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In 2019 over 2 trillion was the global cost of cybersecurity crime (Morgan, 2016). In the U.S. and U.K., mistakes and poor decision making on the part of employees account for up to 90% of the information security breaches (Maglaras, He, Janicke, & Evans, 2016). Humans are notably the weakest link in security and risk management because organizations struggle to understand and mitigate behavioral-based risk in information security (Alavi, Islam, & Mouratidis, 2016; Proctor & Chen, 2015). Human factors study social interaction with information systems, networks, and practices in an information security environment (Alavi, Islam, & Mouratidis, 2016). The increase in cyber-attacks, the need to protect critical organizational data, and demand for organizations to leverage data for competitive advantage have pushed a necessity to explore the impact of technology in new ways and from new perspectives.
According to Nobles (2018), cybersecurity, computer science, and information technology certification and training programs have failed to implement program content to address organizational behavioral factors, change management perspectives, and human factors in cybersecurity. This incongruence can create a developmental new domain of technical sociology. Technical sociology provides a diagnostic and investigative context for comprehending the social frameworks around technological human interaction, technology adoption, technological resistance, the overuse of technology, the misuse of technology, change management, and human error around the use of technology. This new domain draws from the traditional sociological matters and human-computer interaction issues around employee groups, organizations, and workers that manage and use technology. This domain is concerned with sociological research and its implications for improving technology management's professional practice through a lens of interconnected social systems, organizational systems, and individual systems.
To understand and explore the nature of technology and its hazards requires an understanding that social science theory attempts to explore social dynamics and its basic set of relations to explain how distinct phenomena function (Burton, 2019; Burton, 2017). Therefore, social science theorizing or formulation and modifications of those interpretative explanations is an ongoing process of observing and analyzing applied scientific knowledge and its intersection with everyday interaction (Newman, 2018). Sociology theory is the inquiry of interpersonal relationships in ways that attempts to explain people's relation to their social, organizational, and individual systems (Newman, 2018). Whether employees are experiencing technology, technological innovations, technological hazards, they encounter a set of interpretive assumptions. These assumptions are defined within the context of a particular organizational cultural setting, which accounts for what occurs and how it occurs (Burton, 2019). Thus, the sociology theory's comprehension is neither strictly abstract nor distinctly practical; it’s an intersection of both (Newman, 2018).
Furthermore, the foundation or emergence of technical sociology is a process by which individuals explain and interpret their relationship to various aspects of technology in their physical and social environments. Thus, comprehending the value of technical sociology as an area for needed research and exploration requires understanding the phenomenon manifested through the relationships in various societal and organizational institutions.