A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Background

The notion of Large Technical Systems (LTS) refers both to an approach to understanding and analyzing sociotechnical change, and to a class of phenomena – large infrastructural and production systems – which are particularly suited for analysis by an LTS approach.

LTS thinking finds its roots in the American historian Thomas P. Hughes’s book Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880–1930 (1983). In the late 1980s, the LTS approach was positioned among the promising “new directions in the sociology and history of technology” next to the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT; see Chapter 15) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT; see Chapter 64).

Simultaneously, an LTS literature emerged to investigate large infrastructure and production systems. Since then, the conceptual framework and the empirical range of inquiry have steadily expanded.

LTS-informed work is best-presented not as a coherent theory in a strict social science sense, but rather as comprising a variety of narratives, concepts and research strategies that can inspire inquiry. These are usually guided by two original concerns.

A first important original concern was to criticize and transcend the customary focus upon artifacts or machines in history and sociology, routinely investigating the lightbulb, locomotive, motorcar or assembly line as loci of technological change and harbingers of major social changes. Such artifacts, however, were only the most visible of many interacting elements that ...