Knut H Sørensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 101130 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Knut H Sørensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Knut H |
| FAMILY NAME | Sørensen |
| SIGNATURE | SØRENSEN K H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Norwegian University of Science and Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0829-3496 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Relying on Relays: A Socio-technical Integration Model for Interdisciplinary Research
This article proposes a theoretical model for practices of integrating knowledge across disciplines. We characterise it by the sports metaphor of a relay, to highlight the directional interactions that occur in interdisciplinary work when it is organised as a series of exchanges of materials, data, calculations, and models. Drawing on existing research to outline its main features, we develop the model using interviews with and observations of sc…
From Authoritative Voices to Dialogical Policy‐Making: How Norwegian Universities Navigate Diversity Implementation
This article examines how Norwegian universities implement gender equality and diversity policies through a Bakhtinian dialogical lens. Using document analysis of action plans from four major universities and interviews with 19 department heads and research group leaders, we trace how authoritative voices from external policymakers are transformed as they move from institutional plans to local implementation. The study reveals a fundamental shift…
The local dynamics of and disparities in gender balance among professors at a Norwegian university
Making Women Full Professors. How Promotion Programmes May Supersede the ‘Fixing the women’ and ‘Fixing the system’ Binary
The Sociotechnical Life of a Shapeshifting Technology: The Bike Lift Trampe in Trondheim
This article explores the idea that technologies may be considered shapeshifting as they move between and are domesticated in different social worlds. We employ a material-semiotic approach with a domestication and social worlds framework to study the case of Trampe, a bicycle lift built in Trondheim, Norway, in 1993. The study is based on interviews, observation, documents, and news media analysis. We show how the lift shifted shape: although or…
Steered or Guided by Numbers: How Climate and Energy Policymakers Domesticate Quantitative Information
Concepts like 'the metric society' and 'the tyranny of metrics' suggest that quantitative information increasingly shapes and steers policy and governance. This paper engages critically with such assumptions by using domestication theory to analyse how Norwegian climate and energy policy actors make sense of, assemble, and employ numeric information. Through analysis of interviews with politicians and public employees working with climate and ene…
Incorporation work: The socialisation of bio- and nanotechnology through newspapers
In this paper, we analyse how the socialisation of new science and technology (technoscience) is performed through newspapers. Newspapers remain an important source of information about emerging technosciences, such as bio- and nanotechnology, even in the age of new social media. This includes communication about scientific and technological developments but also about sense-making and imaginaries related to expectations about future effects. We …
Transitions through numbers? A critical inquiry into superior numeric targets in climate and energy policymaking
Policy discourses regarding sustainability transitions intersect with a host of quantitative targets, articulated to guide efforts to achieve such transitions. This paper analyses ‘superior numeric targets’ in climate and energy policy; overarching, quantified articulations of missions for sustainability transitions. We use interviews and political documents to investigate how policymakers in Norway have established and enacted two superior numer…
STS as a Lens to Study Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity: A Comment on Sharon Traweek’s “I Prefer the Map”
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social di…
Designing and domesticating an interstructure: Exploring the practices and the politics of an elevator for cyclists
Technologies called infrastructures are often considered to be inherently and opaquely political, but how they exert their politics has been both empirically and conceptually debated. Infrastructure studies have largely focused on (in)visibility or ‘infra’ qualities as central criteria for assessing who and what is included and excluded, and when. In this paper we argue that this binary is unproductive and propose the concept of interstructure to…
Liminal technologies: Exploring the temporalities and struggles in efforts to develop a Belgrade metro
The sociology of technology needs more nuanced conceptualizations of the temporal aspects of sociotechnical change. In this article, we propose liminality as a useful analytical entry-point to study technologies that seemingly remain in a 'no man's land' - what we call liminal technologies. Drawing on anthropological accounts and technology studies literature, we propose a framework to be used as a sensitizing device that includes four ways of un…
Transforming Scientists’ Understanding of Science–Society Relations. Stimulating Double-Loop Learning when Teaching RRI
The problem of developing research and innovation in accordance with society’s general needs and values has received increasing attention in research policy. In the last 7 years, the concept of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) has gained prominence in this regard, along with the resulting question of how best to integrate awareness about science–society relations into daily practices in research and higher education. In this context, p…
Rhizomic learning: How environmental non-governmental organizations (Engos) acquire and assemble knowledge
It has been a common assumption that the knowledge practices of environmental organisations (ENGOs) is largely based on interaction with environmental research. Implied in such assumptions is the idea that ENGOs are so-called boundary organizations brokering knowledge between science and environmental policy decision-making. In this article, we challenge this belief. Through interviews, we have investigated the practices of ENGO employees as they…
