Social Construction of Technology

The theory of technological determinism has been directly derived as a consequence to Veblen’s theory of institutional change (Brette 2003). Technological determinism is based on a reductionist explanation for social changes. Technological determinism is highly important to explain patterns of human interactions and behaviours, particularly in the wake of the industrial revolution. In the modern era, technology controls practically every aspect of human endeavour and enquiry. It cannot be denied that technology has a very important influence on human life since most of the primary achievements and constructs of human civilisation are based on technological innovation and technology use.

This paper examines current issues at the intersection of the Sociology of Technology and the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies. It begins with an overview of major social constructionist, interpretive semiotic, and actor–network theoretical sociological approaches to technology as developed within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Considering the predominance of narrative visual metaphors in these approaches' treatment of socio-technical perception, it is argued that the “turn to sound” in social studies of technology, rather than simply furnishing established analytic approaches with a fresh set of empirical cases (i.e. “sound technologies”), presents an opportunity to better sensitize STS approaches to the contingent socio-technical shaping and distribution of embodied perceptual modalities in general. A critical review of recent social and historical studies of sound and technology, attending especially to debates surrounding the theoretical shift from acoustemological or soundscape-based to signal-oriented “transductive” approaches, suggests the importance for future STS and Sound Studies work of addressing how shared modes of sensory perception are produced within particular socio-technical frames.

In highly technical societies, gender is largely produced in relation to technology. In this article, we explore the effects on the construction of gender and technology when groups of parents discuss technological activities. To do so, we report the results of a research project conducted in Barcelona, in which fathers and mothers, after playing video games with their sons and daughters, expressed their opinions about that activity, the relations their sons and daughters have with video games, and their own relationship with technology. The results support the idea that gender and technology are discursively and practically in permanent co-construction and have a relatively firm relationship that guarantees stability to both. However, we find that when people are confronted with facts that contradict the dominant perception that women are technologically unskilled or uninterested, it is only technology and not gender that is flexibly interpreted.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

The establishment of the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS) in Malawi is a striking example of informed amnesia in development assistance. Despite the lessons learned earlier concerning a process approach to participatory irrigation development in Africa, in the case of BVIS outside interveners designed an irrigation system and parachuted it into Bwanje Valley as a black-boxed technology. Using a sociotechnical

„Technologia i sport” jest pracą z zakresu humanistyki nieantropocentrycznej. W odróżnieniu jednak od klasycznej humanistyki nieantropocentrycznej, zachwyconej „potworami”, hybrydycznością i sprawczością rzeczy, w tej książce podejmuje się klasyczne problemy socjologii: nierówność społeczną i kontrolę/władzę. […] Autor napisał interesującą książkę, obfitującą w niebanalne przemyślenia i ustalenia, która pozostaje na wysokim poziomie akademickim i nie stroni od rekomendacji praktycznych oraz prób zarysowania stanów przyszłych. Jest ponadto porządnie skonstruowana, posiada wywód uporządkowany i logiczny, a narrację zgrabną. […] Zagospodarowuje pole do tej pory w polskiej socjologii pozostawione odłogiem, gdyż opowiada o splocie technologii, sportu, ekonomii i polityki. (z recenzji prof. Tomasza Szlendaka)

En esta obra se analiza la historia de las patentes de invención mexicanas desde la consumación de la independencia hasta la culminación del Porfiriato. Un extenso recorrido histórico que permite identificar las distintas condiciones del contexto sociotécnico que configuraron el devenir de las patentes nacionales. De este modo, se aborda el tema de la invención patentada como un fenómeno socialmente configurado. Para conseguirlo se consideran tres variables clave: el orden institucional encargado de regular las patentes, los grupos sociales relevantes que las solicitaron y los campos de invención que fomentaron los inventos mexicanos. Igualmente, esta investigación ayuda a comprender un conjunto de procesos más amplios de la historia nacional, como la naturaleza de las políticas de fomento industrial, las dinámicas de circulación de los saberes técnicos en la sociedad y la fisonomía que adoptó la cultura tecnológica del país. En suma, este libro ofrece una profunda perspectiva de las conexiones existentes entre la sociedad, la tecnología y la industria mexicanas del siglo XIX y el Porfiriato. Cabe destacar que por su calidad y originalidad, el presente trabajo obtuvo el Premio Nacional "Francisco Javier Clavijero" del INAH en 2015.

