A Framework for Strategic Network Design Assessment, Decision Making, and Moral Imagination

Abstract

This article presents a framework for practitioners who may be interested in maintaining adaptive stability of sociotechnical networks. The framework is developed from assembling several concepts that are useful for assessing and for drawing on appropriate moral reasoning strategies as sociotechnical networks are designed, constructed, and adapted. One such strategy involves the ability to assess degrees of perspective sharing and trading relationships in networks using moral imagination. The article uses the case of the design of an environmentally sustainable fabric to illustrate these strategic concepts. The framework also draws on other examples of cases in which sociotechnical networks have become destabilized to illustrate instances in which the framework may have been useful for decreasing a tendency for destabilization.