This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts’ disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of political inaction, and considerations with respect to everyday life. These sense-making devices allowed for ambiguous outcomes, and the paper argues four main outcomes with respect to the domestication processes: the acceptors, the tempered acceptors, the uncertain and the sceptics.
This paper examines how energy efficiency fails in the building industry based on many years of research into the integration of energy efficiency in the construction of buildings and sustainable architecture in Norway. It argues that energy-efficient construction has been seriously restrained by three interrelated problems: (1) deficiencies in public policy to stimulate energy efficiency, (2) limited governmental efforts to regulate the building industry, and (3) a conservative building industry. The paper concludes that innovation and implementation of new, energy-efficient technologies in the building industry requires new policies, better regulations and reformed practices in the industry itself.
Eirik Swensen for assistance in collecting information about websites, and two anonymous reviewers for very useful comments and suggestions.
AbstractLocal governments' websites are important gateways for residents wishing to interact with public institutions online, and the establishment and development of such websites stand out among governmental initiatives to improve their performance. Drawing on domestication theory to apply a change-oriented perspective, the paper analyses how
Social studies of science and technology are dominated by action and macro approaches. This has led to a neglect of institutions and institutional arrangements at the meso level, which are important, in particular to the student of technology. The transfer of concepts and methods from social studies of science to technology studies has conserved this lack of concern with the meso level. This article suggests a more critical evaluation of this transfer, along with a review of the now popular assumption of a high degree of similarity between science and technology. Two case studies show how meso-level considerations are important to an understanding of the nature of technological innovation and illustrate the lack of similarity between scientific and technological development.
<span>This paper analyses technology policy as a scholarly concern and political practice that needs to be taken beyond the present somewhat singular focus on innovation and deployment. We also need to include an interest in the making of infrastructure, the provision of regulations, and democratic engagement. Consequently, this paper introduces the concepts of socialisation and domestication to overcome the instrumental, economic framing of technology policy. These concepts highlight the importance of embedding and enacting new technology. The suggested conceptual </span><span>framework is used in a brief synthetic analysis of four examples of technology policy and technological development in the Norwegian context: cars, wind power, hydrogen </span><span>for transport, and carbon capture and storage (CCS).</span>
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