Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 399-410). / This dissertation is a two-theme ethnography focusing on the early history of one company within the context of the turbulent business environment of the 1990's. One theme is the control exercised by a corporation to mold its people to achieve certain productive ends, focusing on three areas: culture, physical environment and technology. The second theme is the ability of a corporation to be flexible. Taken together, the two themes form the self-contradictory notion of trying to control a group to increase its ability to be flexible. Many writers who focus on organizations have found the biological metaphor of evolution a useful way to conceptualize some aspects of a successful firm. In contrast I find the biological metaphor of genetic manipulation best illustrates the kind of control exercised by the leadership of this particular firm. From its inception, the leadership team wanted to create a flexible firm, one that could thrive in a turbulent environment. Rather than rely on a multiplicity of heterogeneous experiments, they actively manipulated specific aspects of the firm. The early results, the formation of a successful company, suggested that those controls and the decision to actively mold the firm using such controls were the right choices. When faced with a radical change in the marketplace, the arrival of the Internet economy, the leaders of this firm responded with the same technique and once again were able to mold a successful firm. To the extent that the Internet economy requires companies to change at Internet speed, this firm's ability to manipulate its own "DNA" may well be a model for success for other firms in this environment. / by Patricia Peterson Bentley. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-223). / This dissertation investigates the role of software in institutional transformation using the example of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. It ethnographically tracks the development of the software infrastructure being built for MOOCs, focusing on three communities-programmers, instructors, and researchers-who centrally participate in the MOOC start-ups' stated mission of reinventing higher education. It argues that MOOC infrastructures are best viewed as an example of a heterogeneous software assemblage that I call the "software-as-platform," that is today being widely deployed and used in a number of industries and institutions. The software-as-platform consists primarily of software that holds together a variety of normative logics: open-endedness; fast, iterative, production processes; data-driven decision-making; governance for emergent effects; scalability; and personalization. Of these, the most important is that its creators give to it an open-endedness as to its ultimate purpose: thus, the assemblage is often framed using the language of "tools" or "platform." I then argue that the software-as-platform is a vehicle through which the norms and practices of Silicon Valley are making their way into other institutions, a process I call "platformization." Finally, I suggest that the software-as-platform enables the emergence of a new form of expertise: tool-making. Tool-makers see themselves as building software tools, whose ultimate purpose comes from their users. The tools themselves draw on many other kinds of expert knowledge chosen at the discretion of the tool-builders. The dissertation consists of four chapters bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. Chapter 2 is an analysis of the public discourse around MOOCs. Chapter 3 describes MOOC infrastructures, showing how a cluster of institutions, software, and people are organized to produce the plethora of courses as well knowledge about education. Chapter 4 tells the story about how edX, a MOOC start-up, turned itself from an educational organization into a software organization by deploying the software-as-platform, thereby transforming and displacing particular institutional roles. In Chapter 5, I analyze the practices of a rising class of tool-makers, computer scientists, and describe how they are able to draw on other kinds of expertise, and intervene in new domains, while still presenting themselves as neutral system-builders. / by Shreeharsh Kelkar. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [312]-323). / This dissertation uses the Ames Family of Easton, Massachusetts as a case study on development of business and industry in early nineteenth century America. From English iron-working roots transplanted to America in 1635 the artisan tradition of blacksmithing dominated the Ames family for generations. Oliver Ames was trained as a smith, but when he came to Easton in 1803 to focus on the manufacture of shovels, he made an important step in the evolution from artisan and craftsman to industrialist, a common transition well exemplified by Oliver Ames's life. The Ames story demonstrates that the "Industrial Revolution" was no revolution at all. It was a gradual and fluid evolution from one way of doing business to another, an evolution in which many older methods and beliefs (the importance of farming, the dependence on kin, devotion to the community, conservative capital investments...) served men like Oliver Ames well. Common mischaracterizations of industrial development as revolutionary slights the importance of early nineteenth century industry; encourages an inaccurate focus on the romantic nature of small, rural mills; and discourages any impulse to examine in detail the ways in which early industry operated and played a part in industrial development. In fact, the management and operation of many of these facilities was far more complex than is typically recognized. Many of the earliest industrialists struggled to understand and manage complicated issues such as labor, raw materials, shipping, sales, international trade, economics, technological and scientific understanding, and the impact of business on family and community. / (cont.) We can learn much about later business practice by exploring these earlier industries. The thesis discusses Oliver Ames's operations in Easton, West Bridgewater, and Canton, Massachusetts including joint waterpower development. Later management by Oliver's sons Oakes and Oliver is also studied as are merchant houses in New York and blast furnaces in Franklin and Wawayanda, New Jersey managed by Old Oliver's son William and the puddling and heavy forging shop run by his son Horatio in Falls Village, Connecticut. Later family investments are briefly discussed including Oakes's involvement with the Credit Mobilier Construction Company which built the Union Pacific Railroad. / by Gregory J. Galer. