'Wearables' and 'self-quantifying technologies' are becoming ever more popular and normalised in society as a means of 'knowing' the self. How are these technologies implicated in this endeavour? Using insights from a four year multi-sited ethnography of the 'Quantified Self', I explore how the self is 'done' in the context of using technologies that purport to quantify the self in some way. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) sensibilities, I conduct a four- pronged investigation into 'self-making' by drawing upon, and expanding, existing theories of agency and performativity, number, data-visualisation, and enactment. I find that self-quantifying technologies are productive in the doing of the self and are implicated in the process of making boundaries around that which comes to be known as the 'self' in a particular moment. The numbers and visualisations that result from practices of self-quantification enable a new way of 'seeing' the self, and provide a way of communicating this self with others. The self is thus not a pre-existing entity that simply requires these technologies as a means to 'know' it. Rather, the self is constantly being done with these technologies and within the surrounding practices of self-quantification. In order to highlight the different parts of this process, I proffer the term 'entractment'. This term explains how these different elements come together to culminate in the production of a momentarily constant self in a particular context. It is a way of simultaneously encapsulating the processes of intra-action, extra-action and enactment with/in a community. In sum, it captures the conclusion that, in the context of self-quantification, we must understand the self as a collective enactment, achieved, at least in part, through the use of self-quantifying technologies that produce numerical data which facilitate visualisations that are imperative to the doing of the self.

Orientador: Renato Peixoto Dagnino / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Geociências / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T15:16:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lima_MarciaMariaTait_M.pdf: 1555790 bytes, checksum: 9231ac8c84dd06895dd5ddd500eb7017 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: O enlace atual entre ciência, tecnologia e mercado - referido pela palavra tecnociência - tem como exemplo paradigmático as novas biotecnologias. A engenharia genética e o desenvolvimento de organismos geneticamente modificados (OGMs) constituem temas-chave de diversas controvérsias que se estabelecem entre as dimensões tecnocientífica, econômica e social. A pesquisa utilizou o discurso de cientistas brasileiros para mostrar como se constroem e difundem suas concepções de tecnociência. Esses discursos se referem à Comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança (CTNBio), responsável pelos pareceres técnicos sobre OGMs e por assessorar o governo na definição da política de biossegurança. A pesquisa apontou que a política de biossegurança brasileira e a forma como a CTNBio se constituiu e atua não foram determinadas por opções de caráter estritamente "científico". Também permitiu entender como as concepções de tecnociência estão presentes neste contexto. No capítulo conclusivo foi incluída uma proposta de abordagem construtivista engajada para o tratamento das novas biotecnologias. / Abstract: The current link between science, technology and the market - referred to as technoscience - has as an emblematic example the new biotechnologies, among which those related to genetics and the development of genetically modified organisms may be considered key issues for scientific and environmental controversies. Speech fragments from the Brazilian research community are extracted from the current debate to show how those conceptions of technoscience on which they are based are constructed, propagated and legitimized. They refer to the National Biosafety Technical Commission (CTNBio) presented as electronic news by Science Journal (Jornal da Ciência) and as letters, lectures and other public documents. At the end of this dissertation, a relationship between the views of the research community, technoscientific practices and biosafety policies are established. The research points out that the Brazilian biosafety policy and the way that CTNBio was constituted and acts were not determined strictly scientific choices or by the end of uncertainty and clear and consensual boundaries regarding technological risks. Additionally, a normative constructivist approach is suggested as a form of understanding the new biotechnologies. / Mestrado / Mestre em Política Científica e Tecnológica

This thesis conducts a critical investigation into digital literature—a genre of literary expression that is integrated with, and articulated using, digital computing systems and infrastructures. Specifically, it presents a framework for evaluating the expressive capacities of this genre as it relates to particular conceptions of knowledge-making in the contemporary technocultural environment. This framework reveals how the generation of critical knowledge concerning digital literature, as crystallised through a reader’s material engagements with specific works, enacts a ‘performative’ conception of knowing and being, in which the observable world is treated as emerging in the real time of practice—as being articulated through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies, rather than existing as a fixed array of passive, unchanging primitives. Digital literature is presented subsequently as a model of this greater performative vision—as a means of evaluating the structures and processes that manifest it, particularly within digital systems, and for assessing its practical and political implications for art and culture more broadly. In so doing, this thesis aims to justify the value of engaging digital literature from a standpoint that is more expressly political, contending not only that these texts are revealing of key processes shaping digital activities, artefacts, and environments, but are enacting alternative vectors of thought and practice concerning them.