The imagined scientist of science governance
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with so…
Domesticating technology for shared success: Collective enactments of World of Warcraft
In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the im…
Articulations of mundane transition work among consulting engineers
Beyond innovation. Towards an extended framework for analysing technology policy
This paper analyses technology policy as a scholarly concern and political practice that needs to be taken beyond the present somewhat singular focus on innovation and deployment. We also need to include an interest in the making of infrastructure, the provision of regulations, and democratic engagement. Consequently, this paper introduces the concepts of socialisation and domestication to overcome the instrumental, economic framing of technology…
Mismatch or misunderstanding? Calculation and qualculation among economists and consumers in their framings of the electricity market
This paper reports on a study of how economists engaged in energy policymaking and household consumers frame the electricity market, based on interviews with prominent energy economists and focus group interviews with household consumers. Drawing on economic sociology, and above all the contribution of Michel Callon, we analyse framing processes involved in the sense-making with regard to the electricity market, including electricity consumption …
From ‘Alternative’ to ‘Advanced’: Mainstreaming of Sustainable Technologies
This paper revisits some technologies that, in the 1970s, were considered as ‘low-tech’ alternatives to mainstream versions, but more recently have been developed using high-tech elements. This change from alternative to advanced is analysed as a process called sociotechnical mainstreaming, whereby technologies are transformed by the dominant R&D institutions and/or industry. The paper aims to clarify what is involved in such processes of mainstr…
Consumer, client or citizen? How Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology and configure their users
Local governments' websites are important gateways for residents wishing to interact with public institutions online, and the establishment and development of such websites stand out among governmental initiatives to improve their performance. Drawing on domestication theory to apply a change-oriented perspective, the paper analyses how Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology to make websites and configure their users, based up…
Making sense of global warming: Norwegians appropriating knowledge of anthropogenic climate change
This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts’ disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of politic…
Brukbar klimakunnskap? – Kommunalt ansattes forhold til forskning og annen kunnskap om klimaendringer og klimatilpasning
This paper is an analysis of how local government employees domesticate climate science for the purpose of climate adaptation. Employees in Norwegian municipalities perceive the consequences of climate change as a serious challenge, but while placing trust in climate science they consider it too difficult to use. The paper discusses how these employees perceive the challenges of appropriating climate science knowledge and putting it to use. It is…
Walking the line? The enactment of the social/technical binary in software engineering
This article shows how professional communication practices with customers are accounted for in software engineering. It looks at how communication and related activities are enacted and placed in relation to the so-called social/technical binary while also critically engaging with analyzing how this dualism is performed. Empirically, the article investigates how software engineering and communication with customers are framed in two settings: at…
Bokomtaler
Cultural Politics of Technology: Combining Critical and Constructive Interventions
Genderization of Technology among Norwegian Engineering Students
This paper discusses the phenomenon of genderized technology. A model of genderized technology is outlined, identifying mechanisms of gen derization at three levels: institutional, symbolic, and characteristics of research work. Usmg survey material from Norwegian engineering students, it is shown that technology is genderized through all three sets of mechanisms. Although an increasing number of women study engineering, there is an emerging gend…
Tacit Networks, Heterogeneous Engineers, and Embodied Technology
Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved this lack of concern with the meso level. This article suggests a more critical evaluation of this tra…
Articulations of mundane transition work among consulting engineers
Towards a Feminized Technology? Gendered Values in the Construction of Technology
Feminists have produced different conceptions of women in science—suppressed, reformers, or revolutionaries—all of which have proved controversial to many women who are actually working in science and technology. This paper approaches some of the issues raised by feminist analysis through an empirical investigation of engineering students and R&D scientists in Norway. It gives an outline of what is meant by `caring values' in a Norwegian context,…
Mismatch or misunderstanding? Calculation and qualculation among economists and consumers in their framings of the electricity market
This paper reports on a study of how economists engaged in energy policymaking and household consumers frame the electricity market, based on interviews with prominent energy economists and focus group interviews with household consumers. Drawing on economic sociology, and above all the contribution of Michel Callon, we analyse framing processes involved in the sense-making with regard to the electricity market, including electricity consumption …
Walking the line? The enactment of the social/technical binary in software engineering
