[Sci-tech-public] special event: Wajcman brown bag

[Rosalind H. Williams]

This is a preliminary notice to let you know that Judy Wajcman (of the 
Australian National University) will be giving a brown bag lunch talk at 
STS on January 25, 2006. The event will be held in E51 (exact location and 
title yet to be announced).

Wajcman has long-standing research interests in the social studies of 
technology, employment relations and organizational analysis. Her first 
book, Women in Control: Dilemmas of a Workers' Co-operative (1983), 
explored the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and gender 
divisions in the home and workplace.

During the early 1980s at the University of Edinburgh she further developed 
her approach to the analysis of technology and social change in the book 
The Social Shaping of Technology (with Donald MacKenzie, 1985). While at 
the University of New South Wales, she continued this theme with a major 
empirical research project on the future of work, examining the employment 
implications of new information technology. This research resulted in a 
number of articles on the implications for economic and domestic change of 
electronic homework, or telework.

Another field of expertise is gender theory. As a graduate student at 
Cambridge University, together with other faculty and postgraduates, 
Wajcman established the first women's studies program in the UK. A book 
based on the course was published as Women in Society: Interdisciplinary 
Essays (1981). She is probably best known internationally for her analysis 
of the gendered nature of technology in Feminism Confronts Technology 
(1991). Her more recent book TechnoFeminism (2004) deals with the 
relationship between the Internet, cyberspace, humans and machines, and 
biotechnology. It critically examines theories about the post-industrial, 
network society and new economy, and how technological risk has become a 
central public concern.

During an appointment as Principal Research Fellow at Warwick Business 
School,  Wajcman conducted a major research project on senior management, 
the restructuring of organizations and changing workplace culture. The book 
based on the research, Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate 
Management (1998), was the first British study to investigate the gender 
relations of senior management in a post-equal opportunities world. Her 
most recent book, Working Life in Capitalist Organizations (co-authored 
with Paul Edwards 2005), consolidates her research on the sociology of work 
and employment. A major theme is the effect of technological change on the 
workplace, identity and personal life.

Wajcman has a number of current research projects including one with 
Michael Bittman on the impact of information and communication technologies 
on the management of time, examining such themes as people's experience of 
time pressure and the quality of domestic life.  She is also developing a 
large project on the impact of mobile phones on work/life balance, in 
conjunction with the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association. 
Wajcman is one of the editors for a New Handbook of Science and Technology 
Studies to be published by MIT Press in 2007. This is the official handbook 
for the Society of the Social Studies of Science (4S).

The presence of this distinguished scholar should be of interest to many in 
the larger sts community, so please mark this date on your calendars now.

Rosalind Williams


---------------------------------------
Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing
Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
President, Society for the History of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E51-185
Cambridge, MA 02139

phone: (617) 253-4062
FAX: (617) 258-8118

email: rhwill at mit.edu 
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