The software industry has seen a shift from annual to more frequent quarterly and even weekly employee reviews. As a result, there is a high demand for employee evaluations to be less costly and less time-consuming, while providing key insights for richer interactions between employees and their employers or managers. Tech com- panies are constantly looking for methods of producing high quality evaluations to prevent costly turnover. In an industry where software engineers are in high demand, tech companies face a challenging problem. Issues with employee evaluations typi- cally include the lack of performance transparency, unhelpful feedback, lack of metrics, lack of time, and lack of resources. This thesis addresses these challenges through the implementation of an employee evaluation tool. Revalume is a cloud-based web application that provides a stream-lined solution of creating, routing, completing, and viewing evaluation forms. Revalume allows users to use pre-existing and configurable templates, third-party APIs, and a friendly UI to ease the evaluation process. Revalume was evaluated with a longitudinal, semi-controlled study that demonstrates meaningful improvements over existing solutions.

This ethnographic dissertation project is an applied philosophical project that takes an ontological and critical phenomenological approach to the enactment of carceral bodies. This dissertation set out to answer two central questions. First, how do jail intake processes enact carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the ontological implications? Second, how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? The process of answering these questions offers an early attempt at empirical abolitionist science and technology studies research as it offers an intervention in the essentializing biomedical and criminological understandings of "the criminal." This is achieved by tracing the enactment pf carceral bodies across the domains of datafication, space, and time. First, with the advent of digital technologies, the science and technology of criminality continues to be informed by the desire to use metrics to identify and define criminal man. Like their precursors, however; when taken together these quantified characteristics contribute to the production of a body predisposed not to crime but to incarceration. This predisposition arises out of datafication and algorithmic characterization. The data comprising the raw material of this assignation pulls together the digitization of one's race, ethnicity, school (reflective of the school-to-prison-pipeline), address, sex, socio-economic status, disability status, mental health status, etc. Carceral algorithms, and the structures they arise out of, inform one's incarcerability. The carceral body of data and its risks are multiple and are represented in a number of ways, just as it is experienced variously. There are infinite permutations of the intake process across which categories come to stand in for human suffering, for risk, for job performance, etc. The data generated and its infrastructures are reflective of the broader political and socioeconomic context. The role of data collection, management, and analysis surrounding the intake process makes visible the politics and stakes of the carceral bodies enacted. The two primary epistemologies and attendant professions brought to bear upon the carceral body are medicine and criminology. These epistemologies rely upon quantification, categorization, and calculations of risk to generate data from which carceral knowledge is made (and in turn makes). This project characterizes the data infrastructures of the jails as socio-technical objects, practices, and architectures that are multiple and complex. It is through this lens that managerialism, algorithms, and knowledge production are characterized. Together, these facets provide insight into the making of carceral bodies of data and the logics and mechanisms of the carceral-data-industrial-complex. Second, this project addresses the spatialities that carceral bodies are generative of and situated in. The spaces of intake are suffused with values, politics, and epistemologies that play out in a number of ways. In order draw out these facets, the ontological approach was integrated with carceral geography. This approach elevates micro-scales of space and time, placing the personal and particular beside within the broader social and political contexts. This shift in scale has important implications for the study of correctional facilities as it is from this scale that the complexities, relationalities, materialities, contradictions, and multiplicities are visible. This approach relates to Foucault's carceral archipelago, which conveys the complexities of carceral spaces, surveillances, and their leakiness. Carceral geography's reading of Foucault requires an engagement across carceral societies that incorporates the body as a prime site from which to understand complex dynamics of control. Carceral geography offers a helpful approach drawing out spatialities enacted through performances and experiences, making concertina wire fences permeable and ever-mutable. The carceral body carries carceral spaces within it and beyond it that arise out of epistemes, policies, and practices that are mutually reinforcing and enmeshed. These embodied spaces include emotions and mental self-scapes alongside digitally recorded diagnoses and correctional designations. When considering how security infrastructures permeate society, well beyond correctional facility gates, this has important implications for this carceral society. The buildings and physical spaces of incarceration are read as reflective of