This study examines the implementation of office technology in the social security system of employees and more specifically in the sectors "central collection" (ONSS), health and disablement, family allowance, holiday allowance and retirement pension. The research starts at a first turning point in 1939 when the Society for Mecanography was founded. During the Second World War this organization reached maturity and was adopted by the ONSS in 1945 to implement the central collection system with punch-card technology. This was the gateway for the dissemination of technology throughout the system. In the 1960s, IT technology supplanted mecanography to become dominant from 1970 onwards. This was a new turning point because computerization was accelerated and became irreversible.
The study uses source material that had not been tapped until now, such as the archives of the various parastatal institutions.
This part of social security history, which has not been explored to date, is based on the insights of the Actor-Network Theory and social-constructivism.This study opens the "black box" of the technical functioning of the social security system. It leads to some surprising findings such as the impact of social technicians, a mysterious group of technocrats who helped direct the process. Or the influence of the designer IBM, which kept a strict hand on the systems by years but was countered abruptly by political intervention.
With the conclusion: technology is not neutral, it is one of the determining factors in the development of social security, among others, such as the economic, social and political power factors. Technology shapes society and vice versa

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This is a preface to a special issue on the history of everyday technology. It includes an introduction to the theory 'Social Construction of Technology' (SCOT) as well as a brief description on the following eleven articles, part of which apply SCOT in their case studies.

The volume contains three sections: Gendering Transportation and Communication, Cultivating the Automobile, and Equipping Homes. The list of contents available at: http://lmu-munich.academia.edu/TMyllyntaus/Books

From the beginning of the coming academic year the anthology will be used as a textbook at the University of Turku, Finland.

The Special Issue of ICON can be ordered by joining ICOHTEC, filling the subscription form and paying the membership fee of the year 2010 (€ 15 - 30). Further information at: http://icohtec.org/about-icohtec-join-us.html

"Il volume, grazie a un apparato documentario finora inedito, analizza le prime fasi di sviluppo del telefono in Italia tra l’ultimo ventennio dell’Ottocento e la prima guerra mondiale. Come venne accolto, interpretato e “metabolizzato” il nuovo mezzo di comunicazione nella società dell’epoca? Quali gruppi sociali compresero le sue potenzialità e quali, invece, lo trascurarono o addirittura ne ostacolarono la diffusione? Chi furono i primi abbonati al telefono, come lo utilizzarono e cosa significò per loro? Si possono individuare delle caratteristiche peculiari nello sviluppo del telefono nel nostro paese tali da delineare una sorta di “via italiana alle telecomunicazioni”? Le origini del telefono in Italia mira a rispondere a queste e ad altre domande, analizzando una fase della storia della comunicazione italiana fino a oggi poco considerata ma fondamentale per comprendere appieno l’evoluzione delle telecomunicazioni, un settore sempre più al centro della vita politica, economica e culturale della società contemporanea.

This book aims at identifying the turning points in the early history of Italian telephone (1877–1915) considering at the same level political, economical, technical, and social dimensions and trying to reconstruct conflicts and connivances among relevant social
groups. The early history of the Italian telephone can be subdivided into four periods: the urban networks building during the 1880s; the nationalization attempt, concentration process and failed building of the long-distance network during the 1890s; the nationalization process between 1903 and 1907; and the failure of public management and return to private operation between 1907 and the First World War. This analysis helps identify some characteristics of Italian telephone history that
configure a kind of Italian style in telecommunications: the relevance of old media (electric telegraph in particular) for the new one, political uncertainties, foreign investments, difficulties in interconnecting different systems, a lively and overlooked demand."