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the second half of the twentieth century, American wildlife biologists incorporated Cold War-era surveillance technologies into their practices in order to render wild animals and their habitats legible and manageable. One of the most important of these was wildlife radio-tracking, in which collars and tags containing miniature transmitters were used to locate individual animals in the field. In addition to producing new ecological insights, radio-tracking served as a site where relationships among scientists, animals, hunters, animal rights activists, environmentalists, and others involved in wildlife conservation could be embodied and contested. While scholars have tended to interpret surveillance technologies in terms of the extension of human control over nature and society, I show how technological, biological, and ecological factors made such control fragmentary and open to reappropriation. Wildlife radio-tracking created vulnerabilities as well as capabilities; it provided opportunities for connection as well as for control. I begin by showing how biologists in Minnesota and Illinois in the early 1960s used radio-tracking to establish intimate, technologically-mediated, situated relationships with game animals such as ruffed grouse, which they hoped would bolster their authority vis-a-vis recreational hunters. I then show how the technique was contested by environmentalists when biologists applied it to iconic "wilderness wildlife" such as grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park in the 1960s and 1970s. One way for biologists to render radio-tracking acceptable in the face of such opposition was to emphasize its continuity with traditional practices, as they did in a radio-tagging study of tigers in Nepal in the 1970s. / (cont.) Another way was to shift to less invasive techniques of remote sensing, such as the bioacoustic surveys of bowhead whales off Alaska's Arctic coast that were conducted in the 1980s after a proposal to radio-tag whales was rejected by marine mammalogists and Ifiupiat whalers. Finally, wildlife biologists could reframe radio-tracking as a means for popular connection rather than expert control, as they did by broadcasting the locations of satellite-tagged albatrosses to schoolchildren, gamblers, and the general public via the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. / by Etienne Samuel Benson. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-206). / Through the mode of conceptual history, this dissertation examines some of the forms dissent could take within academic social science in the United States from roughly 1945-1970. The concept in question is "conflict." There are many stories one could tell about this concept and its transformations in postwar American social science, but in this dissertation I focus on one in particular: how certain social scientists sought to frame conflict as a problem of knowledge, by stretching the concept to fit the global proportions of the bipolar world that seemed to have emerged from World War II, and then using that conceptualization to oppose the Cold War. The dissertation first considers a specific moment of conceptual change, when some social scientists sought to redefine "conflict" in the immediate aftermath of World War II, so that it would be capacious enough to describe conflict at all levels of analysis, from the intrapersonal to the international. From there, it follows a cadre of social scientists who used that novel conceptualization to build an intellectual movement around a new journal and research center starting in the mid- 1950s. The scholars who participated in that movement, known as "peace research" or ''conflict resolution," endeavored to construct a "general theory of conflict," which they would then employ to challenge the notion that the Cold War was inevitable. The language of mid-century social science was the idiom in which they expressed their dissent. Although this was to become an international movement, this dissertation focuses on its American incarnation, which came to fruition at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor beginning around 1957. The dissertation then looks closely at how two of the leading theorists of that movement modeled conflict in the early 1960s, and considers the ethical and political impulses that animated their work, demonstrating that it was possible for some intellectuals to inhabit the dual role of academic social scientist and social critic in the early 1960s. It concludes with a brief set of reflections on the United States Institute of Peace, an independent federal institute established in 1984 to embody the dream of "conflict resolution." / by Marie Elizabeth Burks. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2004. / "May 2004." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-253). / This dissertation recounts the development of graphic models of human bodies and virtual reality simulators for teaching anatomy and surgery to medical students, residents, and physicians. It considers how researchers from disciplinary cultures in medicine, engineering, and computer programming come together to build these technologies, bringing with them values and assumptions about bodies from each of their disciplines, values and assumptions that must be negotiated and that often are made material and embedded in these new technologies. It discusses how the technological objects being created privilege the body as a dynamic and interactive system, in contrast to the description and taxonomic body of traditional anatomy and medicine. It describes the ways that these technologies create new sensory means of knowing bodies. And it discusses the larger cultural values that these technologies reify or challenge. The methodology of this dissertation is ethnography. I consider in-depth one laboratory at a major medical school, as well as other laboratories and researchers in the field of virtual medicine. I study actors in the emerging field of virtual medicine as they work in laboratories, at conferences, and in collaborations with one another. I consider the social formations that are developing with this new discipline. Methods include participant observation of laboratory activities, teaching, surgery, and conferences and extensive, in-depth interviewing of actors in the field. I draw on the literatures in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, the sociology of science, technology, and medicine, and the history of science and technology to argue that "bodies of information" are part of a bio-engineering revolution. / (Cont.) that is making human bodies more easily viewed and manipulated. Science studies theorists have revealed the constructed, situated, and contingent nature of technoscientific communities and the objects they work with. They also have discussed how technoscientific objects help create their subjects and vice versa. This dissertation considers these phenomena within the arena of virtual medicine to intervene in debates about the body, about simulation, and about scientific cultures. / by Rachel Prentice. