| 1. |
- Ekerholm, Helena, 1981-
(författare)
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Bränsle för den moderna nationen : Etanol och gengas i Sverige under mellankrigstiden och andra världskriget
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigate Swedish policy-making concerning promotion of wood gas and ethanol distilled from fermented sulphite lye as domestic fuel alternatives in the Interwar years and World War II. With a departure point in the theories of social constructions of technology (SCOT), the sociology of expectations and Thomas P. Hughe’s socio-technical systems I analyse the measures that were undertaken in these efforts, the arguments put forward for and against the ethanol and wood gas projects and how the efforts turned out. I also investigate how the interpretations of ethanol and wood gas as fuel alternatives changed from the Interwar period on through World War II and what consequences this had for ethanol and wood gas policy immediately after World War II. Source material includes Parliament and Government records, cabinet meeting files, governmental commissions, authority archives, technical evaluations and handbooks and scientific medical publications.Ethanol and wood gas were promoted from a nationalist vantage point. The Interwar debate was imbued with visions of national techno-scientific prowess in a perceived ongoing global contest for technological and scientific advancement, of which achieving autarky, self-sufficiency on important raw materials and industrial products, was an ideal for some. Ethanol and wood gas were also promoted as means for creating a lucrative new market for the forestry industry, which also held a prominent position in nationalist visions of technology. Expectations of a new war also motivated the promotion of ethanol and wood gas as national fuels. Measures for promotion included tax exemptions, sales guarantees and legislation for mandatory ethanol purchase for all petrol importing companies and gasifier loan funds. Political conflicts mainly centred around the principles of free trade as opposed to protectionism, proper use of tax funds and whether the potentials of the fuel alternatives were rhetorically exaggerated. During World War II ethanol and wood gas in particular served as important petrol surrogates. The increased wood gas use led to negative interpretations of wood gas a fuel alternative due to its hazardous, dirty and time-consuming maintenance and the changed driving behaviour it required from its users compared to petrol or ethanol fuelled automobiles. Compared to wood gas, ethanol was appreciated for its socio-technical similarities to petrol, but production was after the war deemed difficult to maintain during wartime. Whereas wood gas remained an important stand-by surrogate during the cold war, Swedish politicians lost interest in ethanol of the kind that was promoted in the Interwar years.
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| 2. |
- Dussauge, Isabelle, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Precursors of the IT Nation : Computer use and control in swedish society, 1955–1985
- 2011
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Ingår i: 3rd IFIP WG 9.7 Conference on History of Nordic Computing, HiNC 2010. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag New York. - 9783642233142 - 9783642233159 - 9783642270192 ; , s. 425-432, s. 425-432
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper is a presentation of a research project that aims at writing the history of computing in Sweden in the mainframe age from a user perspective. Rather than beginning with the history of hardware, this project takes as its point of departure the way in which actors in different sectors of society used computer technology in order to achieve a higher degree of control over crucial processes, whether through electronic data processing systems, process control or technical/scientific computation.
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| 3. |
- Lundin, Per, 1971-
(författare)
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Bilsamhället : Ideologi, expertis och regelskapande i efterkrigstidens Sverige
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the 1950s the number of cars in Sweden increased almost fivefold and the country attained the highest level of car ownership per capita in Europe. The rise and establishment of mass motoring was dramatically illustrated by the violent encounter between the car and the city. Despite the fact that congestion as well as road accidents were well-known, everyday occurrences, they reached previously unimagined heights through the growth of mass motoring. In this doctoral thesis Per Lundin focuses on the emergence of a group of planning experts as the key advocates of the idea of the “car society” as the solution to these problems. By fully adapting society to the car it would be possible to eliminate congestion and road accidents, thus affirming the continuing advance of the car. This ideal, which originated in the United States, became the goal and the dream of these experts.The general question addressed by Lundin is to what extent the actions and the ideologies of the experts interacted with the advent of mass motoring and the extensive urban building during the post-war period. In order to answer this question Lundin analyzes, firstly how the planning experts laid claim to the problems of congestion and road accidents, thereby restating them as exclusive planning problems, secondly how guidelines and standards for a car-conscious planning of cities and communities were developed based on the formulation of this problem and thirdly how, and to what extent, the guidelines and standards concerned were implemented in the town planning process.In the thesis Lundin argues that the dreams about a post-war Swedish society entirely adapted to the car by and large were realized. One important explanation of the fact that the physical adaptation of cities and societies to the car could proceed so quickly, on such a large scale and in similar forms all over the country, is found in the planning rules developed by the experts. The rules were the embodiment of the untroubled and unreflecting dreams nourished by the planning experts of the 1950s and the 1960s. Through the rules these ideological conceptions were reinforced and disseminated in a manner almost unable to stop. As the rules quickly were integrated with the planning instruments of administrative bodies locally, regionally and nationally, they set the tone for the extensive urban renewal of the following decades.
