The analysis of the social importance of new technologies and their socioeconomic and institutional repercussions has moved into the center of research in the Project Area Science, Technology and Innovation.

           Ulrich Dolata                                     Raymund Werle

Since the 1980s, mainstream technology studies have focused on the social shaping and construction of technology while its socioeconomic, structural and institutional repercussions have rarely been analyzed systematically. But technology affects and restructures social contexts often seriously. New information and communication technologies, the internet, biotechnology or nanotechnology as well as significant technological shifts in already existing fields of technology (e.g. energy supply systems, public utilities) affect industries and infrastructures, open up new market opportunities, and rearrange the relation between industry and academia. They trigger new links between human and nonhuman actors, influence ways of life and patterns of consumption, and last but not least call for new legal and institutional framings.
 

Under the header “Bringing technology back in”, Ulrich Dolata and Raymund Werle address this blind spot of technology related social research. Research and publications include
 

• the interaction of technological and institutional innovations,
   
• the roles of technology as actor, institution and structure,
   
• the relation between different types of technology and their sociotechnical organization,
   
• the technological and socioeconomic transformation of sectoral systems,
   
• the interplay between the transformative capacity of new technologies and the adaptability of socioeconomic structures, institutions and actors.