the values and logics of the state, this brings into view the extra-penological function of incarceration, in which specific populations are disproportionately removed and disciplined/ punished by the state even before they are determined to be guilty or not guilty by a court. This hyper-incarceration of certain populations underlines the spatial logics of carceral networks that reflect the machinations of a neoliberal state that disappears those who have been Othered via carceral networks. This takes on even more problematic hues when considering the torturous conditions unsuitable for any creature, including humans. Third, despite Western constructs of linear or absolute time, the study of the carceral temporal body demonstrates the relativities, multiplicities, and disjunctures that challenge the notion of a universal clock. This dissertation tells of carceral bodies made into and across multiple time points. Bodies become metaphoric timeclocks through managerial oversight processes in which they are assigned varying times across different electronic record systems, with these different from their time of arrest and remand. In this space, the temporal jurisdictions diverge, giving rise to frictions and conflict. Further, these assigned temporalities differ greatly from the ways time is experienced across embodied states (e.g. experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms). The theoretical frameworks employed to understand carceral time are designed to address how carceral bodies come to be anticipated. In part, this is enacted through professional and bureaucratic routines that are often protracted and repetitive. These routines give rise to waiting and urgency. This empirical engagement with carceral temporalities draws out epistemic and experiential forces. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that drawing out the ontological multiplicities of mass incarceration can countermand its fixities and generate abolitionist epistemologies. Abolition has generative potentials that coalesce with science and technology studies' investment in the otherwise. Over time carceral abolition has come to refer to a wide range of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and activism. The various approaches to abolition share a sense of urgency and resistance to gradual or eventual change, as this has historically led to the perpetuation and maintenance of racialized criminal justice systems and mass incarceration. Carceral epistemologies (e.g. penology, criminology, biomedicine, public health) are steeped in racisms and classisms, which inform broader imaginaries of crime and criminality. As political discourse has been reduced to simplistic chants and pithy soundbites, the aim of this dissertation has been to "complicate the discourse" surrounding the carceral-industrial-complex and the carceral body in particular. Understanding the carceral body through its ontological multiplicities serves as the grounds from which resistances to the status quo can be formulated. This is vitally important in light of the diffuse assemblages detailed in this project and the pervasiveness of carceral logics. In sum, this dissertation has demonstrated that carceral bodies are made and not born. It points to the difficult work still needed and the utility of ethnography in eliciting the multiplicities of practices and materialities in carceral settings. The abolitionist dreams arising from this project demand the embrace of ontological multiplicities as new logics and imaginaries unweave the criminal justice system. While it does not fall within the purview of this project to delineate a specific set of directives, it does suggest that abolitionist dis-epistemology requires logics and tactics equally as multifaceted and nuanced as the criminal justice system itself. / Doctor of Philosophy / This is an applied philosophy project based on ethnographic research in the New York City jails. It provides insight into the practices of jail intake as a way to draw out the ways in which carceral bodies come to be enacted. The project grows out of feminist science studies. The two central questions are 1) how do jail intake processes produce carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the implications? 2) how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? These questions are addressed through the domains of data, space, and time, which serve as the organizing framework of this project. The focus on intake enactments draws out the multiplicities of carceral realities, which has the potential to resist essentializing conceptualizations of the criminal. In doing so, this dissertation project demonstrates the potential for abolitionist science and technology studies to disrupt the criminal justice status quo.

In this dissertation, I tell the story of midcentury attempts to establish, develop, and study bibliotherapy in the US. I follow three groups-hospital librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and language arts educators-from the 1930s to the 1960s, when each in its own ways expressed belief in the therapeutic power of reading and set out to enact that belief as a legitimate practice in the evolving contexts of its profession and in the broader culture. These professionals tried to learn what happened within people during and after reading, and they attempted to use what they learned to apply reading toward healthy ends. Today, therapeutic reading has become commonplace to the extent that it seems natural. In this dissertation, I aim to recover and explore the midcentury processes by which therapeutic reading came to seem at once natural, medical, and scientific. I argue that midcentury bibliotherapy functioned