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| 4. |
- Öhman, May-Britt, 1966-
(författare)
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Taming exotic beauties : Swedish hydropower constructions in Tanzania in the era of development assistance, 1960s-1990s
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study analyses the history of a large hydroelectric scheme – the Great Ruaha power project in Tanzania. The objective is to establish why and how this specific scheme came about, and as part of this to identify the key actors involved in the decision-making process, including the ideological contexts within which they acted. Although the Tanzanian actors and the World Bank (IBRD) are discussed, main focus is on the Swedish actors on project level.Kidatu, the first phase of the Great Ruaha power project (constructed between1970-1975), became the first large-scale hydropower station in Tanzania. As such, it paved the way for Tanzanian entrance into the Big Dam Era and significant changes within the Tanzanian landscape. As well as the dry river bed at Kidatu, and the small reservoir that precedes it, the Great Ruaha power project also involved the creation of a huge artificial lake, the Mtera reservoir. The Kidatu hydropower station was the first large undertaking within Swedish bilateral aid, and implied the takeover of control of hydropower construction in Tanzania by Swedish enterprises, replacing the enterprises of the former colonial power. A hydropower plant is a complex technoscientific artefact. The construction of a hydropower plant is preceded by a large number of technological choices, scientific prestudies and estimations of costs and revenues. A hydropower plant is also a complex social creation, and is as such filled with social actors engaged in conflicts, compromises and power structures. The decision to construct Kidatu hydropower station was a result of negotiations and activities within what is called “development assistance”. This brings in yet another dimension, the political one, involving export and import of technology, foreign capital, and foreign influence in decision-making processes, as well as ideas about how to bring development and progress to a people supposed to be living in “poverty and misery”. The study is divided into three main parts. The first part analyses the context of Swedish development assistance in the support to the construction of hydropower plants. This part discusses Swedish state-supported hydropower exploitation of indigenous people’s territory within Sweden’s borders in the 20th century and the background of Swedish development assistance, from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The second part analyses the event of Swedish development assistance entering Tanzania and the Great Ruaha power project, with the main focus being on the period 1965 – 1970. The third part is an analysis of the technoscientific basis for the decisions taken to implement the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme. Main focus is on the period 1969-1974, discussed against the backdrop of precolonial and colonial studies. While focus is on the 1960s and 1970s, in both part two and three events in the 1980s and 1990s are discussed. The study shows that although Sweden was not a colonial power in Tanzania, colonial imagery, and relations to the colonial era, as well as Sweden’s background of internal colonialisation, exerted an influence on the decision-making process and the actors involved in the Great Ruaha power project.The study is mainly based on archival sources, complemented with oral sources from Tanzania and Sweden. Recognizing the complexity of large-scale hydropower and the attempts to control watercourses that large scale hydropower necessitates, in the specific context of decolonisation and development assistance that the decision-making process behind the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme reveals, the analysis of the actors involved is based on feminist and postcolonial perspectives.
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| 5. |
- Dussauge, Isabelle, 1978-
(författare)
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Technomedical Visions : Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 1980s Sweden
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The medical imaging technology called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) stems from a blind measurement technology which was further developed in research and practice to enable seeing into the inner body. Vision with MRI was open-ended, and it was developed and tamed in a context of fragmented medical perspectives on the body and on technology. "Technomedical Visions" addresses the formation of MRI’s specific visualities in the first decade of its introduction in Sweden. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how vision with MRI has been constructed in practice in relation to existing ways of knowing the body within medicine. Dussauge investigates first the early decisions that led to a national evaluation of MRI technology in the mid-1980s in Sweden. Then she addresses the shaping of MRI’s quantitative visuality in the practices of radiology, psychiatry and the laboratory, with focus on microhistories at St. Göran’s Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, Uppsala University Hospital, and Lund University. Dussauge shows that whereas authorities’ early decisions momentarily defined MRI as a radiological tool for immediate clinical use and evaluation, a crucial part of MRI’s introduction was the work conducted by MRI-users. These researchers from a range of scientific and medical disciplines performed, over time, a multitude of shapings of MRI’s vision. This studies shows how MRI was made congruent with existing technomedical gazes. The novel MRI gaze was made intelligible within cross-referential networks, and researchers reproduced technomedicine’s existing gazes both in the production, optimization and interpretation of MRI representations. Technomedical time frames, epistemologies and definitions of the normal and the pathological were reproduced and sometimes, re-cast, in the shaping of MRI in practice. This study also demonstrates that anatomy recurrently worked as an underlying frame for the exploration and production of MRI visions. Anatomy’s material visuality provided a site for the production of novel facts at the intersection of existing gazes. Through the practices of shaping MRI gazes, anatomy was systematically remediated, reproduced and reconfigured.
