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Technology, Social Construction of
Technology, Social Construction of Wiebe E Bijker, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) is one approach among several constructivist ways of studying science and technology that emerged in the 1980s. SCOT can be used to denote two different things. First, it is a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. And second, it is a theory about the relation between society and technology. This article sketches the genealogy of the social construction of technology by distinguishing mild and radical versions. Within the radical versions, broad and narrow forms are identified; the narrow one is denoted by the acronym ‘SCOT.’ Historically, the development of SCOT is closely linked to the sociology of scientific knowledge and to the science, technology, and society movement in the 1970s. An important starting point was to criticize technological determinism. In the 1980s and 1990s, it developed primarily as an academic enterprise, but then also found application in the policy domain, in innovation management, and in discussions about new forms of democracy.
Constructivist Studies of Science and Technology The social construction of technology (SCOT) is one approach among several constructivist ways of studying science and technology that emerged in the 1980s. Here, ‘constructivist’ means a scholarly orientation that treats the truth of scientific facts and the working of technical artifacts as accomplishments – as being constructed – rather than as intrinsic properties of those facts and machines. The term ‘social construction of technology’ can be used to denote two different things. First, it refers to a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. Second, it signifies a theory about the development of technology. Historically, the development of SCOT is closely linked to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and to the science, technology, and society (STS – an acronym later used as much for science and technology studies) movement in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, it developed primarily as an academic enterprise, but then also found application in the policy domain, in innovation management, and in discussions about new forms of democracy. The phrase ‘social construction’ was first used by Berger and Luckmann (1966) in their Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Building on the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and social theory, and particularly on the work of Alfred Schutz, they argue that social reality is constructed through human actions and that the processes through which it is constructed should be the object of the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann focus on the social construction of ordinary knowledge of the sort that we use to make our way in a particular society. They are concerned with the reality of social institutions and their focus is on society at large, rather than on natural reality and the subcultures, such as fields of science and technology, that contend with it. Nevertheless, provocative lines of scholarship developed around such themes as the social construction of mental illness, deviance, gender, law, and class. In the 1970s, the theme of social construction was applied to scientific facts (Latour and Woolgar, 1986[1979]), and in the 1980s
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developed for an approach to artifacts (Bijker et al., 2012 [1987]). Constructivist studies of science and technology come in a wide variety of forms, both mild and radical (Sismondo, 1993). The mild versions merely stress the importance of including the social context when describing the development of science and technology. Examples in the history of technology include Constant’s (1980) account of the turbojet revolution and Nye’s (1998) studies of the electrification of America. The radical versions argue that the content of science and technology is socially constructed. In other words, the radical claim is that the truth of scientific statements and the technical working of machines are not derived from nature alone, but are constituted in social processes. Radical constructivist studies of science and technology share the same background and have similar aims, and to an extent studies in both areas have been carried out by the same authors. The remainder of this article will focus on technology studies and more precisely on the radical versions of SCOT.
