Robin Williams
Biographic Data
| ID | 3603870 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robin Williams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robin |
| FAMILY NAME | Williams |
| SIGNATURE | WILLIAMS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9044-4611 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 258 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Politics of Artifacts Revisited: Information Infrastructures, Power, and Governance
This review traces the evolution of understandings of the political significance of technology. Starting from early critical accounts of technology—including Marx's analysis of the factory system and Ellul's concept of technique—through the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS), we revisit classic approaches to the technology‐society relationship, including the Social Shaping of Technology, critiques of Technological Determinism, an…
Balancing ideals and realities: Health care professionals’ perspectives of and attitudes toward digital patient-centered cancer care
Our findings highlight a tension between HCPs' needs for technical functionality and workflow alignment, and the support required to adapt their practice to fully realize PCC through digital tools. Integrating PCC successfully requires organizational, cultural, and workflow adaptations, alongside active HCP engagement in design and implementation. These changes are essential to reposition PCC as an integral rather than competing component of high…
Energy information infrastructures: Beyond system conceptions of energy and digitalisation
Energy production, markets, and patterns of use are undergoing a rapid transition under the banner of promoting environmental sustainability, accompanied by a shift towards renewable energy and the increasing electrification and digitalisation of society. The transformation underscores the need to develop new concepts that highlight the subtle interconnectedness of current energy infrastructures and their interdependencies with other infrastructu…
Implementing integrated care infrastructure: A longitudinal study on the interplay of policies, interorganizational arrangements and interoperability in NHS England
Governance by Infrastructure (Part II): Preface
This collection of articles is the second part of the special issue published by First Monday in February 2024 (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/747). The original thematic series of case studies on ‘Governance by Infrastructure’ is extended here with three new case studies, an article on methodology, and a closing commentary. Their publication concludes an adventure that we began in 2021 with the preparation of a workshop held…
Governance by information infrastructures: Origins and evolution of the concept
The term “infrastructure” has evolved to span a wide range of disciplines, reflecting its diverse applications and conceptualizations. This paper argues that information infrastructures (II) represent a distinct and increasingly significant socio-material form, crucial for understanding governance by infrastructure. We examine the origins and evoluIon of II, emphasizing the socio-material differences between II and other technological forms such …
Domesticating AI in medical diagnosis
We consider the anticipated adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis. We examine how seemingly compelling claims are tested as AI tools move into real-world settings and discuss how analysts can develop effective understandings in novel and rapidly changing settings. Four case studies highlight the challenges of utilising diagnostic AI tools at differing stages in their innovation journey. Two ‘upstream’ cases seeking to demo…
The need to strengthen the evaluation of the impact of Artificial Intelligence-based decision support systems on healthcare provision
Despite the renewed interest in Artificial Intelligence-based clinical decision support systems (AI-CDS), there is still a lack of empirical evidence supporting their effectiveness. This underscores the need for rigorous and continuous evaluation and monitoring of processes and outcomes associated with the introduction of health information technology. We illustrate how the emergence of AI-CDS has helped to bring to the fore the critical importan…
Regulating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-Enabled Medical Devices in Europe and the United Kingdom
Recent achievements in respect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) open up opportunities for new tools to assist medical diagnosis and care delivery. However, the typical process for the development of AI is through repeated cycles of learning and implementation, something that poses challenges to our existing system of regulating medical devices. Product developers face tensions between the benefits of continuous improvement/deployment of algorithms…
Crafting Credible Homicide Narratives: Forensic Technoscience in Contemporary Criminal Investigations
Drawing upon qualitative data gathered during a four-year ethnographic study of homicide investigation in Britain, this paper explores how detectives, scientists, and other experts use findings from forensic sciences and technologies (FSTs) when constructing and modifying pre-trial homicide narratives. We consider how these narratives unfold from the earliest moments of the investigation and are told and re-told, as they are assembled into one co…
We need to talk about dialogue: Accomplishing collaborative sensemaking in homicide investigations