This chapter surveys the history of telecommunications from a global perspective and highlights three influential interpretative traditions. It has two parts. The first part defines “telecommunications” and sketches the main dimensions of four telecommunications networks over a two-hundred-year period – the optical telegraph, the electric telegraph, the landline telephone, and the mobile telephone (and its predecessor, the wireless telegraph). The second part shows how historical scholarship on topics in the history of telecommunications has been shaped by three intellectual traditions: the Large Technical Systems (LTS) approach; political economy; and the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT).

This chapter is about managing sociotechnological risks. It is in the 70s that the notion of ‘high-risk’ (or ‘safety critical’) systems started to be distinguished and grouped into an independent category including industries such as the nuclear, aviation, marine, petrochemical or the railways. Any attempt such as this one to introduce this background in a few pages is necessarily restrictive, partly unfair but also a simplified account. And, there are of course many different strategies to do so. One option is to consider the field through the scientific disciplines involved, say sociology, engineering, psychology, ergonomics, management, etc. A second one, quite related to the first, is to introduce pioneers who, from different disciplinary backgrounds, produced seminal contributions used as shared references among various research communities interested in the safety of complex sociotechnological systems. A third one is to look into industry (aviation, nuclear or petrochemical) in order to illustrate and to differentiate the diversity of problems related to sociotechnological risks and how they materialise. Another option is to identify core concepts that sometimes cut across a range of disciplines, authors and industry which offers also good insights into the issues involved with sociotechnological risks. In any case, it is a very challenging task. The intention in this chapter is to combine a bit of these strategies in order to offer the reader a broad vision, and to follow editors’ guidelines specifying the following structure: first, key concepts, second, major debates and third open questions/perspectives.

It is a systematic introduction into the sociological analysis of technology, technology-related action, and technostructures of society. Topics are the technicization of everyday life, the conceptualization of technique and technology, and the impact of technologies and media on social and cultural change. Three perspectives of STS are presented: (1) the view of technological determinism focussing on the effects of new technologies on society, (2) the view of social constructivism emphasizing the social definition, negotiation and design of technology projects, and (3) the non-dualistic view of technopragmatism that is interested in the practices of creating new human-technology interactivities and hardening them into sociotechnical constellations: ensemble of technologies, actor-networks, infrastructures ... Main results of STS-research are summarized and illlustrated by case studies and examples from everyday life.