This article shows how professional communication practices with customers are accounted for in software engineering. It looks at how communication and related activities are enacted and placed in relation to the so-called social/technical binary while also critically engaging with analyzing how this dualism is performed. Empirically, the article investigates how software engineering and communication with customers are framed in two settings: at…
Out of the boy's room? A critical analysis of the understanding of gender and ICT in Norway
The issue of gender and ICT and the concern about an emerging digital divide in Norway have been dominated by a fear that the symbolic content and practices around ICT—epitomized in the hacker stereotype—are turning women off by making them feel like entering a “boy's room” when using ICT. State feminist policies have been developed to cope with these challenges, directed at schools and universities in particular. This paper provides a critical d…
Designing and domesticating an interstructure: Exploring the practices and the politics of an elevator for cyclists
Technologies called infrastructures are often considered to be inherently and opaquely political, but how they exert their politics has been both empirically and conceptually debated. Infrastructure studies have largely focused on (in)visibility or ‘infra’ qualities as central criteria for assessing who and what is included and excluded, and when. In this paper we argue that this binary is unproductive and propose the concept of interstructure to…
Liminal technologies: Exploring the temporalities and struggles in efforts to develop a Belgrade metro
The sociology of technology needs more nuanced conceptualizations of the temporal aspects of sociotechnical change. In this article, we propose liminality as a useful analytical entry-point to study technologies that seemingly remain in a 'no man's land' - what we call liminal technologies. Drawing on anthropological accounts and technology studies literature, we propose a framework to be used as a sensitizing device that includes four ways of un…
Cultural Politics of Technology: Combining Critical and Constructive Interventions
Making Women Full Professors. How Promotion Programmes May Supersede the ‘Fixing the women’ and ‘Fixing the system’ Binary
Transitions through numbers? A critical inquiry into superior numeric targets in climate and energy policymaking
Policy discourses regarding sustainability transitions intersect with a host of quantitative targets, articulated to guide efforts to achieve such transitions. This paper analyses ‘superior numeric targets’ in climate and energy policy; overarching, quantified articulations of missions for sustainability transitions. We use interviews and political documents to investigate how policymakers in Norway have established and enacted two superior numer…
Brukbar klimakunnskap? – Kommunalt ansattes forhold til forskning og annen kunnskap om klimaendringer og klimatilpasning
This paper is an analysis of how local government employees domesticate climate science for the purpose of climate adaptation. Employees in Norwegian municipalities perceive the consequences of climate change as a serious challenge, but while placing trust in climate science they consider it too difficult to use. The paper discusses how these employees perceive the challenges of appropriating climate science knowledge and putting it to use. It is…
A ROM of One's Own or a Home for Sharing: Designing the Inclusion of Women in Multimedia
In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such initiatives, a CD-ROM called JenteROM and a webservice called HjemmeNett, based on interviews with the m…
The learning needs of female health-workers and their consequences for the planning of continuing education programmes
Technology and Industrial Democracy An inquiry into some theoretical issues and their social basis
The issue of the possible impact of technology on industrial democracy is explored theoretically, using two different approaches — sociotechnical theory and the Marxist labour-process approach. Within each of these approaches, a model of the interaction between technology and democratization is developed to illustrate how different theoretical conceptions produce different problematics and expose a seemingly similar issue in nearly non-comparable…
Radical Science Essays. Les Levidow
Genderization of Technology among Norwegian Engineering Students
This paper discusses the phenomenon of genderized technology. A model of genderized technology is outlined, identifying mechanisms of gen derization at three levels: institutional, symbolic, and characteristics of research work. Usmg survey material from Norwegian engineering students, it is shown that technology is genderized through all three sets of mechanisms. Although an increasing number of women study engineering, there is an emerging gend…
Towards a Feminized Technology? Gendered Values in the Construction of Technology
Feminists have produced different conceptions of women in science—suppressed, reformers, or revolutionaries—all of which have proved controversial to many women who are actually working in science and technology. This paper approaches some of the issues raised by feminist analysis through an empirical investigation of engineering students and R&D scientists in Norway. It gives an outline of what is meant by `caring values' in a Norwegian context,…
Tacit Networks, Heterogeneous Engineers, and Embodied Technology
Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved this lack of concern with the meso level. This article suggests a more critical evaluation of this tra…
An Anatomy of Engineering Knowledge
Nothing Unusual is Happening', in Roy Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, Sociological Review Monographs, No. 27 (1979), 237-69. 4. See Eugene Mallove's letter to Chemical and Engineering News (10 February 1992), 2. 5. M. Ashmore, 'The Theatre of the Blind', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 1993), 67-106, and T. Pinch and Ashmore, 'Defending the Daft and the Dangerous: Wilhelm…
A ROM of One's Own or a Home for Sharing: Designing the Inclusion of Women in Multimedia