In this paper, we explore the importance of dialogue for collaborative sensemaking during homicide investigation, focusing upon interactions between detectives, forensic scientists and other experts involved in managing and undertaking forensic work. Drawing on data from a 4-year ethnographic study of British homicide investigations, we provide insights from criminal justice actors about both the value of, and barriers to, inter-professional and …
Sequencing BGI: The evolution of expertise and research organisation in the world’s leading gene sequencing facility
The increasing importance of computational techniques in post-genomic life science research calls for new forms and combinations of expertise that cut across established disciplinary boundaries between computing and biology. These are most marked in large scale gene sequencing facilities. Here new ways of organising knowledge production, drawing on industrial models, have been perceived as pursuing efficiency and control to the potential detrimen…
Revolution remixed? The emergence of Open Content Film-making as a viable component within the mainstream film industry
Our previous study of the Open Content Film-making (OCF) community Revolution Postponed? Tracing the development and limitations of open content filmmaking, Information, Communication & Society, (10.1080/1369118X.2018.1464590) had shown how early expectations that Creative Commons (CC) licences would enable a viable alternative to mainstream film production, comparable to free/libre open source software (FLOSS), were challenged, in particular, by…
Revolution postponed? Tracing the development and limitations of open content filmmaking
Networked information technologies have brought about extensive changes in the production and distribution of creative cultural work. Inspired by the widespread success of Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), many proponents of open access advocate reconceptualisation of existing legal protection frameworks in creative works. This paper traces the attempted appropriation of Creative Commons (CC) licences by filmmakers and the consequent forma…
Method Matters in the Social Study of Technology: Investigating the Biographies of Artifacts and Practices
Science and Technology Studies understandings of technological change are at odds with its own dominant research designs and methodological guidelines. A key insight from the social shaping of technology research, for instance, has been that new technologies are formed in multiple interlinked settings, by many different groups of actors over long periods of time. Nonetheless, common research designs have not kept pace with these conceptual advanc…
Algorithms as folding: Reframing the analytical focus
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
The making of a moral economy: Women's Views of Monetary Transactions in an 'Egg Sharing for Research' Scheme
There are growing debates about the appropriateness of offering money in exchange for the provision of bodily materials for clinical treatment and research. The bioethics literature and many practice guidelines have generally been opposed to such entanglement, depicting the use of money as contaminating, creating undue inducement, exploitation and commodification of the human body. However, two elements have been missing from these debates: (i) t…
Screen time and young children: Promoting health and development in a digital world
The digital landscape is evolving more quickly than research on the effects of screen media on the development, learning and family life of young children. This statement examines the potential benefits and risks of screen media in children younger than 5 years, focusing on developmental, psychosocial and physical health. Evidence-based guidance to optimize and support children's early media experiences involves four principles: minimizing, mitig…
Why is it difficult to achieve e-health systems at scale
This paper examines some of the current challenges surrounding the implementation of information and communication technology systems to support the delivery of care within health services. These highly complex electronic information infrastructures support an increasingly broad array of functions and actors. They are being supplied in the UK National Health Service by commercial vendors as Commercial Off-The Shelf solutions. Vendors have struggl…
Waluwin - an integrated approach towards health and wellbeing in Western NSW, Australia
Introduction: Waluwin - Health and Wellbeing in Aboriginal Language WiradjuriThe Western NSW region is one of the most vulnerable localities in Australia with a fractured service network, a strategy to transform current services into a patient centred, coherent system of care is well into its second year. The Western NSW Local Health District (LHD) is leading the way as one of three NSW Integrated Care LHD Demonstrators as part of the NSW State G…
The venues of high tech prediction: Presenting the future at industry analyst conferences
The Politics of Innovation for Environmental Sustainability
The managed prosumer: Evolving knowledge strategies in the design of information infrastructures
This paper contributes to the reworking of the traditional concepts and methods of Science and Technology Studies that is necessary in order to analyse the development and use of social media and other emerging information infrastructures (IIs). Through long-term studies of the development of two contrasting IIs, the paper examines the prosumer-management strategies by which vendors manage their relationships with their diverse users. Despite the…
Identity, mass fatality and forensic genetics
