The Problem of Observing Sociotechnical Entities in Social Science and Humanities Energy Transition Research

Abstract

The notion of “sociotechnical” is an important concept for interdisciplinary research on the transformation of the energy supply. Different branches of research agree that the provision, transmission, and distribution of energy are not simply a matter of physics. The transformation of the energy infrastructure is significantly a societal project, carried by technical innovation and social change. However, in social science and humanities research the interrelation between technical and social processes is often not explicitly explored, even though the interrelationship is the decisive descriptor that distinguishes sociotechnical entities from their environment. This article examines the merits of enriching the concept of sociotechnical by adding the distinction between tight and loose couplings in technical operations and human activities. While tight couplings are necessary to sustain control, they hamper change, and while loose couplings are necessary to adapt and to uphold choice, they increase complexity. Additionally, the article concludes that the introduction of “smart” technologies—an essential vision of the energy transformation—changes the composition of tight and loose couplings. Technical ideas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence go beyond mere automation. We might as well face a new sociotechnical reality. The introduction of intelligence in systems makes more loose couplings necessary. Paradoxically, this allows for new functionality and services by establishing complex operations while at the same time diminishing control by social systems.

Gradual stimulation of respondents' reflexivity: A research design for studying unreflexive consumers

“…Especially science and technology studies have long been calling for replacing the technology–society divide, that is, for understanding the social and the technical simultaneously, for moving away from considering the social order as merely social, but rather as a socio‐technical order, as heterogeneous networks of socio‐technical (human and non‐human) elements (e.g., Bijker & Law, 1992; Latour, 1996; Law, 1991). However, in the case of mobile technologies, we are, according to Büscher (2022), facing ‘a new socio‐technical reality’, in which the social and the technical become irreducible, and conceptually indistinguishable. De Souza and Silva (2006) calls this new reality a hybrid space, which emerges when virtual communities, previously existing only in cyberspace, migrate into physical space using mobile technologies.…”

“…Not only consumers but also consumption must be situated in the present context of the new socio‐technical reality (Büscher, 2022), while understanding it in its broad sense as a primary space for personal and social identification (Falk, 1994), as a specific area of everyday practices (Maffesoli, 1989), involving social relations related to the acquisition, use, and sale of goods and services (Halkier, 2001). We use, therefore we consume—via mobile technologies, in their presence, the content they deliver or their very materiality.…”

Advanced HRM practices and digital personnel for digital energetics based on the technologies of Industry 4.0

“…Automation covers more and more economic processes and systems of energy companies (Afshari et al, 2022' Buchmayr et al, 2022Krupnik et al, 2022). The research works (Chadwick et al, 2022;Guglielmi et al, 2022;Shidong et al, 2022) note that the transition to digital energetics based on the technologies of Industry 4.0 increases the risks for workers in this industry (Al-Haidan et al, 2022;Baur et al, 2022;Büscher, 2022).…”