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Materiality (social Sciences And Humanities)
In the social sciences, materiality is the notion that the physical properties of a cultural artifact have consequences for how the object is used. Some scholars expand this definition to encompass a broader range of actions, such as the process of making art, and the power of organizations and institutions to orient activity around themselves. The concept of materiality is used across many disciplines within the social sciences to focus attention on the impact of material or physical factors. Scholars working in science and technology studies, anthropology, Materiality turn, organization studies, or communication studies may incorporate materiality as a dimension of their investigations. Central figures in the social scientific study of materiality are Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Communication studies Communication studies scholars use theories of materiality when investigating the impact of media such as newspapers, radio, television, personal computing and the Internet. Co ...
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Cultural Artifact
A cultural artifact, or cultural artefact (see American and British English spelling differences), is a term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology and sociology for anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users. ''Artifact'' is the spelling in North American English; ''artefact'' is usually preferred elsewhere. Cultural artifact is a more generic term and should be considered with two words of similar, but narrower, nuance: it can include objects recovered from archaeological sites, i.e. archaeological artifacts, but can also include objects of modern or early-modern society, or social artifacts. For example, in an anthropological context: a 17th-century lathe, a piece of faience, or a television each provides a wealth of information about the time in which they were manufactured and used. Cultural artifacts, whether ancient or current, have a significance because they offer an insight into: techno ...
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Materiality Turn
The materiality turn in organization studies is the theoretical movement emphasizing objects, instruments and embodiments involved in organizations and organizing (theoretical debate and the ontologies underpinnings theories about organizations and organizing, what deeply 'matters' in the study of organizations and organizing (e.g. structures, agency, intentionality, process, movements, relations, networks, entities, substance, technologies, semiosis, etc.) (ontological debate (see e.g. Latour, 2007; de Vaujany and Mitev, 2016). In the context of organization studies (see e.g. Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2005 or Clegg et al., 2006), a turn is a collective direction of research, focused on some coherent sets of concepts, theories and ideas, which represent a point of bifurcation for the field itself. Most turns in organization studies relate to broader ones in social sciences and humanities. The materiality-turn is one of these major turns. It emerged in the nineties, precisely becaus ...
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Harold Innis
Harold Adams Innis (November 5, 1894 – November 9, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.Easterbrook, W.T. and Watkins, M.H. (1984) "The Staple Approach." In ''Approaches to Canadian Economic History''. Ottawa: Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press, pp. 1–98. Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations. He argued, for example, that a balance betwee ...
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Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his ''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'' and the term ''global village.'' He even predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and ...
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Science, Technology And Society
Science and technology studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. History Like most interdisciplinary fields of study, STS emerged from the confluence of a variety of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, all of which had developed an interest—typically, during the 1960s or 1970s—in viewing science and technology as socially embedded enterprises. The key disciplinary components of STS took shape independently, beginning in the 1960s, and developed in isolation from each other well into the 1980s, although Ludwik Fleck's (1935) monograph ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' anticipated many of STS's key themes. In the 1970s Elting E. Morison founded the STS program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which served as a model. By 2011, 111 STS research centers and academic programs were counted worldwide. Key theme ...
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Langdon Winner
Langdon Winner (born August 7, 1944) is Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Langdon Winner was born in San Luis Obispo, California on August 7, 1944. He received his B.A. in 1966, M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, all in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary focus was political theory. He has been a professor at Leiden, MIT, University of California, Los Angeles and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 1985 he has been at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; he was a visiting professor at Harvey Mudd College (2000) and Colgate University (2001). In 2010 he was a Fulbright Fellow visiting the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Winner lives in upstate New York. He is married to Gail P. Stuart and has three children. His interests include science, technology, American popular culture, and theories of sustain ...
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