This paper locates the use of DNA profiling within the contemporary disaster response apparatus as an instance of a historically contingent biometric identity regime. It considers why and how DNA profiling and profile matching, first developed to support criminal justice aims, have been adopted for disaster victim identification. The increasingly obligatory status of this identification technology in contemporary society is also discussed, as is …
Approaching disaster victim identification
The origins of this special issue of New Genetics and Society lie in the response of the editors and a number of colleagues to a short exchange that was published in this journal in 2012. The excha
Interdisciplinary integration in Europe: The case of the Fifth Framework programme
The business of expectations: How promissory organizations shape technology and innovation
The business of technological expectations has yet to be explored thoroughly by scholars interested in the role of expectations and visions in the emergence of technological innovations. However, intermediaries specializing in the production, commodification and selling of future-oriented knowledge have emerged to exert new kinds of influence on the shaping of technology and innovation. We focus on the work of those specialist forms of consultant…
Method Matters in the Social Study of Technology: Investigating the Biographies of Artifacts and Practices
Science and Technology Studies understandings of technological change are at odds with its own dominant research designs and methodological guidelines. A key insight from the social shaping of technology research, for instance, has been that new technologies are formed in multiple interlinked settings, by many different groups of actors over long periods of time. Nonetheless, common research designs have not kept pace with these conceptual advanc…
Global Software and its Provenance: Generification Work in the Production of Organizational Software Packages
This paper addresses the seemingly implausible project of establishing a 'generic' organizational information system. This is an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, we are told of the diversity of specific organizational contexts and on the other, we often find the same standardized software solutions being applied across those settings. How do generic software packages work in so many different contexts? Science and Technology Studies provi…
Sociology, ethics, and the priority of the particular: Learning From a Case Study of Genetic Deliberations
There are growing debates about the relationship between the two disciplines of sociology and ethics, particularly as they each become increasingly involved in research and policy formation on the life sciences, especially genetics. Much of this debate has been highly abstract, often stipulating the seemingly different character of the two disciplines and speculating on their theoretical potential - or lack thereof - for future collaborative work…
Dynamics of information technology implementation
Algorithms as folding: Reframing the analytical focus
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
Compressed Foresight and Narrative Bias: Pitfalls in Assessing High Technology Futures
Helping with inquiries or helping with profits? The trials and tribulations of a technology of forensic reasoning
The commercialization of forensic scientific provision in the UK over the last two decades has had a major role in shaping a changing epistemic identity for forensic scientists working within this jurisdiction. Efforts to match the presumed epistemological standards of the 'pure' sciences have been brought together with concerns about value for money in a new approach to the interpretation of evidence, an activity that lies at the heart of crimin…
Sociological Tropes: A Tribute to Erving Goffman
The venues of high tech prediction: Presenting the future at industry analyst conferences
Crafting Credible Homicide Narratives: Forensic Technoscience in Contemporary Criminal Investigations
Drawing upon qualitative data gathered during a four-year ethnographic study of homicide investigation in Britain, this paper explores how detectives, scientists, and other experts use findings from forensic sciences and technologies (FSTs) when constructing and modifying pre-trial homicide narratives. We consider how these narratives unfold from the earliest moments of the investigation and are told and re-told, as they are assembled into one co…
The Dialectics of Place and Space: On Community in the `Information Age
This article takes a social learning perspective to examine the development of a community information service in terms of the changing computer interfaces used and their relations to a variety of more or less competing discourses around the related concepts of community, access and service. We show how both the enthusiasm of internet proponents and the pessimism of writers such as Castells does not take account of the complex interplay of local …
Sociology and the vernacular voice: Text, Context and the Sociological Imagination
Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose act…
Enacting forensics in homicide investigations
This article, co-authored by an academic and a forensic practitioner, describes some of the gaps in current knowledge of the utility of forensic science support to homicide investigations. It also reflects on the experience of a recent pilot study of the use of forensic science in homicide investigations in an English police force to argue for new kinds of research capable of grasping the ways in which issues of temporality, agency and contingenc…
Residual Categories and Disciplinary Knowledge: Personal Identity in Sociological and Forensic Investigations
