In Building the Trident Network, Maggie Mort approaches the United                  Kingdom's Trident submarine and missile system as a sociotechnical network. Drawing                  on the sociology of scientific and technical knowledge and on actor-network theory,                  Mort recounts how the Trident program was stabilized in the United Kingdom and                  brought into "successful" production. She uncovers the nature of this success by                  retelling unofficial histories of Trident, of production roads not taken, and of                  potential technological "distractions." The production of Trident, she shows, was                  not inevitable but contingent and problematic.Using material from interviews and                  local texts, Mort explores the emergence of a counternetwork in the form of a                  workers' campaign for alternative technologies. She develops concepts of                  "disenrollment" and "absent intermediaries," in which redundant workers and                  marginalized technologies serve to discipline and reinforce the dominant network as                  production shrinks. She also examines the maintenance of the barrier between the                  technical and the social/political in this context. The management of uncertainties                  within the Trident production program emerges as critical to its successful                  completion.

Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines (Inside Technology) PDF

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