CPT-31306 Technography, Researching Technology and Development

Course

Credits 6.00

Teaching methodContact hours
Lectures12
Tutorial12
Self-study
Course coordinator(s)dr. ir. SR Vellema
Lecturer(s)dr. ir. SR Vellema
Examiner(s)dr. ir. SR Vellema

Assumed knowledge on:

Technology, Development and Natural Resources (CPT-11806) or Introduction to Technology, Agro-ecology and Development M (CPT-21304).

Continuation courses:

Thesis Knowledge, Technology and Innovation.

Contents:

The course offers a social science perspective on technology appropriate to the needs of students preparing to carry out research on technology in development or to work with technologies as engineers, managers or policy advisors. This course focuses on what technology is as human activity. Careful and comprehensive description of technology, technological processes and impacts, technology task groups, and user perspectives - something the CPT group terms "technography" - is an essential basis for any further analytical or policy oriented work. The aim of technography is to develop a theory of practice. The course elaborates on the study of embodied skill and technique, the study of distributed tasks and making as a collective enterprise, and the study of rules, routine and protocols in professional associations embedded in a division of labour. Attention is also paid to fields in which technologies operate - to institutional environments, design processes, policy, entrepreneurship and innovation processes, ideas about risks and acceptability, selection pressures upon technologies. The emphasis in the course is on how to make these complex issues amenable to description and empirical analysis. Careful description and analysis of technology, it is argued, is foundational to the human sciences.

Learning outcomes:

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:
- transform the discussion on realist methodology into a proposal for a technographic investigation of a relevant research problem of own choosing;
- demonstrate awareness of the interaction between choice of theory, choice of methodology, framing of research questions and research tools in a proposal for making the relationship between society and technology researchable;
- investigate how examples of technographic research combine evidence and theory and to debate the inference reached in these selected technographic studies;
- select objects of study in an integrative problem addressed by both technology and development studies;
- appraise the value of the theoretical and methodological approaches to technology-society interaction in the literature provided for the design of integrative research;
- hypothesize how human activity, social organization and technological or material aspects interact and to plan what kind and how much evidence is needed to be able to analyse the technographic problem of own choosing.

Activities:

The course will be taught by lecture, seminar and discussion. Students will read, analyse and, as a group, make critical presentations upon a number of exemplary cases of technographic research. Students read the literature from the perspective of what it tells about how to make a problem researchable. Students prepare a poster presentation on a technographic problem of their own choice, and give feedback to presentations of others. Students read and use the readings to present methodological choices in an individual paper, which demonstrates grasp of elements of the technographic methodology, capacity to frame a researchable problem and to strategize data collection. The course includes regular moments of feedback on the students' research design process and stimulates an interactive methodological discussion on how to unpack the society-technology interface. The feedback students receive on the individual paper is meant to give support in further developing the research design towards a proposal for a master thesis.

Examination:

Individual paper (100%).

Literature:

A list of relevant literature will be composed based on latest findings and tailored to specific interests.

ProgrammePhaseSpecializationPeriod
Restricted Optional for: MOAOrganic AgricultureMScB: Consumer and Market5AF
MDRDevelopment and Rural InnovationMSc5AF
MIDInternational Development StudiesMScC: Communication, Technology and Policy5AF