In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such initiatives, a CD-ROM called JenteROM and a webservice called HjemmeNett, based on interviews with the m…
Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy: Concepts, Spaces and Tools
Out of the boy's room? A critical analysis of the understanding of gender and ICT in Norway
The issue of gender and ICT and the concern about an emerging digital divide in Norway have been dominated by a fear that the symbolic content and practices around ICT—epitomized in the hacker stereotype—are turning women off by making them feel like entering a “boy's room” when using ICT. State feminist policies have been developed to cope with these challenges, directed at schools and universities in particular. This paper provides a critical d…
Cultural Politics of Technology: Combining Critical and Constructive Interventions
Bokomtaler
Walking the line? The enactment of the social/technical binary in software engineering
This article shows how professional communication practices with customers are accounted for in software engineering. It looks at how communication and related activities are enacted and placed in relation to the so-called social/technical binary while also critically engaging with analyzing how this dualism is performed. Empirically, the article investigates how software engineering and communication with customers are framed in two settings: at…
Making sense of global warming: Norwegians appropriating knowledge of anthropogenic climate change
This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts’ disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of politic…
Brukbar klimakunnskap? – Kommunalt ansattes forhold til forskning og annen kunnskap om klimaendringer og klimatilpasning
This paper is an analysis of how local government employees domesticate climate science for the purpose of climate adaptation. Employees in Norwegian municipalities perceive the consequences of climate change as a serious challenge, but while placing trust in climate science they consider it too difficult to use. The paper discusses how these employees perceive the challenges of appropriating climate science knowledge and putting it to use. It is…
From ‘Alternative’ to ‘Advanced’: Mainstreaming of Sustainable Technologies
This paper revisits some technologies that, in the 1970s, were considered as ‘low-tech’ alternatives to mainstream versions, but more recently have been developed using high-tech elements. This change from alternative to advanced is analysed as a process called sociotechnical mainstreaming, whereby technologies are transformed by the dominant R&D institutions and/or industry. The paper aims to clarify what is involved in such processes of mainstr…
Consumer, client or citizen? How Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology and configure their users
Local governments' websites are important gateways for residents wishing to interact with public institutions online, and the establishment and development of such websites stand out among governmental initiatives to improve their performance. Drawing on domestication theory to apply a change-oriented perspective, the paper analyses how Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology to make websites and configure their users, based up…
Beyond innovation. Towards an extended framework for analysing technology policy
This paper analyses technology policy as a scholarly concern and political practice that needs to be taken beyond the present somewhat singular focus on innovation and deployment. We also need to include an interest in the making of infrastructure, the provision of regulations, and democratic engagement. Consequently, this paper introduces the concepts of socialisation and domestication to overcome the instrumental, economic framing of technology…
Mismatch or misunderstanding? Calculation and qualculation among economists and consumers in their framings of the electricity market
This paper reports on a study of how economists engaged in energy policymaking and household consumers frame the electricity market, based on interviews with prominent energy economists and focus group interviews with household consumers. Drawing on economic sociology, and above all the contribution of Michel Callon, we analyse framing processes involved in the sense-making with regard to the electricity market, including electricity consumption …
Articulations of mundane transition work among consulting engineers
Domesticating technology for shared success: Collective enactments of World of Warcraft
In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the im…
Transforming Scientists’ Understanding of Science–Society Relations. Stimulating Double-Loop Learning when Teaching RRI
The problem of developing research and innovation in accordance with society’s general needs and values has received increasing attention in research policy. In the last 7 years, the concept of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) has gained prominence in this regard, along with the resulting question of how best to integrate awareness about science–society relations into daily practices in research and higher education. In this context, p…
Rhizomic learning: How environmental non-governmental organizations (Engos) acquire and assemble knowledge
It has been a common assumption that the knowledge practices of environmental organisations (ENGOs) is largely based on interaction with environmental research. Implied in such assumptions is the idea that ENGOs are so-called boundary organizations brokering knowledge between science and environmental policy decision-making. In this article, we challenge this belief. Through interviews, we have investigated the practices of ENGO employees as they…
The imagined scientist of science governance
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with so…
STS as a Lens to Study Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity: A Comment on Sharon Traweek’s “I Prefer the Map”
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social di…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Social science (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Norwegian (8 works)