La producción de conocimiento y los procesos de desarrollo tecnológico predominantes en las instituciones de ciencia y tecnología han seguido una trayectoria lineal conocida como determinismo tecnológico. En respuesta a este modelo surgieron concepciones teóricas alternativas como el Constructivismo Social de la Tecnología que brinda la base conceptual del presente artículo cuyo objetivo fue reconocer los grupos sociales relevantes, identificar los significados que le atribuyen al servicio estacionado de los rodeos bovinos del sur de San Luis y establecer los criterios para el diseño, formulación o re-significación de la tecnología orientada a grupos sociales específicos, en particular el de no usuarios. Se utilizó una metodología integrada por tablas de verdad, método Q y un índice de apropiación (IA) de la tecnología. Se entrevistaron tecnólogos, usuarios, no usuarios y asesores de la citada región geográfica. Los IA fueron 0.95, 0.88, 0.83 y 0.54 para tecnólogos, usuarios, asesores y no usuarios, respectivamente. Se hallaron diferencias de valoración de los atributos según el grupo social. Los clasificadores Q significativos (confiabilidad ≥ 0.95) fueron el 37% del total; la de los tecnólogos fue el doble de los demás grupos. Los grupos sociales por su función profesional no presentaron patrones de percepciones comunes, excepto los tecnólogos. Los asesores, usuarios y no usuarios se dividieron en subgrupos. Se encontraron cinco patrones, o grupos sociales relevantes, de la importancia asignada a los distintos atributos, lo que revela la presencia de igual cantidad de artefactos, o variantes socio-técnicas. Se identificaron algunos criterios para incorporar en la tecnología dirigida al grupo social de no usuarios.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” (25.06.1963 J.F. Kennedy) Eine Chance, diesen Blick in die Zukunft zu richten und den Wandel voranzutreiben sowie unsere Mobilität nachhaltiger zu gestalten, bietet eine neue technologische Entwicklung im Zweiradbereich: das Pedelec. So war es auch das Ziel des Dissertationsprojekts, auf Grundlage empirischer Analysen zum (Mobilitäts-)Handeln von Pedelecbesitzern Ansatzpunkte zu identifizieren, wie die Pedelecpraktik und ihre Diffusion unterstützt werden können. Im Laufe der empirisch-theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen wurden der Grounded Theory folgend zwei gegenstandsorientierte Modelle entwickelt: das Modell der individuellen Mobilitätspraxis (MiMP) und das Modell der Mobilitätskarrieren von Pedelecbesitzern (MoKa). Während das MoKa einen Rahmen für den prozessualen Ablauf der Herausbildung der Pedelecpraktik darstellt, bietet das zweite Modell, das MiMP, ein Gerüst zur Analyse der Elemente, die die Pedelecpraktik konfigurieren und charakterisieren. Basis des MiMP bilden praxistheoretische Grundannahmen, die um handlungstheoretische Ansätze erweitert wurden. Während der Arbeit konnten sowohl Adoptionsfenster als auch –risiken identifiziert werden, die wesentlich die Adoptionswahrscheinlichkeiten von Pedelecs und damit die Diffusion beeinflussen. Des Weiteren wurde festgestellt, dass die Effekte des Pedelecs sich nicht nur auf das Mobilitätshandeln beschränken, sondern als Artefakt entfaltet die technologische Neuheit eine Wirkkraft, die darüber hinausgehend soziale Handlungs- und Alltagszusammenhänge verändert und Lebenswirklichkeiten beeinflusst. Generell zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass das Pedelec nicht nur auf individueller Ebene positive Effekte hervorruft, sondern auch auf kollektiver Ebene einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erreichung vieler umwelt-, gesundheits- und verkehrspolitischer Ziele leisten kann. Eine Chance hat das Pedelec jedoch nur, wenn die Pedelecpraktik im Wettbewerb mit anderen Mobilitätspraktiken so komfortabel wie möglich durchführbar ist und die in der Arbeit identifizierten bestehenden Adoptionsrisiken minimiert werden. Alfred SCHÜTZ folgend ist die „Wirklichkeit mannigfaltig“ – und so auch die Zukunft. Daher liegt es auch an uns, diese zu gestalten. Besser gestern als heute sollten also die vielfältigen Chancen, die das Pedelec bietet genutzt werden.

En el presente escrito escudriñan algunos de los presupuestos ontológicos que se ciernen a la base de la práctica administrativa, y que tienen que ver con tres preguntas fundamentales: 1) ¿qué tipo de cosa es la práctica administrativa?; 2) ¿cómo es posible su modo de existencia?; 3) ¿cuál es el rasgo esencial de esta práctica social? Partiendo de una reflexión filosófica sobre la ontología de lo social, las nociones de ‘orden’ y ‘técnica social’, y referentes teóricos e históricos de la práctica administrativa, se llega a concebir esta práctica social como un tipo de técnica social ordenadora institucionalizada, la cual refleja la necesidad del hombre de generar ordenamiento e intervención en el mundo social.

This paper presents a study about ontological assumptions of management practice. It try to give an approach to the questions “what kind of fact is the management practice?”, “how is its existence possible?” and “what is its identity?” It emphasizes in the philosophical study of social ontology, notions of “social technique” and “order”, and the theory and history of the management, to conceive this social practice like a  "institutionalized social technique ordering"

This article investigates how the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007) gets inscribed in the fabric of search algorithms by way of social practices. Drawing on the tradition of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and 17 qualitative expert interviews I discuss how search engines and their “capital accumulation cycle” (Fuchs, forthcoming) are negotiated and stabilized in a network of actors and interests, website providers and users first and foremost. I further show how corporate search engines and their capitalist ideology are solidified in a socio-political context characterized by a techno-euphoric climate of innovation and a politics of privatization. This analysis provides a valuable contribution to contemporary search engine critique mainly focusing on search engines’ business models and societal implications. It shows that a shift of perspective is needed from impacts search engines have on society towards social practices and power relations involved in the construction of search engines to reconsider and renegotiate search engines and their algorithmic ideology in the future.

