Editorial
The Space Between Efficiency and Experience
- 1 Syracuse University, USA
Abstract
Technical systems are routinely evaluated on one set of measures and experienced on another. A service platform that resolves enquiries faster may also leave the people it serves feeling less heard, and the two findings can be true at once without either being an error. This editorial introduces Sociotechnical Inquiry, a peer-reviewed open access journal for research on the gap between how systems are measured and how they are lived. It argues that the gap is not a measurement problem to be designed away but a substantive finding that disciplinary venues are poorly equipped to publish, because the evidence for it is typically split across methods that rarely appear in the same article. It sets out the journal’s scope, its review process, and its commitment to publishing work in which the quantitative and the qualitative disagree.
Keywords
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author is the founding editor of Sociotechnical Inquiry. This editorial was not peer reviewed.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Copyright and licence
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Journal of Sociotechnical Inquiry. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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