A central feature of the development of sociological knowledge is the formulation and use of 'descriptive frames of reference' within which theoretical and empirical work may be critically assessed. This article considers the way in which one such frame of reference-that developed by Erving Goffman to represent the variety of human science understandings of the nature of identity in social interaction-distinguished between 'personal,' 'social,' a…
The persecution of the presidency? The role of the independent counsel
Journal Article The persecution of the presidency? The role of the independent counsel Get access R Williams R Williams University of Durham, Durham, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 291–305, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/52.2.291 Published: 01 April 1999
Domesticating AI in medical diagnosis
We consider the anticipated adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis. We examine how seemingly compelling claims are tested as AI tools move into real-world settings and discuss how analysts can develop effective understandings in novel and rapidly changing settings. Four case studies highlight the challenges of utilising diagnostic AI tools at differing stages in their innovation journey. Two ‘upstream’ cases seeking to demo…
The Dynamics Of Social Science Research Exploitation
Research in the natural and social sciences has come to be seen as crucial to economic and social progress across a wide range of fronts, from wealth creation through technological advances and the imputed shift to a Knowledge Economy to the development of more effective, evidence-based public policies (Cabinet Office 1999). These issues have attracted the early attention of the new Scottish government, with wide-ranging reviews and consultations…
The making of a moral economy: Women's Views of Monetary Transactions in an 'Egg Sharing for Research' Scheme
There are growing debates about the appropriateness of offering money in exchange for the provision of bodily materials for clinical treatment and research. The bioethics literature and many practice guidelines have generally been opposed to such entanglement, depicting the use of money as contaminating, creating undue inducement, exploitation and commodification of the human body. However, two elements have been missing from these debates: (i) t…
Internationalizing New Technologies of Crime Control: Forensic DNA Databasing and Datasharing in the European Union
The use of DNA profiling in support of criminal investigations by police forces across the world has expanded remarkably during the last decade. The effectiveness of the world's first national DNA database—the National DNA Database of England & Wales—has subsequently influenced both police and legislative authorities in many other criminal jurisdictions to establish (or seek to establish) equivalent databases. The automated comparison of DNA prof…
Public Choices and Social Learning: The New Multimedia Technologies in Europe
La dynamique du developpement, de la mise en place et de l'utilisation des technologies d'information et de communication multimedia en Europe est abordee, en reference au concept d' apprentissage social
Disciplinary subjects and the human sciences
We must first of all draw up as large as possible a catalogue of categories, beginning with all those which it can be discovered that mankind has ever employed. It will then be seen that there have been, and that there still are, many dead moons, and others pale or obscure, in the firmament of reason. (M. Mauss, 1950: 309; translated by R. Needham, 1963: xliv) Durkheim and Mauss’s agenda for the sociological investigation of the ‘categories of th…
The Privatised World
Categorizing Death
Review in this article:J. Maxwell Atkinson, Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organisation of Sudden Death
Mutual Accommodation: Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation
Learning to Do Field Research: Intimacy and Inquiry in Social Life
The paper documents the reasons for the reluctance of fieldworkers to formalize and codify their methods of data creation. While these reasons are not directly challenged, it is asserted that the conventional emphasis on the experimental foundation of fieldwork practice may usefully be replaced by a consideration of its communicational and interactional foundations. Some implications for the teaching and learning of fieldwork are outlined
Sociological Tropes: A Tribute to Erving Goffman
From Cognitive Style to Substantive Content: Programmatics and Pragmatics in the Development of Sociological Knowledge
The view that the conduct of professional sociologists is partly to blame for the recent decline of interest in the production and funding of sociological knowledge and research is held by many interested in the nature and development of the human sciences. One aspect of that conduct has been the unseemly eagerness with which we have sought to prosecute internal disciplinary disputes at the expense of the image of the discipline as a whole. The e…
Dynamics of information technology implementation
Disciplinary subjects and the human sciences
We must first of all draw up as large as possible a catalogue of categories, beginning with all those which it can be discovered that mankind has ever employed. It will then be seen that there have been, and that there still are, many dead moons, and others pale or obscure, in the firmament of reason. (M. Mauss, 1950: 309; translated by R. Needham, 1963: xliv) Durkheim and Mauss’s agenda for the sociological investigation of the ‘categories of th…
The social shaping of technology
The Social Shaping of Technology