Attempting to illuminate the utility of amateurism for the history of computing, this article examines the records of the Amateur Computer Society (1966–1976), a hobbyist organization whose newsletterschronicle an important corner in the field. The author looks at both thediscussion of schematics as a contested representation of amateur expertise and the crucial links between amateur practice anddomesticity.

Blockchains are decentralized databases of digital transactions undertaken and verified by quasi-anonymous users interacting in peer-to-peer networks. This chapter traces the agency exercised by this technology, as well as that of its human users in co-producing authority in global governance. Drawing on a Social Construction of Technology approach, the main argument advanced is that parallel forms of human and techno-agency have provided enabling conditions for extensions of liberal market governance modalities in the wake the 2007-8 global financial crisis. Highlighting dynamic relationships between authority, governance and technology, this chapter enhances IR understanding of patterns of agency at two registers of 'the international': the global economy, particularly global finance, and its governance, specifically in its Anglo-American financial heartland.

This paper looks at how the selfie stick shifted from being included in a 1995 Japanese book of useless inventions to the most popular Christmas gift of 2015. I investigate how this seemingly unsuccessful invention slowly transformed into an overnight phenomenon without development in the technology itself. From the perspective of science and technology studies, particularly the actor-network theory, I audit the vast amount of actors necessary to be perfectly timed and placed in order to ensure the success of the product. As a means of understanding the selfie stick, I first look at the selfie movement in comparison to traditional self-portraiture. Through this, I grasp what defines a selfie, which in turn stands to define the actors involved. I then discuss the technological and social actors that led to the popularity of the selfie movement, including the enhancement of photographic tools, the rise of the internet, the subsequent emergence of social media, and the mobility and interconnectedness of smartphones. The timing and placement of these actors determined the failure of the first invention of the selfie stick by Hiroshi Ueda in 1983—the scene simply had not been fully built for the movement to thrive. This can be attributed to lack of digital infrastructure, technological mobility, and a general embarrassment of public self-portraiture. Next, I examine the second invention of the selfie stick by Wayne Fromm in 2005, and the ten-year slow rise of the device through the lens of actor-network theory. I consider how the emergence of two distinct worlds—the physical and the digital—emerged from the complexities of all people and concepts surrounding innovation, and how this event sparked the redefinition of the selfie stick as a novel and useful tool. I conclude by positing how the selfie stick in turn redefines the selfie through manipulation of its visual language.

This paper looks at the fateful 1988 fuselage failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 to suggest and illustrate a new perspective on the sociology of technological accidents. Drawing on core insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it highlights, and then challenges, a fundamental principle underlying our understanding of technological risk: a realist epistemology that tacitly assumes that technological knowledge is objectively knowable and that ‘failures’ always connote ‘errors’ which are, in principle, foreseeable. From here, it suggests a new conceptual tool by proposing a novel category of man-made calamity: the ‘Epistemic Accident’, grounded in a constructivist understanding of knowledge. It concludes by exploring the implications of Epistemic Accidents and a constructivist approach to failure; sketching their relationship to broader issues concerning technology and society, and reexamining conventional ideas about technology, accountability and governance.