in concert with an evolving cultural narrative that I call "reading for health." The reading for health narrative gathers up into a coherent story various and deep beliefs and commonplaces about the power of books over our minds and our bodies. In midcentury bibliotherapy, reading for health was reinvigorated as a story about the marriage of science and culture, a unity narrative that claimed the iconic book-capable of swaying minds and societies alike, and burnished with all that western civilization signified-for the professions that applied reading toward their healthy ends. As I demonstrate, however, these narratives were not confined to discrete professions, but functioned as a part of a larger cultural movement set upon the shifting fault lines of the humanities and science. Each of the groups I follow took an avid interest in what I have called the embodied reader. Rather than viewing reading as an act of a disembodied mind, they understood the practice as a psychosomatic experience in which mind and body could not be disconnected. Moreover, they believed that reading could capitalize on the embodied nature of thought and affect, and engender healthy effects. In this way, the embodied reader was constructed as a new, modern locus of both the literary experience and the therapeutic ethos. By valuing above all else how reading could be used to achieve health, advocates of bibliotherapy fashioned a form of applied humanities, one that defined the meaning and judged the value of books in terms of their utility and efficacy. In so doing, they contributed to the development of a form of the medicalized humanities that now resonates in three contemporary sites: (1.) the study and use of bibliotherapy in clinical psychology; (2.) the dominant and naturalized approach to books known as therapeutic reading; and (3.) the medical humanities. / Ph. D.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study focuses on tracking the developments accompanying the rise of indigenous knowledge (IK) and its positioning on the science policy and national research agenda in South Africa (SA). The historical occasion, the variety of policy developments in a diverse ‘new’ SA and how IK evolved, presented the impetus and context of the study. The objectives of the study were to consider more closely the roles and actions of the participants in the overall process, how they interacted and to identify broad patterns that occurred. Other areas included positioning IK as strategic science and how it was refracted through the national research system. To achieve these objectives, a significant part of the methodology involved a historical reconstruction of developments in IK. The data obtained from this reconstruction provided the basis for further analysis and closer scrutiny of the issues. Reconstructing the history assisted with providing some answers regarding the sources of concern and motivation which led to formulating policy on IK, the processes that advanced IK to its position in 2002, looking at how the various players in the research system were mobilized and how the prelegislative stage of activity determined the outcome of the IK legislative process. In addition to these questions, there was an opportunity to consider Wally’s Serote’s role as ‘moral entrepreneur and to try to understand both his personal trajectory and the role he played in the system. The historical reconstruction provided a periodization comprising three chronological phases, namely • Genesis (1994 – 1996) • Awareness Creation (1997 – 1998) • Programmes and Implementation (1999 – 2002) New policy directions in SA provided a context for positioning IK within strategic science. The leadership and passion displayed by Serote also required an understanding of his personal trajectory and the role he played in the system. IK as strategic science is positioned within framework of the moral entrepreneur’s cycle in a changing system. The historical reconstruction raised the issue of how easy or difficult it is to embed processes and how these processes co-evolve in the system. It also showed how IK was refracted through the national research system. The broad ‘success’ of the IK initiative is discussed with respect to its legislative and policy journey in SA and its current position in the research system. The ‘lesser successful’ side is also discussed in terms of the intended objectives and the eventual outcomes. Protecting IK, a central issue throughout the process, led to struggles and tensions that required rethinking both the policy and epistemic aspects of both western science and IK. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus daarop om dié ontwikkelinge te volg wat deel was van die opkoms van inheemse kennis (IK) en die posisionering daarvan op die agenda vir wetenskapsbeleid en nasionale navorsing in Suid-Afrika (SA). Die historiese gebeurlikhede, die verskeidenheid in beleidsontwikkelinge in 'n diverse "nuwe" SA en die manier waarop IK ontwikkel het, het die stukrag en die konteks vir hierdie studie verskaf. Die doelwitte van die studie was as volg: om die rolle en die aksies van die deelnemers aan die proses as geheel in meer detail te oorweeg; om hulle interaksie waar te neem en om die breë aksiepatrone te identifiseer. Ander ondersoekareas was om IK as strategiese wetenskap te posisioneer en om vas te stel hoe dit deur middel van die nasionale navorsingstelsel gerefrakteer is. Om hierdie doelwitte te kan bereik, het 'n belangrike deel van die metodologie die historiese rekonstruksie van ontwikkelinge in IK behels. Die data wat deur middel van hierdie rekonstruksie verkry is, het die basis voorsien vir die verdere analise en nadere beskouing van die relevante