The Origin and Development of the Social Construction of Technology SCOT grew out of the combination of three distinct bodies of work: the STS movement, SSK, and the history of technology. The first started in the 1970s, mainly in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Often led by science and engineering faculty members, its goal was to enrich the curricula of both universities and secondary schools by studying issues such as scientists’ social responsibilities, the risks of nuclear energy, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and environmental pollution. The movement was quite successful, especially in science and engineering schools and faculties, and some of the STS courses were incorporated into degree requirements. SSK emerged in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom on the basis of work in the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science. The central
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methodological tenets of the ‘strong program’ (especially its symmetry principle) seemed equally applicable to technology. The symmetry principle called for a similar explanatory approach to scientific knowledge, regardless of whether it was now held to be true or false; in other words, sociological interests and group processes would be used to explain the development and acceptance of ‘true’ as well as ‘false’ knowledge. In studying technology, this should mean that working and nonworking machines were to be analyzed symmetrically and in the same terms. In the history of technology, especially in the United States, an increasing number of scholars began to raise more theoretical and sociologically inspired questions (Constant, 1980; Hughes, 1983; Cowan, 1983). Path-breaking advocacy for this body of work in the history of technology was provided by the reader edited by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999[1985]). Citing the title of this volume, the phrase ‘social shaping of technology’ is often used to denote a broader area of research, including work in industrial sociology, technology policy, and the economics of technical change. Researchers from these three traditions convened an international workshop in 1984 in the Netherlands. The subsequent volume – Social Construction of Technological Systems – from that workshop, edited by an STSer, a historian of technology, and a sociologist of scientific knowledge, has been heralded as the starting point of SCOT. On the occasion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s 150th anniversary, this volume was included in the list of 30 most influential titles ever published by MIT Press, and it was republished in an anniversary edition 25 years later, with a new preface reviewing the development of the field since 1987 (Bijker et al., 2012[1987]). To understand the role of this workshop and volume, it is helpful to distinguish between a broad and narrow usage of the phrase ‘social construction of technology’ (but do note that both notions fall within the radical meaning of social constructivism). When broadly used, ‘SCOT’ encompasses all the work represented in the 1987 volume, including the actor–network approach by Callon, Latour, and Law, and the technological systems approach advocated by Hughes. The author uses the acronym SCOTS, after the title of the 1987 volume, to indicate this broad meaning. Used more narrowly, it refers primarily to the program set out by Pinch and Bijker (1984). For this latter program of the social construction of technology, the acronym SCOT was introduced; but this acronym is now increasingly used in the broad sense too, without reference to one specific approach in constructivist studies of technology. The remainder of this article is primarily about SCOT in the narrow sense, although in the last sections, the author broadens the review by returning to SCOTS. SCOT developed like any normal scientific program: its agenda, central concepts, and even unit of analysis shifted in response to research findings and discussions among contributing scholars. In that sense, one can distinguish early and late (or recent) versions of SCOT. An important, although negative, starting point for SCOT was a criticism of technological determinism. Technological determinism was taken to comprise two basic claims: (1) technology develops autonomously and (2) technology determines societal development to an important degree. These claims were seen as intellectually impoverished
and politically debilitating. Proponents of SCOT argued that technological determinism involves a poor research strategy, because it entails a teleological, linear, and one-dimensional view of technological development. In addition, they considered it politically debilitating because technological determinism suggests that the paths taken by technological development are inevitable, thus making social and political interventions a futile endeavor. To bolster this critique, it was necessary to show that the development, stabilization, and even working of technology are socially constructed, with the emphasis on social. Key concepts in this program, as will be discussed in the next section, are ‘relevant social group,’ ‘interpretive flexibility,’ ‘closure,’ and ‘stabilization.’ The unit of analysis was the single artifact (that is, a tool, a device, or a machine). The choice of the artifact as unit of analysis was a choice of the ‘hardest possible case,’ similar to the choice of mathematics and natural sciences by the Strong Programme (David Bloor) and the Empirical Programme of Relativism (Harry Collins). To show that even the working of a bicycle or a lamp is socially constructed seemed a harder task, and thus – when successful – more convincing, than to argue that technology at a higher level of complexity and aggregation was socially shaped. The agenda of demonstrating the social construction of artifacts by detailed analysis at the microlevel resulted in a wealth of case studies. A few years later, the program was broadened in two ways (Bijker and Law, 1992). First, new questions were raised at a meso- and macrolevel of aggregation: for example, about the political construction of radioactive waste, clinical budgeting in the British National Health Service, or technically mediated social order. Second, the agenda was broadened to include, once again, the issue of technology’s impact on society, which had been bracketed for the sake of refuting technological determinism. Concepts developed for this agenda were ‘technological frame,’ and various conceptualizations of the obduracy of technology. The unit of analysis was broadened from the singular technical artifact to the more comprehensive and heterogeneous sociotechnical ensemble. The emphasis now was on ‘construction’ rather than on ‘social’ – a similar shift had occurred in the social construction of science, for example, when Latour and Woolgar dropped the word ‘social’ from the subtitle of their book Laboratory Life when it was reprinted in 1986. The aim became to study the mutual shaping, or ‘coproduction,’ of society and technology, rather than explaining how distinct ‘social factors’ shaped a separate domain of ‘technology’ (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). Current research in SCOT continues to broaden the empirical, theoretical, and, indeed, political agendas of SCOT. The author returns to these agendas in the final two sections.