Social accounts of technological change make the flexibility and openness of interpretations the starting point of an argument against technological determinism. They suggest that technological change unfolds in the semantic domain, but they focus on the social processes around the interpretations of new technologies, and do not address the conceptual processes of change in interpretations. The dissertation presents an empirically grounded case study of the design process of an open-source online software platform based on the framework of distributed cognition to argue that the cognitive perspective is needed for understanding innovation in software, because it allows us to describe the reflexive and expansive contribution of conceptual processes to new software and the significance of professional epistemic practices in framing the direction of innovation. The framework of distributed cognition brings the social and cognitive perspectives together on account of its understanding of conceptual processes as distributed over time, among people, and between humans and artifacts. The dissertation argues that an evolving open-source software landscape became translated into the open-ended local design space of a new software project in a process of infrastructural implosion, and the design space prompted participants to outline and pursue epistemic strategies of sense-making and learning about the contexts of use. The result was a process of conceptual modeling, which resulted in a conceptually novel user interface. Prototyping professional practices of user-centered design lent directionality to this conceptual process in terms of a focus on individual activities with the user interface. Social approaches to software design under the broad umbrella of human-centered computing have been seeking to inform the design on the basis of empirical contributions about a social context. The analysis has shown that empirical engagement with the contexts of use followed from conceptual modeling, and concern about real world contexts was aligned with the user-centered direction that design was taking. I also point out a social-technical gap in the design process in connection with the repeated performance challenges that the platform was facing, and describe the possibility of a social-technical imagination.

Population registers are statistical and administrative devices aimed at providing an accurate and dynamic picture of the population, and thereby allowing authorities to acquire information on its composition and the ways people are located and move within the territory. Even though these devices are theoretically expected to merely register social reality without affecting it, population registers do have performative effects, which differ from those of other demographic devices such as censuses and are more explicitly political. First, population registers turn the material relations between people and space into a formal act called registration, and produce a legal status called residency, which is the precondition for exercising many rights. Moreover, despite their apparent inclusivity, population registers are structurally restricted to certain components of the population. Only some ways of dwelling and living in the space are considered legitimate, and only these are accepted legally and permit registration. In analysing the performative power of population registers in Italy and how it changes over time, this article seeks to contribute to the debate on performativity by shifting the focus from the socio-technical dimension, typical of Science and Technology Studies (STS), to the socio-legal one, less explored within the scholarship on demographic devices.

Contemporary philosophy of technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) both commit to studying technology from a nontechnical perspective. They also share a common aim: studying technology-in-the-making, which means opening the black box of technology. As a result, philosophers of technology and STS scholars often use each other’s theories and concepts, or criticize each other’s arguments. This introduces a question: what are the differences between philosophy of technology and STS? This thesis offers a comparative study of philosophy of technology and STS, guided by the research question ‘what are key differences and similarities between philosophy of technology and science and technology studies (STS)?’. The comparison is narrowed down to classical and contemporary philosophy of technology on the side of philosophy, and the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) on the side of STS. The comparison focused on the treatment of three topics central to both fields: artefacts, technological determinism and the notion of a black box. The comparison was done through conceptual and textual analysis, using both primary and secondary literature from both fields. The main conclusion was that, despite their similar research subject and common aim, both fields had a different focus: whereas STS focuses primarily on the dynamics that drive technological change, philosophy of technology studies technology and how it influences human experience or action. In other words, STS studies technology-in-the-making, philosophy of technology studies technology-in-the-making and technology-at-work.

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

The field of archaeomaterials research has enormous potential to shed light on past innovation processes. However , this potential has been only partially recognized outside its immediate practitioners, despite the fact that innovation and technology change are topics of enduring interest in archaeology and the broader social sciences. This review explores the relationship between archaeomaterials research and the interdisciplinary study of innovation, and maps out a path toward greater integration of materials analysis into these discussions. To foster this integration, this review has three aims. First, I sketch the theoretical landscape of approaches to the study of innovation in archaeology and neighboring disciplines. I trace how theoretical traditions like evolutionary archaeology have influenced archaeomaterials approaches to questions of technological change while also highlighting cases where work by archaeomaterials researchers anticipated trends in the anthropology of technology. Next, I distill a series of core concerns that crosscut these different theoretical perspectives. Finally, I describe examples where archaeomaterials research has deepened scholarly understanding of innovation processes and addressed these core questions. The future of archaeomaterials research lies in engagement with these broader discussions and effective communication of the contributions that materials analysis can make to building a comparative understanding of innovation processes.