Sociotechnical Imaginaries Analysis
Also known as: Sociotechnical imaginary analysis, Imaginaries of science and technology, Visions of desirable futures analysis
Sociotechnical imaginaries analysis studies the collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures that societies attach to science and technology. Introduced by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim in their 2009 comparison of nuclear power in the United States and South Korea, the concept treats imaginaries as more than rhetoric: they are co-produced with the material and political order, shaping how technologies are designed, governed, and lived. The method reconstructs these visions from public discourse, traces how they become embedded in institutions and policy, and compares how the same technology animates different imaginaries across nations or eras.
Key highlights
- Links culture, politics, and technology by showing how shared visions of the future are co-produced with material order.
- Powerful for comparative analysis, explaining why similar technologies are governed differently across nations and eras.
- Captures the normative and affective dimensions of technology—hopes, fears, and notions of the good life—that other methods miss.
- Connects discourse to durable institutional outcomes, avoiding the reduction of imaginaries to mere talk.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use sociotechnical imaginaries analysis when you want to understand how collective visions of the future shape, and are shaped by, the development and governance of science and technology—especially in cross-national or historical comparison. It suits questions about why similar technologies are governed differently across societies, how states and institutions justify large technological programmes, and how public futures are co-produced with material and political order. The method assumes that imaginaries are durable, collective, and traceable in public discourse and institutions, and that interpretation can recover their normative content. It is less appropriate for fine-grained studies of individual cognition, for purely technical performance questions, or when no rich public discourse or institutional record exists to analyse.
Strengths & limitations
- Links culture, politics, and technology by showing how shared visions of the future are co-produced with material order.
- Powerful for comparative analysis, explaining why similar technologies are governed differently across nations and eras.
- Captures the normative and affective dimensions of technology—hopes, fears, and notions of the good life—that other methods miss.
- Connects discourse to durable institutional outcomes, avoiding the reduction of imaginaries to mere talk.
- Reconstructing a 'collective' imaginary risks overstating coherence and homogeneity within heterogeneous publics.
- The interpretive identification of visions depends on the analyst's reading of necessarily selective corpora.
- It can be difficult to establish the causal weight of an imaginary relative to interests, resources, and contingency.
- The concept's breadth invites loose application, with 'imaginary' stretched to cover any vision or narrative.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How is a sociotechnical imaginary different from a discourse or a narrative?
A sociotechnical imaginary is more specific and more consequential than a generic discourse: it is a collectively held, institutionally stabilised vision of a desirable future attainable through science and technology, and it is co-produced with material and political order. Where a narrative may be ephemeral or individual, an imaginary endures, is publicly performed, and becomes embedded in laws, funding, and infrastructures. The emphasis on institutional embedding and co-production distinguishes it from analysis of discourse alone.
Why is comparison so central to the method?
Comparison—across nations, periods, or groups confronting similar technologies—reveals that imaginaries are contingent rather than dictated by the technology itself. Jasanoff and Kim's contrast of US and South Korean nuclear programmes showed how the same artefact supported a logic of containment in one society and of aspiration in another. By showing that things could have been imagined otherwise, comparison denaturalises each vision and exposes the work of co-production.
Does an imaginary have to be held by an entire nation?
Not necessarily. The original 2009 study took the nation as its unit, but the 2015 Dreamscapes volume explicitly broadened the scope to imaginaries held by organisations, professions, social movements, and transnational communities. What matters is that the vision is collectively held, durable, and institutionally performed rather than the mere preference of an individual. The relevant collective is specified empirically as part of defining the object of study.
Sources
- 1.Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119-146.
- 2.Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 9780226276359
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Sociotechnical Imaginaries Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/science-technology-studies/sociotechnical-imaginaries-analysis