Wiebe E Bijker, Thomas P Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds) 1987 London: MIT x + 405 pp price £29.95 ISBN 0 262 02262 1 Science and technology have come under scrutiny from several social science perspectives. Historians, philosophers, economists and sociologists have all made their contribution.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9112/39/8/019/pdf

The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

A review of socio-technical energy transition (STET) models

Agent technologies for business systems Business process improvement Content management Customer relationship management Decision support systems Enterprise resource planning Information quality management Life cycle management Organizational cybernetics Organizational knowledge management Organizational modeling Supply chain management Systems engineering Systems thinking Value chain management

/pdf/strategic-information-systems-concepts-methodologies-tools-38sdo0pm0a.pdf

Strategic information systems : concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications

The increasing complexity in highly technological systems such as aviation, maritime, air traffic control, telecommunications, nuclear power plants, space missions, chemical and petroleum industry, and healthcare and patient safety is leading to potentially disastrous failure modes and new kinds of safety issues. Traditional accident modelling approaches are not adequate to analyse accidents that occur in modern socio-technical systems, where accident causation is not the result of an individual component failure or human error. This paper provides a review of key traditional accident modelling approaches and their limitations, and describes new system-theoretic approaches to the modelling and analysis of accidents in safety-critical systems. This paper also discusses the application of formal methods to accident modelling and organisational theories on safety and accident analysis.

A review of accident modelling approaches for complex socio-technical systems

The conceptualisation of the notion of a system in systems engineering, as exemplified in, for instance, the engineering standard IEEE Std 1220–1998 (1999), is problematic when applied to the design of socio-technical systems. This is argued using Intelligent Transportation Systems as an example. A preliminary conceptualisation of socio-technical systems is introduced which includes technical and social elements and actors, as well as four kinds of relations. Current systems engineering practice incorporates technical elements and actors in the system but sees social elements exclusively as contextual. When designing socio-technical systems, however, social elements and the corresponding relations must also be considered as belonging to the system.

Modelling infrastructures as socio-technical systems

Systems engineering has been plagued by the problem of how to separate a system from its environment or context, in particular from its social context. We propose to include anything in the system that is necessary for performing its intended function and that may be the object of design. For certain engineering systems, such as civil aviation systems, this implies that human agents and social institutions have to be taken as integral parts of these systems. These ‘socio-technical’ systems are of a hybrid nature because they are constituted by different kinds of elements, intentional and nonintentional: social institutions, human agents and technical artefacts. This paper analyses two different roles that human agents, as elements of socio-technical systems, may play with regard to technical artefacts. Furthermore, it discusses some conceptual problems concerning the modelling of socio-technical systems that are due to the hybrid nature of these systems.

/pdf/treating-socio-technical-systems-as-engineering-systems-some-wwzpourqdn.pdf

Treating socio-technical systems as engineering systems: some conceptual problems

The IEEE standard for the systems engineering process is problematic when applied to the design of (socio-technical) systems. This is argued using examples of automated vehicle systems. A conceptualization of socio-technical systems is introduced. This distinguishes technical and social elements and agents, as well as four kinds of relations. Next to physical and functional relations, intentional and normative relations play an important role. The IEEE standard defines social elements as contextual and focuses on total design control. Because of the involvement of agents and social elements in socio-technical systems both these viewpoints are problematic.

Modeling engineering systems as socio-technical systems

The Cadastral System as a Socio-Technical System

In this paper we discuss how the increasing importance of socio-technical systems affects systems engineering. We start with a clarification of the notion of systems engineering by distinguishing two ways in which engineering design is involved with systems characteristics: in the object of design and in the design approach. Next we focus on system-like objects of design of a special sort: socio-technical systems. After presenting two examples, we indicate several tensions between the systems engineering design approach and the design of socio-technical systems.

Maarten Ottens

Papers

Modelling infrastructures as socio-technical systems

Treating socio-technical systems as engineering systems: some conceptual problems

Modeling engineering systems as socio-technical systems

The Cadastral System as a Socio-Technical System

8.1.1 Systems engineering of socio‐technical systems