kwessies. Deur die geskiedenis te rekonstrueer kon sommige van die vrae oor die volgende beantwoord word: die oorsprong van sake wat kommer gewek het en die motivering wat gelei het tot die formulering van beleid oor IK; die prosesse wat IK tot die posisie daarvan in 2002 bevorder het deur te kyk hoe die onderskeie rolspelers in die navorsingstelsel gemobiliseer is; en hoe die pre-wetgewende fase van aktiwiteite die uitkoms van die IK-wetgewende proses bepaal het. Bo en behalwe die beantwoording van hierdie vrae, kon Serote se rol as morele entrepreneur ook ondersoek word om sodoende beide sy persoonlike trajektorie en die rol wat hy in die stelsel gespeel het te probeer verstaan. Die historiese rekonstruksie het 'n periodisering, bestaande uit drie chronologiese fases, verskaf, naamlik 􀂃������� Genesis (1994 – 1996) 􀂃������� Skepping van 'n Bewussyn (1997 – 1998) 􀂃������� Programme en Implementering (1999 – 2002) Nuwe beleidsrigtings in Suid-Afrika het 'n konteks verskaf vir die posisionering van IK binne die strategiese wetenskap. Die leierskap en passie wat Serote geopenbaar het, het ook begrip vir sy persoonlike trajektorie en die rol wat hy in die stelsel gespeel het, gevra. IK as 'n strategiese wetenskap is geposisioneer binne-in die raamwerk van die morele entrepreneur se siklus in 'n veranderende stelsel. Die historiese rekonstruksie het die kwessie geopper van hoe maklik of hoe moeilik dit is om prosesse in te bed, en hoe hierdie prosesse saam in die stelsel ontwikkel. Dit het ook gewys hoe IK deur middel van die nasionale navorsingstelsel gerefrakteer is. Die breë "sukses" van die IK-inisiatief word bespreek met betrekking tot die pad wat dit geloop het in die wetgewende en die beleidsvormende proses in Suid-Afrika en die huidige posisie daarvan in die navorsingstelsel. Die "minder suksesvolle" kant word ook bespreek met betrekking tot die vooropgestelde doelwitte en die uiteindelike uitkomste. Die beskerming van IK, 'n sentrale kwessie regdeur die proses, het gelei tot worstelinge en spanninge wat vereis het dat die beleids- én die epistemiese aspekte van beide die westerse wetenskap en IK herbedink moes word.

It is essential to consider what new technologies mean to the people who use them and the ways in which they are experienced and used. In the context of public transit services in Saskatoon, understanding what the recent changes from a manual to an electronic/automated system means to users and the broader community is critically important to the overall assessment of the service. Investigating users’ lived experiences and interpretations of technical artifacts is valuable to understanding socio-technical relations or the embodied interactions of humans and machines as “technologies-in-practice.” Research into socio-technical relations has primarily focused on large scale technological systems and expert practices while less attention has been paid to “seemingly mundane” technologies or technical artifacts routinely used in everyday life. At the same time, this preoccupation has overshadowed or downplayed the importance of exploring users’ experiences and interpretations of technologies. The goal of this research is to contribute to the sociological understanding of mundane technologies-in-practice and socio-technical relations more broadly. In order to gain insight into this relationship, this thesis focuses on bus riders’ (users) and the community’s perceptions of the Go-Pass smartcard and electronic fare system used by the public transit service in Saskatoon. The perspectives of Go-Pass users and community stakeholders (n=15) were investigated using qualitative semi-structured interviews to gain deeper understanding into the complex relationship between users and technologies. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the sociology of technology literature, I propose that a sociomaterial theoretical perspective following a mutual shaping framework offers insight into socio-technical relations. Both critical and feminist technology studies literature has been helpful for developing an understanding of the wider social and political contexts of technical use which underscores this study. In particular, the conceptual insights of “socio-technical assemblages” (Suchman, 2007) and “intra-action” (Barad, 2003) have been helpful tools for exploring agency, subjectivity and power which is key to uncovering the intricacies of socio-technical relations and human-machine interaction. The four main themes emerging from this study were: 1) shifting human-machine roles and relationships; 2) the socio-technical construction of the bus rider; 3) configuring users’ and technologies; and 4) structural issues and social justice implications of technologies-in-practice. The findings demonstrate that the use of this new system is mutually co-constructed by both social and technical factors whereby both the users and the technology inform perceptions and use. There was also the unexpected connection between users’ everyday situated uses, experiences and interpretations of the Go-Pass technologies to wider social-political contexts. There were a number of issues raised in relation to the implementation of the Go-Pass system which had negative effects or unintended social and technical consequences particularly for those most marginalized economically. At the same time, there were important benefits and positive effects on riders’ quality of life and use of the service. Finally, participants’ perspectives have contributed to understanding what the Go-Pass technologies mean to them, the ways in which they are used in practice and the ways in which the mixing of people and seemingly mundane technologies shape relations in everyday settings.