The Social Construction of Technology as a Heuristic for Research As a heuristic for studying technology in society, research in SCOT can be set out as a progression through three steps (Bijker, 1995). Key concepts in the first step are ‘relevant social group’ and ‘interpretive flexibility.’ An artifact is described through the eyes
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of relevant social groups: groups that are relevant because the way they attribute a meaning to the artifact, shapes the artifact’s development. Accordingly, relevant social groups can be identified as actors who refer to the artifact in the same basic way. For example, bicycle producers, young athletic ordinary users, women cyclists, and anticyclists each described the highwheeled ordinary bicycle in the 1870s in a distinctive way. Because the description of an artifact through the eyes of different relevant social groups produces different descriptions – and, in a sense, different artifacts – the researcher is able to demonstrate the ‘interpretive flexibility’ of the artifact. Although it is common to speak of one artifact, in practice there are many. In the case of the ordinary bicycle, for example, it was an unsafe machine in the eyes of women, but a macho machine in the eyes of the young male ordinary users. For the typical woman of the era, the bicycle was a machine in which the skirt got entangled and from which the woman frequently made a steep fall; for the ‘young man of means and nerve’ riding the bicycle was a means to impress people (including young ladies). In the second step, the researcher follows how interpretive flexibility diminishes over time, as some artifacts gain dominance over others and meanings converge, and in the end one artifact results from this process of social construction. Here, key concepts are ‘closure’ and ‘stabilization.’ Both concepts are meant to describe the outcome of the process of social construction. ‘Stabilization’ stresses process: a process of social construction can take several years in which the degree of stabilization slowly increases up to the moment of closure. ‘Closure,’ a concept stemming from SSK and describing the way scientific controversies end (Collins, 1985), highlights the irreversible end point of a discordant process in which several artifacts (e.g., bicycle designs) coexisted for awhile, before being succeeded by a single model. In the third step, the processes of stabilization described in the second step are analyzed and explained by interpreting them with a broader theoretical framework. The explanation seeks to answer why a given social construction process follows one course, rather than another. The central concept here is ‘technological frame.’ A technological frame structures the interactions among the members of a relevant social group, and shapes their thinking and acting. It is similar to Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’ with one important difference: ‘technological frame’ is a concept that applies to all kinds of relevant social groups, while Kuhn intended ‘paradigm’ exclusively for scientific communities. (However, these days, the popularized ‘paradigm’ seems to apply to all sorts of communities and imagined communities.) A technological frame is built up when interaction ‘around’ an artifact begins. In this way, existing practice guides future practice, although without logical determination. The cyclical movement thus becomes artifact, technological frame, relevant social group, new artifact, new technological frame, new relevant social group, etc. Typically, a person will be included in more than one social group, and thus also in more than one technological frame. For example, the members of the Women’s Advisory Committees on Housing in the Netherlands are included in the technological frame of male builders, architects, and municipality civil servants. This allows them to interact with these men in shaping public housing designs. But at the same time, many of
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these women are included in the feminist technological frame, which enables them to formulate radical alternatives to the standard Dutch family house that dominates the male builders’ technological frame (Bijker and Bijsterveld, 2000). This three-step research process thus amounts to (1) sociological analysis of an artifact to demonstrate its interpretive flexibility, (2) description of the artifact’s social construction, and (3) explanation of this construction process in terms of the technological frames of relevant social groups. The remainder of this section discusses some methodological issues and points of criticism. It is important to appreciate that SCOT provides a research heuristic for interpretive sociology, not a research machine to churn out case studies as Russell (1986) and Winner (1993) seem to suggest. For example, the adage ‘identify all relevant social groups by searching citations of the artifact by a variety of actors’ does not diminish the researcher’s obligation to decide which groups are important to include in the account, and which groups only obfuscate the picture by adding useless details. As a research heuristic, SCOT shows its debt to the history of technology by