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)

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2005. / Also issued in a 2 v. set, printed in leaves. / MIT Dewey Library copy: 2 v. set. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 518-545). / This is a study of Japan and Taiwan's different responses to the expansion of the global drug industry. The thesis focuses on the problematic of "voicing," of how a state can make its interests heard in the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The ICH is a unique project that facilitates the formation of a single global market by creating universal standards for clinical trials and drug approvals. Tracing, through "slow motion" ethnography, step by step, why Japan claims a racial difference requires additional local clinical trials with "Asian bodies," this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of protectionism for Japan's resistance to globalization. It argues that more than protectionism is involved, and that a rich ethnographic understanding of Japan's medical infrastructure is required to understand the claim of biological, cultural, and national differences, as well as biostatistical arguments about the ambiguities of "extrapolation" of clinical data from one place to another. / (cont.) The inherent ambiguities of efforts to create "bridging" studies as a temporary solution to these problematics created a deadlock in the ICH, and provided an opening for Taiwan, another Asian state, which does not enjoy formal recognition from the world, to speak for itself to this conference, and to create the fragile, but politically critical, possibility of becoming a clinical trial center for Asian populations. The language of genomics and biostatistics become in the more recent period the vehicles for both Japanese and Taiwanese efforts at "voicing" their concerns. Both genomics and biostatistics look different in these contexts than they do from the United States or European Union. In sum, (1) Japan's and Taiwan's response, as well as "global ethnographic objects" such as the ICH, provide important tools to rethink the comparative method as well as universalizing claims of harmonization. (2) Race, culture, and the nation-state are transformed as categories through the contemporary reworkings of genomics and biostatistics. (3) The thesis demonstrates that abstract accounts of the spread of clinical trials and resistance in various parts of the world are not to be trusted unless they include detailed probings of local understandings, identity issues, and problems of voicing. / by Wen-Hua Kuo. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-113). / A study was carried out on policies to address the environmental damage caused by urban public transportation in megacities. Policy recommendations were proposed to alleviate the environmental impact of transportation in two existing megacities, Mexico City and Guangzhou City, using lessons learned from previous experiences in two industrialized countries, the US and Japan. The objectives of this study were as follows: - Review the environmental problems caused by urban transportation; - Examine policies previously tried in developed countries to counter the problems; - Examine methodologies to evaluate external costs of urban transportation from the perspective of environmental sustainability; - Propose, on the basis of case studies, measures to alleviate the environmental impact of transportation in existing megacities. The megacities of Mexico City, Guangzhou City, and Tokyo are suffering from similar environmental problems caused by transportation such as local air pollution of ozone, NOx and suspended particular matter. The causes of pollution such as lack of both internalizing environmental externalities and long-term perspective are common. Policy recommendations were made for each mega city, taking into account the city's historical, cultural, and political background. Through the case studies, the importance of proper enforcement of the policies as well as well-planned transportation policies was found. Only integrated transportation and environment policies and effective policy implementation will enable the recommendations proposed here to achieve the goal of more sustainable urban transportation systems. / by Mimi Takayanagi. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2000. / Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage <http://thesis.mit.edu>. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-95). / An Application Service Provider (ASP) provides a contracted service, which offers to deploy, host, manage and rent access to popular packaged software applications. Customers, primarily enterprises, are served from centrally managed facilities. Clients access the service through Internet technologies. The ASP is responsible for providing all specific activities and expertise to manage these software applications. The ASP is a new ( or renewed) application delivery model. It represents a new ( or renewed) business model. Customers rent access to applications addressing enterprise-wide needs such as accounting or customer relationship management. Installation, maintenance, security, and updating responsibilities lie with the ASP, hence reducing expenses and IT infrastructure for the customer. In return the vendor receives a rent-like payment for its services. These revenues are shared between the software provider and the service provider. This thesis includes an industry analysis, a market assessment and plans for developing an ASP business. The business plan includes plans for developing the product, marketing, financing and staffing. Analysis suggests that although the service is likely to be(-come) very attractive to customers, it is also likely to have some commodity attributes. The ongoing challenge to create and sustain profit will be to continue to innovate so as to provide differentiation for the customers the ASP chooses to serve. / by Paul Robert Mattson. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-179). / Globalization is changing the way in which the world is organized. The world trade regime is increasingly the dominant mode of organizing international relations. Within this context of globalization and liberalization of trade, empirical examples of a race to the bottom co-exist with examples of a race to the top and examples of stable heterogeneity of international standards. The puzzle, then, is to determine the structural conditions, sources of power, and policy instruments that determine whether international standards will diverge or converge, upward or downward. This research seeks to reveal the potential for (and limitations of) a race to the top in international standards. System dynamics modeling and theories of globalization and regulatory competition are applied to three case studies to explore the causes of a race to the top: the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances, dolphin-safe tuna, and fair trade coffee. Many of the concerns of a race to the bottom pertain to process and production methods (PPMs) in global supply chains. One of the themes in this research is the distinction between standards based on the characteristics of a product and standards based on the process and production methods (PPMs) used to produce the product. Whereas product standards can be monitored and enforced at the point of market access, PPM standards must be monitored and enforced at the site of production, which can be problematic in global supply chains. This research seeks to elucidate the sources of power and policy levers available to promote higher PPM standards within the context of globalization and the liberalization of trade. / (cont.) A set of theories from international law and political economy is selected to create a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of globalization on international standards. In particular, theories of corporate power, corporate social responsibility, norm change and consumer power elucidate the potential and limitations of voluntary standards. Theories of regulatory capture and competition inform the question of how voluntary standards translate into public policy. The goal is to understand how social and environmental objectives can be promoted within the context of liberalized trade. / by Diane Cameron. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-105). / Web-based enterprise software - sometimes referred to as "Software as a Service" (SaaS) or "on demand software" - is a major wave of innovation that introduces a new technical and economic model to enterprise software. The defining characteristics of web-based enterprise software are: a fully web-based user interface, hosted application deployment, a SaaS-based business model, and the use of a service-oriented architecture for integration. This study analyzes a sample of 108 companies currently offering SaaS-based products. In total, 35 different application types and 20 different combinations of revenue models were counted. Apparently, the market is still in an experimental phase, and truly dominant designs haven't emerged yet. Gross margins for SaaS-oriented companies are lower than for traditional software product companies, but still attractive at around 85%. The entrepreneurial activity in the sector is significant. More than 50% of the companies in the sample were founded in or after 2002, and almost 30% in the last two years. Venture capital continues to be an important source of capital with 36% of the companies having received VC investment, but an equally large percentage of companies are boot-strapped, i.e. have no formal source of outside capital. / (cont.) The data about customer adoption of web-based enterprise software is not very clear. Most studies suggest that SaaS accounted for about 5% of the CRM market in 2006, with other application types below that level. In total, SaaS probably doesn't even account for 1% of the global software market. However, customer willingness to adopt SaaS is apparently rising very quickly, and specialized SaaS companies are experiencing rapid growth. From the data available, it can't be decided unambiguously if web-based enterprise software is a truly disruptive model or merely an incremental innovation. Most characteristics point to a new-market disruption, i.e. an innovation that will bring new functionality to current non-users of advanced enterprise software. / by Andreas Göldi. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2009. / Page 414 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 401-413). / This is a story about technology, users, and music. It is about an approach to the design, manipulation, and arrangement of technologies in small-scale systems to achieve particular aesthetic goals - goals that are at once subjective and contingent. These goals emerge from enthusiasm for technology, for system-building, and for music among members of a community of users, and the promise of the emotional rewards derived from these elements in combination. It is a story about how enthusiasm and passion become practice, and how particular technologies, system-building activities, listening, debating, innovating, and interacting form that practice. Using both historical and ethnographic research methods, including fieldwork and oral history interviews, this dissertation is focused on how and why user communities mobilize around particular technologies and socio-technical systems. In particular, it concerns how users' aesthetic sensibilities and enthusiasm for technology can shape both technologies themselves and the processes of technological innovation. These issues are explored through a study of the small but enthusiastic high-end audio community in the United States. These users express needs, desires, and aesthetic motivations towards technology that set them apart from mainstream consumers, but also reveal important and under-recognized aspects of human relationships with technology more broadly. Covering the emergence and growth of high-end audio from the early 1970s to 2000, I trace some of the major technology transitions during this period and their associated social elements, including the shift from vacuum tube to solid-state electronics in the 1970s, and from analog vinyl records to digital compact discs in the 1980s. I show how this community came to understand technology, science, and their own social behavior through powerful emotional and aesthetic responses to music and the technologies used to reproduce music in the home. I further show how focusing on technology's users can recast assumptions about the ingredients and conditions necessary to foster technological innovation. / by Kieran Downes. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS