{"title":"Books by Donald MacKenzie","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780335199136","title":"The Social Shaping of Technology","description":"Reviews of the 1st Edition:\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"....This book is a welcome addition to the sociology of technology, a field whose importance is increasingly recognised.\" \u003c\/i\u003e-  Sociology\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"....sets a remarkably high standard in breadth of coverage, in scholarship, and in readability and can be recommended to the general reader and to the specialist alike.\"\u003c\/i\u003e  -   Science and Society\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"....This remarkably readable and well-edited anthology focuses, in a wide variety of concrete examples, not on the impacts of technologies on societies but in the reverse: how different social contexts shaped the emergence of particular technologies.\"\u003c\/i\u003e  -   Technology and Culture\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e \u003cli\u003e How does social context affect the development of technology? \u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat is the relationship between technology and gender\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIs production technology shaped by efficiency or by social control?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003eTechnological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic - something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production; domestic and reproductive technology; and military technology.\u003cp\u003eThe book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise - though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all - the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology and society. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56286538596725,"sku":"9780335199136","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780335199136_f7f29d07-4ac0-4152-a80c-545aed9d7b85.jpg?v=1786013758"},{"product_id":"9780691217789","title":"Trading at the Speed of Light – How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets","description":"A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial marketsIn today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global trading, but has also created an unrelenting race for speed, leading to a systematic, subterranean battle among HFT algorithms.   In HFT, time is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and in a nanosecond the fastest possible signal—light in a vacuum—can travel only thirty centimeters, or roughly a foot. That makes HFT exquisitely sensitive to the length and transmission capacity of the cables connecting computer servers to the exchanges’ systems and to the location of the microwave towers that carry signals between computer datacenters. Drawing from more than 300 interviews with high-frequency traders, the people who supply them with technological and communication capabilities, exchange staff, regulators, and many others, MacKenzie reveals the extraordinary efforts expended to speed up every aspect of trading. He looks at how in some markets big banks have fought off the challenge from HFT firms, and how exchanges sometimes engineer technical systems to favor certain types of algorithms over others.   Focusing on the material, political, and economic characteristics of high-frequency trading, Trading at the Speed of Light offers a unique glimpse into its influence on global finance and where it could lead us in the future.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294782304629,"sku":"9780691217789","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780691217789_d50926af-3ac3-4b11-8438-8b678bbd861d.jpg?v=1786014574"},{"product_id":"9781509568642","title":"Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics","description":"Dozens of times daily, access to your screen is auctioned to advertisers, sometimes by your own phone or laptop without your knowledge. In the background are huge, electricity-hungry, carbon-emitting systems that conduct roughly two trillion near-instantaneous, automated auctions every day.   This book takes you into the heart of this mysterious world. It describes how Google built its astonishing global system of warehouse-scale computing and turned that system into an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar, money-earning machine, and how Facebook – almost by accident – also became an advertising leviathan. It examines the tensions between those giants and the smaller firms that populate digital advertising’s open marketplace. Those tensions, as well as conflicts over user privacy, give rise to a new kind of politics that plays out in material systems in the form of crucial clashes between different ways of designing those systems. Building on work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of market studies, MacKenzie and Caliskan examine digital advertising’s material politics, its giant megamachines, and the foundations of platform power.   Inside Digital Advertising lays bare the processes that underpin today’s global advertising industry. It will be a key book for students and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and business studies, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our everyday digital world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419856744821,"sku":"9781509568642","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509568642_aab79639-fc35-4720-adfc-d7b2117db27e.jpg?v=1786022396"},{"product_id":"9781509568635","title":"Inside Digital Advertising","description":"Dozens of times daily, access to your screen is auctioned to advertisers, sometimes by your own phone or laptop without your knowledge. In the background are huge, electricity-hungry, carbon-emitting systems that conduct roughly two trillion near-instantaneous, automated auctions every day.   This book takes you into the heart of this mysterious world. It describes how Google built its astonishing global system of warehouse-scale computing and turned that system into an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar, money-earning machine, and how Facebook – almost by accident – also became an advertising leviathan. It examines the tensions between those giants and the smaller firms that populate digital advertising’s open marketplace. Those tensions, as well as conflicts over user privacy, give rise to a new kind of politics that plays out in material systems in the form of crucial clashes between different ways of designing those systems. Building on work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of market studies, MacKenzie and Caliskan examine digital advertising’s material politics, its giant megamachines, and the foundations of platform power.   Inside Digital Advertising lays bare the processes that underpin today’s global advertising industry. It will be a key book for students and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and business studies, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our everyday digital world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420422058357,"sku":"9781509568635","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509568635_11bfaada-f124-44db-aef0-8892e2cf8dd6.jpg?v=1786022396"},{"product_id":"economization","title":"Economization","description":"How should we understand economies in a moment of profound social, technological, and ecological disruption? For more than a century, three perspectives have dominated. Neoclassical economics treats the economy as a system governed by its own laws; Marxism, as a mode of production dominated by class; much of economic sociology, as a domain embedded in society. Despite their rivalries, all three assume that “the economy” simply exists, out there waiting to be explained.   Economization breaks with this assumption and offers a bold alternative. Instead of asking what the economy is, Michel Callon, Koray Caliskan, and Donald MacKenzie ask how things become economic in the first place. Nothing is economic by nature—not even markets. Humans are not the only agents that shape economic life: computer programs, oceans, sciences, and even viruses take part in creating value and exchange. Through analyses of markets and digital platforms, this book presents a new way to understand contemporary economies, showing how market exchange relates to gift and barter. Each chapter ends with a practical guide to help readers apply this approach.   Finally, Economization argues that we must remake our economies to keep the Earth habitable. Moving beyond greening markets and ecological economics, it identifies an emerging form—ecologization—that reorients economic life around care, interdependence, and the transport of value across human and nonhuman worlds. Social scientists have long helped make economies; the point now is to help ecologize them.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682583257461,"sku":"9780231215411","price":28.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57524690911605,"sku":"9780231215404","price":109.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-donald-mackenzie.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}