c:o/re Senior Fellow 10/24 – 04/25
Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer is a professor of sociology of technology and innovation and the director of the Institute of Sociology at the Technical University of Berlin. He is a member of the program committee and a principal investigator of the DFG Priority Program 2267 “Digitalization of Working Worlds” and a principal investigator of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-figuration of Spaces”. He is an editor of the journal “Zeitschrift für Soziologie” and the managing editor of the journal “Soziologische Revue”. His recent empirical research includes locative media and how they change urban space, reward-based crowdfunding as gift exchange, and the social construction of human-robot collaboration via prototype scenarios. Also, he has a long-term interest in the social theory of technology with a focus on technological agency.
The Digital Transformation of Technological Agency
The digital transformation of society is to a large extent a change of how human activities are supported by technology. This change is not about technology acquiring agency. Rather, it is about a new kind of agency that increasingly turns the use of technological artifacts into situations of collaborating with them. The proposed project aims at addressing two aspects of this digital transformation of technological agency. The first aspect concerns how action is distributed between humans and technological artifacts when the artifacts become collaborators rather than tools. Here, I will focus on human-robot collaboration. The second aspect concerns how the interaction between humans and technology and the roles they assume in relation to each other changes when technology is no longer designed with respect to particular tasks but evolves in a task-agnostic way. Here, I will focus on unsupervised learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
Publications (selection)
Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo, Tim Clausnitzer, Kevin Wiggert, and Martin Meister. 2024. Analyzing Distributed Action in the Making by Comparing Human-Robot Co-Work Scenarios. In: Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten. Zur Erfassbarkeit einer systemischen Transformation, edited by Sabine Pfeiffer, Manuel Nicklich, Michael Henke, Martina Heßler, Martin Krzywdzinski, and Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, pp. 205–230. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo. 2023. Technology and Action. A Theory of Action Analysis. In: Berlin Keys to the Sociology of Technology, edited by Cornelius Schubert and Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, pp. 9–35. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo, and Werner Rammert. 2023. Technology, Action and Practice: The Concept of Gradual Action Revisited. In: Berlin Keys to the Sociology of Technology, edited by Cornelius Schubert and Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, pp. 37–68. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo, Kevin Wiggert, Martin Meister, and Tim Clausnitzer. 2023. The Self-Perpetuation of the Promise of Care Robots. How Doubtful Application Scenarios Become Promising. In: Work Organisation, Labour & Globalization 17(1): 117–35.
Schulz-Schaeffer, Ingo. 2021. Affordance, Role, and Script as Complementary Concepts of Artefact-User Interaction, Illustrated by the Example of an Egg Separator. In: Science & Technology Studies 34(4): 74–93.