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| 6. |
- Cano-Viktorsson, Carlos, 1977-
(författare)
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From Vision to Transition : Exploring the Potential for Public Information Services to Facilitate Sustainable Urban Transport
- 2014
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Background: Policy initiatives to promote sustainable travel through the use of Internet based public information systems have increased during the last decade. Stockholm, in being one of the first cities in Europe to implement an Internet based service for facilitating sustainable travel is believed to be a good candidate for an analysis of key issues for developing sustainable travel planning services to the public.Aim: This thesis investigates the past development of two Stockholm based public information systems and their services in order to draw lessons on how to better provide for a public information service geared towards facilitating environmentally sustainable travel planning through information and communications technology. The overall goal of the thesis is to contribute to an understanding on how to better design and manage current and future attempts at facilitating sustainable travel planning services based on historical case studies.Approach: The thesis draws ideas from the concept of organizational responsiveness – an organization’s ability to listen, understand and respond to demands put to it by its internal and external stakeholders – in order to depict how well or not the two public information systems and their owners have adapted to established norms and values of their surroundings.Results: Overall, the findings from the historical case studies suggest that organizations attempting to provide sustainable travel planning to the public need to design and manage their systems in such a way that it responds to shifting demands on how to provide for information. Implementing and embedding new technologies involves complex processes of change both at the micro level – for users and practitioners of the service – and at the meso level for the involved public service organizations themselves. This condition requires a contextualist framework to analyze and understand organizational, contextual and cultural issues involved in the adoption of new technologies and procedures.Conclusions: The thesis concludes with a discussion on how the findings from the historical case studies may provide lessons for both current and future attempts at providing public information systems geared towards facilitating environmentally sustainable travel planning to the public. Historical examples and issues concerning collective intelligence and peer to peer based forms of designing, producing and supervising public information services identified throughout the study are looked upon and discussed in terms of their possible role in increasing the potential for public information services to facilitate sustainable urban transport.
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| 7. |
- Emanuel, Martin, 1977-
(författare)
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Trafikslag på undantag : Cykeltrafiken i Stockholm 1930-1980
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The modal share of bicycle traffic in Stockholm increased from 20 per cent to over 30 per cent during the 1930s, and reached staggering levels during World War Two – peaking at over 70 per cent. Soon after the war, however, the share declined rapidly. In 1950, 1960 and 1970, bicycle traffic accounted for about 30 per cent, then 3 per cent and then less than 1 per cent, respectively, of the total amount of traffic. How should these rapid changes be understood? Why did bicycle use increase before World War Two, even though the bicycle was hardly a carrier of modernity, and then decline so rapidly during the post-war period?This thesis analyses the changing conditions for bicycling in Stockholm in the period 1930–1980. Comparisons with Copenhagen lend contrast and depth to the Stockholm case. The thesis stresses the importance of ideology and power in the management and planning of urban traffic. The purpose is to examine which actors had an influence on urban traffic and how, on the basis of their conceptions of the bicycle, bicyclists and bicycle traffic, those actors shaped the conditions for bicycling. Although the yearning for automobility and “modern” transit alternatives should not be disregarded as important to the rapid decline of bicycling in post-war Stockholm, it is argued that bicycle traffic was marginalised by traffic engineers and urban planners during the modernisation of the city.Given the rapid growth of bicycle traffic before, during and just after the Second World War, bicyclists were taken into consideration by the police, municipal engineers and the bicycle lobby, primarily through short-term measures. In the post-war period, in a context of a booming economy and the increasingly important position of planning, urban and traffic planners seized the initiative in urban traffic matters. Working within a longer time frame and with more extensive encroachments on the built environment to cope with the “demands” of urban traffic, the bicycle was completely absent in their future visions. Their interpretations of the bicycle as an unsafe, local and primarily recreational mode of transportation were materialised in the urban infrastructure, which led to worse conditions for bicyclists and reinforced the conversion to other modes of transport. By promoting certain uses and deterring others – such as carving out a small sphere for bicycle traffic in the suburbs, while making longer journeys to and from the inner city difficult by bicycle – planning and infrastructure provision shaped future traffic and travel practices.From the late 1960s these interpretations were increasingly complemented by more positive ones of the bicycle as a fast, flexible and clean means of transportation. The bicycle lobby and later local politicians pushed for an increased consideration of bicyclists, eventually leading up to the first bicycle plan for Stockholm in 1978. The early bicycle “renaissance” of the 1970s was curbed in the 1980s, however, due to economic recovery as well as design choices feeding the interpretation of bicyclists as a safety problem.