Studies of the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) emerged in the 1980s through a critique of the prevailing ‘technological determinism’ tradition, which had limited its scope of enquiry to monitoring the social adjustments required by technological progress.1 In contrast, SST researchers ‘problematized’ technological change by showing that it is patterned by the conditions of its creation and use, rather than developing solely according to an inn…
EDI and business network redesign: Why the two don't go together
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for communication between different corporate computer systems was expected to transform relationships between firms. However, this detailed study of three sectors of the UK publishing industry—the book trade; the magazine and newspaper trade; and newsprint supply to newspapers—found that EDI developed in a slow and incremental manner. This calls into question the radical visions of proponents of business network…
Exploring Expertise: Issues and Perspectives
The Politics of Constructionism
Erving Goffman
The complex variety of sociological theories and methods is often reduced to a series of allegedly distinctive ‘schools’, ‘traditions’ ‘styles’ or ‘approaches’ that together constitute the discipline. Some such categories have been named after individual sociologists sufficiently recognisable through fame or notoriety (for example Marxism, Durkheimianism). A second convention has rested on the invention of new terms signifying the distinctiveness…
The persecution of the presidency? The role of the independent counsel
Journal Article The persecution of the presidency? The role of the independent counsel Get access R Williams R Williams University of Durham, Durham, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 291–305, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/52.2.291 Published: 01 April 1999
The Dialectics of Place and Space: On Community in the `Information Age
This article takes a social learning perspective to examine the development of a community information service in terms of the changing computer interfaces used and their relations to a variety of more or less competing discourses around the related concepts of community, access and service. We show how both the enthusiasm of internet proponents and the pessimism of writers such as Castells does not take account of the complex interplay of local …
Public Choices and Social Learning: The New Multimedia Technologies in Europe
La dynamique du developpement, de la mise en place et de l'utilisation des technologies d'information et de communication multimedia en Europe est abordee, en reference au concept d' apprentissage social
Sociology and the vernacular voice: Text, Context and the Sociological Imagination
Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose act…
The Dynamics Of Social Science Research Exploitation
Research in the natural and social sciences has come to be seen as crucial to economic and social progress across a wide range of fronts, from wealth creation through technological advances and the imputed shift to a Knowledge Economy to the development of more effective, evidence-based public policies (Cabinet Office 1999). These issues have attracted the early attention of the new Scottish government, with wide-ranging reviews and consultations…
Shaping Technology, Guiding Policy: Concepts, Spaces and Tools
Concepts, Spaces and Tools for Action? Exploring the Policy Potential of the Social Shaping Perspective
Circuits of Surveillance
This paper examines the increasing police use of DNA profiling and databasing as a developing instrumentality of modern state surveillance. It briefly notes previously published work on a variety of surveillance technologies and their role in the governance of social action and social order. It then argues that there are important differences amongst the ways in which several such technologies construct and use identificatory artefacts, their ori…
Genetics and Forensics
This paper is based on a current study of the growing police use of the epistemic authority of molecular biology for the identification of criminal suspects in support of crime investigation. It discusses the development of DNA profiling and the establishment and development of the UK National DNA Database (NDNAD) as an instance of the ‘scientification of police work’ (Ericson and Shearing 1986) in which the police uses of science and technology …
Residual Categories and Disciplinary Knowledge: Personal Identity in Sociological and Forensic Investigations
A central feature of the development of sociological knowledge is the formulation and use of 'descriptive frames of reference' within which theoretical and empirical work may be critically assessed. This article considers the way in which one such frame of reference-that developed by Erving Goffman to represent the variety of human science understandings of the nature of identity in social interaction-distinguished between 'personal,' 'social,' a…
Wonderment and dread’: Representations of DNA in ethical disputes about forensic DNA databases
The national DNA Database of England & Wales is the largest forensic DNA database in the world. Since 1995 it has quickly developed to hold the genetic profiles of over two million people. This collection of tissue samples, taken without consent from a sizeable collection of the population, has engendered a number of ethical commentaries on its legitimacy as a proportionate response to crime. This paper examines the ways in which the ethical disc…
Sociology (42 works) · Political science (40 works) · Computer Science (30 works) · Law (19 works) · Business (17 works) · Engineering (17 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Social science (16 works) · Economics (11 works)