She develops concepts of "disenrollment" and "absent intermediaries," in which redundant workers and marginalized technologies serve to discipline and reinforce the dominant network as production shrinks. She also examines the maintenance of the barrier between the technical and the social/political in this context. The management of uncertainties within the Trident production program emerges as critical to its successful completion.-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

97Introduction

I Simplifying production – 1 Large-scale technologies: ambivalence and coercion

2 From diversity to "Core Business"

II Reinforcing the network

3 Technological roads not taken: the constant speed generator drive

4 Constructing a core workforce

III Alternatives – 5 Winning the "Technical Arguments"

6 Building a counter-network

IV

Closures

7 Human redundancy: an exercise in disenrollment

8 Softening the facts

Appendix Employment data from Lazard Brothers sale documents, as

reproduced in Oceans of Work

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-28023-X

0-585-43640-1

OCLC:

51959089