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| 8. |
- Nilsson, David, 1968-
(författare)
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Water for a few : a history of urban water and sanitation in East Africa
- 2006
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate thesis describes and analyses the modern history of the socio-technical systems for urban water supply and sanitation in East Africa with focus on Uganda and Kenya. The key objective of the thesis is to evaluate to what extent the historic processes frame and influence the water and sanitation services sectors in these countries today. The theoretical approach combines the Large Technical Systems approach from the discipline of History of Technology with New Institutional Economics. Throughout, urban water and sanitation service systems are regarded as socio-technical systems, where institutions, organisation and technology all interact. The thesis consists of three separate articles and a synthesis in the form of a framework narrative. The first article provides a discussion of the theoretical framework with special focus on the application of Public Goods theory to urban water and sanitation. The second article describes the establishment of the large-scale systems for water supply and sanitation in Kampala, Uganda in the period 1920-1950. The third article focuses on the politics of urban water supply in Kenya with emphasis on the period 1900-1990.The main findings in this thesis are that the socio-technical systems for urban water and sanitation evolve over long periods of time and are associated with inertia that makes these systems change slowly. The systems were established in the colonial period to mainly respond to the needs and preferences of a wealthy minority and a technological paradigm evolved based on capital-intensive and large-scale technology. Attempts to expand services to all citizens in the post-colonial period under this paradigm were not sustainable due to changes in the social, political and economic environment while incentives for technological change were largely absent. History thus frames decisions in the public sphere even today, through technological and institutional inertia. Knowing the history of these socio-technical systems is therefore important, in order to understand key sector constraints, and for developing more sustainable service provision.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Åberg, Anna, 1978-
(författare)
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A Gap in the Grid : Attempts to introduce natural gas in Sweden 1967-1991
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis follows the process of introducing natural gas in Sweden and the construction of a Northern European gas grid from 1967 to 1991. Natural gas is a relatively unnoticed fuel in Sweden today, but this relative anonymity stands in contrast to an extensive historical activity that has taken place behind the scenes of Swedish energy policy. The single pipeline constructed between Denmark and Sweden in the early 1980s was both preceded and followed by many other attempts to construct a larger natural gas pipeline in the region made in the last 50 years. Åberg traces these attempts while discussing the complex and messy process of constructing and managing a transnational energy infrastructure.Åberg follows actors in Sweden and other countries in their attempts to negotiate and construct a natural gas infrastructure, and puts this process into a national as well as transnational context. The perceived risks and opportunities surrounding natural gas are examined, together with factors that have influenced the development of natural gas in a broader sense. By seeing the changing and messy natural gas projects as arenas where different actors construct and negotiate risks and opportunities, as well as contexualize the projects, Åberg shows how the natural gas sector in Sweden has evolved and taken shape.The study shows that natural gas in Sweden has suffered from unstable actor coalitions on different levels, a difficult market situation, and a changeful political context, especially with regard to energy policy. The import status of the fuel and the consequential transnationality of the natural gas infrastructure have also made the process of constructing a pipeline more complex. However, natural gas was introduced in Sweden, showing that when a strong enough actor coalition agreed that there was enough reason to warrant a natural gas introduction and was ready to join this endeavor, a connection could be achieved. This puts into question to what degree general explanations in terms of finance and policy drive energy decisions, and makes a case for showing how these explanations are adapted into their social and historical contexts in sometimes surprising ways.
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