Tecnologia Social : A South American View of the Regulatory Relationship between Technology and Society

The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the concept of tecnologia social, social technology in English, from a sociomaterial perspective. In my investigation of South American writings on social innovation, I found a vast and rich literature describing, analysing and theorizing around grassroots social innovations from the perspective of the underlying arrangements among people, artefacts and practices that brings an interesting view to the relationship between technology and society. The term tecnologia social is applied to those sociomaterial arrangements or assemblages whose goal is to promote social transformation. I am talking about a long tradition that seems to have started with Gandhi in India around the beginning of the twentieth century, had numerous but ephemeral trajectories in Europe and North America, and ended by reaching the minds of South American researchers and practitioners of social innovation by the 1960s. There, it has been transformed, blended and remixed, and its impacts have been very prolific.