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study brings together science and technology studies, political anthropology, and Latin American studies, by studying the practices and political reasoning of neoliberal networks in Peru. It analyses the extension of such networks by studying the relationships and subjectivities cultivated under two contemporary state-led projects: an initiative promoting intellectual property rights among traditional artisans as tools for rural development, and a national effort to encourage the uptake of free/libre and open source software based resources. Promising to modernize government and prepare citizens for the global, information-based economy, these projects frame their reforms as new, contemporary models for economic development. This work demonstrate how key to the success of such projects is the remaking of rural and urban citizens into "free" and modern individuals who are able to independently self- realize using the tools and logics of information networks. It argues that such plans rely on the ability to bring diverse actors - including state planners, transnational corporations, traditional artisans, rural communities, urban technology experts, and transnational activists -- into strategic alliance, or what can become coded as relations of promiscuity. What brings these partnerships together and seduces such disparate actors into alliance isn't so much the promise of increased technology access. It is instead the promise of "freedom" and the opportunity for diversely situated subjects to realize themselves as "modern individuals." / by Anita Say Chan. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references. / by David A. Mindell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-289). / This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography among marketers, consumer-patients and psychiatrists in the U.S. It explores the recent history of styles of pharmaceutical advertising that have come about in response to FDA regulations and ethical issues raised by patients and the press about how the pharmaceutical industry shapes drug research. Specifically this dissertation explores the role of direct-to-consumer drug marketing (DTC) in the consumption and experience of antidepressants, including a cultural shift in the U.S. towards how the consumer negotiates new ethical injunctions to manage his or her own identity through pharmaceuticals. A key focus is how marketers carve out their own ethical niche from which they innovate on ways to persuade consumer audiences with scientific facts that double as public relations. This dissertation gives special attention to how individuals encounter and incorporate the putative neuroscience of DTC advertising of antidepressants to negotiate their personal knowledge of illness, and to manage their identity, everyday practices, and professional pursuits. From these ethnographic encounters I have identified "illness," "fantasy," and "capital" as three key themes for my analysis of DTC marketing. In turn I have combined the very different literatures on illness (which address patient advocacy movements and health care seeking and questions of how medical diagnoses can be deployed as social norms), fantasy (which address psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and self, as well as semiotic understandings of consumption), and capital (which address health care market competition, and negotiations with the FDA over truth in advertising). In sum, this dissertation offers a thick description of "ethical identity management" in the contemporary landscape of U.S. pharmaceutical consumption. / by Nathan P. Greenslit. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-274). / This dissertation tracks what happens when biology, that is, both life forms and knowledge about them, becomes the object of security. While increasing global traffic has led to a greater degree of movement of people, animals, plants, and microbes, biosecurity measures are concerned with regulating circulation and seek to work against such possibly homogenizing forces by both documenting and maintaining the distinctiveness of life forms in different places. Through ethnographic research in Mexico, I track the social logics, scientific practices, and institutional forms that underwrite biosecurity in three areas: invasive species control, emerging infectious disease research, and the use of transgenic organisms. I examine how conservationists working in Mexican settings - particularly on islands - alternately protect or exterminate the various life forms they encounter; how microbiologists and immunologists studying infectious diseases in Mexico make claims about the relationships between environments, bodies, and viral ecologies; and how ecologists regulate the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and turn them into bureaucratic objects. All these projects entail defining "native" life forms and establishing what is unique and valuable about Mexican biology. By bringing together this assortment of interlocutors and research sites I map how biosecurity projects establish the ways that a shared biological substantiality connects the nation and how human and non-human life forms are incorporated into political identities. Through these projects scientists produce knowledge about Mexican biology (including who or what is included or excluded in these populations). As this knowledge in turn informs political efforts to improve human and ecological health, biosecurity projects become ways in which science and the nation in Mexico are coconstituted. I address the production of biosecurity in two canonical places of science, the lab and the field, and I argue for the importance of a third scientific space, the office, a space where scientists engaged with bureaucratic processes and shaped the administration of Mexican ecosystems. Further, I argue that in Mexico biopolitics and biosecurity are no longer only about the regulation of human life, but have been extended beyond the human to encompass animal, plant, and microbial worlds. Mexican biopolitics have become multispecies projects. / by Emily Mannix Wanderer. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)