Cette thèse examine l’imagination des systèmes de mesure de la performance au sein de l’industrie pharmaceutique. Par une observation participante étendue dans une grande entreprise pharmaceutique et des entretiens dans cette industrie, les trois articles de cette thèse explorent les influences intra et extra-organisationnelles qui agissent sur la forme et les raisons des systèmes de rémunération que les sociétés pharmaceutiques utilisent pour leur force de vente. Le premier article considère que les systèmes comptables émergent d’un ensemble d’inscriptions dramatisées qui mettent en scène, encadrent et médiatisent l’interaction entre les différents acteurs, internes et externes à l’organisation, qui participent à la fabrication d’un algorithme de rémunération. Le deuxième article théorise de quelle manière moral imaginaries sont constitués en objets comptables et comment les instruments comptables agissent comme médiateur moral. Il présente les systèmes émergents de mesure de la performance en tant que dispositifs de calcul moral façonnés par les imaginaires moraux contrastés de concepteurs hétérogènes. Le troisième article se concentre sur la manière dont les systèmes de mesure de la performance émergent et se stabilisent dans le contexte des marchés, afin d'explorer les infrastructures comptables au niveau de l’industrie que permettent aux acteurs organisationnels de visualiser, rendre compte et agir sur le marché lorsque ce dernier est invisible à pour ses participants. Pour que les systèmes de mesure de la performance fonctionnent sur un marché, il est nécessaire d’avoir une collaboration au sein du secteur, des opacités construites et des processus de (de)commercialisation de l’identité des acteurs. / This thesis examines the field-level imagining of Performance Measurement Systems in the pharmaceutical sector. By means of an extended participant observation in a Big Pharma company and interviews in the pharmaceutical sector, the three articles of this thesis explore the intra- and extra-organizational influences that act upon the shape and rationales of the compensation systems pharmaceutical companies operate for their sales-force. The first article explores accounting systems as emerging from a set of dramatized inscriptions that stage, frame, and mediate interaction among the different actors, internal and external to the organization, that participate in the fabrication of a compensation algorithm. The second article theorizes in what way moral imaginaries are constituted into accounting objects, and how accounting acts as a moral mediator. It shows emergent performance measurement systems as moral calculating devices that are shaped by, and engage with, the contrasting moral imaginaries of heterogeneous designers. The third paper brings the concern with how performance measurement systems emerge and stabilize in the context of markets, to explore the field-level accounting infrastructures that enable organizational actors to visualize, account for, and act upon the market when the market is invisible to its participants. For performance measurement systems to work in a market, it is suggested, they require field-level collaboration, constructed opacities, and processes of marketization and de-marketization of actors’ identities.

Drastic changes have taken place in UK electricity policy over recent years as government has sought to address the challenges associated with energy security, affordability and commitments to reduce carbon emissions. This study investigates the underlying policy changes between the year 2000 and 2012, particularly the Electricity Market Reform, as the most fundamental transformation in the British power market since liberalisation, almost three decades ago. It illustrates that although this policy had revised the long legacy of market-based and technology neutral electricity policymaking, it was yet to be claimed as a wholesale paradigmatic shift, because, as of 2012, it still suffered from a form of paradigm ambivalence and socio-technical lock-in. Furthermore, this research identifies an accumulative process of policy change explaining how a complex set of dynamics transformed the UK electricity policy mix. The thesis relies empirically on conducting 53 semi-structured interviews as well as scrutinising policy documents and relevant secondary studies. The thesis draws relevant approaches within policy studies that attend to address continuity and change in policy frameworks, in particular the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier 1999) and Policy Paradigm (Hall 1993) perspectives. The study contributes to this literature in three distinctive ways. First, it questions the adequacy of existing frameworks for conceptualising policy change in ‘large-technical’ and ‘techno-centric’ subsystems, such as electricity policy. In return, it introduces technology preference, as a policy component capturing the socio-technical elements of electricity policymaking. Second, to explain why and how such significant changes had been undergone, it forms a bridge between the characteristics of policy change and the extent that existing policies are perceived as irreconcilable policy failures. By this, it, albeit, moves beyond the conventional typology of change drivers in policy literature. Third, this research extends the emerging concept of negotiated agreement and policy compromise as a pathway to evolutionary changes (Sabatier & Weible 2007). Inspired by Institutional Change theory (Mahoney & Thelen 2010), it proposes that compromised policies are often at the risk of policy reversibility and retrenchment, subject to any shift in the contextual conditions they have originated in. Overall, the thesis provides an understanding of one of the very complex and contemporary cases for studying policy change theories.