That's a great example, thanks for bringing that in. I was more thinking of community management since I'd just been skimming "Building Web Reputation Systems" again and its authors have quite a bit to say about the entanglement of social and technical problems. But like you say, there are a lot of domains where technical problems are entangled with social ones - it's just that those domains are software engineering as a practical discipline, not computer science as a branch of math. My favorite examples are time zones, Unicode, and country names/boundaries.

How many time zones are there in the world? How many will there be next year? Your NTP server needs to know.

How will you store humans' names that can't be expressed with the BMP alone? The iCloud servers need to know.

Is Taiwan a country? How about Kurdistan? Where are the borders of India? Google Maps needs to know.

There is plenty of software that won't have to deal with these problems ... but these problems can be huge headaches, and part of that is because of their nature as both social and technical problems.