emphasizing case studies and narrative, and to SSK by a preference for qualitative methods such as ethnography. Besides providing a theory of technology and society (as discussed in the next section), SCOT aims at helping researchers to give detailed and insightful accounts of the development of technology in society. Concepts such as ‘relevant social group’ and ‘interpretive flexibility’ primarily help to open up a case and to ask original and thought-provoking questions; they are less important for telling the story (see the debate between Angus Buchanan, John Law, and Philip Scranton (1991)). These case studies may be historical or contemporaneous. When doing the latter kind of study, the researcher will often find herself or himself drawn into the case and become one of the actors. It is also a mistake to think that SCOT research focuses only on the early stages of an artifact’s development, the design and prototype phases. If the key idea of SCOT – that all kinds of relevant social groups contribute to the social construction process – is taken seriously, then one should also accept that this construction process takes place in all contexts and all phases. Thus, for example, the automobile in the United States acquired a specific functionality in rural areas where it was used as a stationary power supply to washing machines, butter churns, corn shellers, water pumps, and wood saws, well after it had come off the production line as a transportation vehicle (Kline and Pinch, 1996). Two concepts, seamless web and symmetry, may be fruitfully used to highlight one specific methodological characteristic of SCOT research. The phrase ‘seamless web of technology and society’ is often used as a reminder that nontechnical factors are important for understanding the development of technology, and that these factors are closely related to one another as well as the technology. A second, more sophisticated, meaning is that it is never clear a priori and independent of context whether an issue should be treated as technical or social. Was the Challenger accident a technical failure, an organizational mistake, or primarily a lack of adequate funding (Vaughan, 1996)? The activities of engineers and designers are best described as heterogeneous engineering, network building,
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or system building, rather than as straightforward technical invention. The recognition that all kinds of social groups are relevant for the construction of technology supports this second way of using the seamless web metaphor. The third interpretation of that metaphor extends the symmetry principle from the strong program in the sociology of knowledge into the principle of general symmetry. Not only should one treat working and nonworking machines symmetrically, but also the very distinction between the social and the technical world can be treated in that way. The ‘stuff’ of the fluorescent lamp’s invention is economics and politics as much as electricity and fluorescence (Bijker, 1995). Let us call this ‘stuff’ sociotechnology. The relations that play a role in the development of the fluorescent lamp are thus neither purely social nor purely technical; they are sociotechnical. The principle of general symmetry casts this into a methodological principle: human and nonhuman actors should be treated similarly, and the construction of society and the construction of technology should be explained in symmetrical terms (Callon, 1986). In other words, technical reductionism and social reductionism are both out of play as explanatory strategies. Instead, new forms of explanation need to be developed. The next section includes an example.
The Social Construction of Technology as a Theory of Technology in Society SCOT also provides a theoretical perspective on the relation between technology and society, and on their joint developments or coevolution. As discussed earlier, the development of technology can be explained as a social process in which an open variety of relevant social groups participate. This social process does not stop when an artifact leaves the factory, but continues when users endow the technology with specific uses and meanings. Laws of physics and economics are relevant but insufficient to characterize a technology’s development. Artifacts can be shown to have interpretive flexibility, due to the different constructions that various social groups make. When these relevant social groups interact, typically one meaning of the artifact will gain dominance and stabilize. At the end of that social process, closure occurs, and interpretive flexibility vanishes. Analogously, the development of social institutions in modern society cannot be fully understood without taking into account the role of technology. Such institutions as the church, capitalism, the government, organized labor, communication systems, and education may keep the social fabric of society together; but where would all of these be without technology? Social order in modern society can only be explained by reference to technology (Latour, 1992). This requires a view of technology’s impact on society. In SCOT, conceptualizing the hardness or obduracy of technology does this. An artifact can be hard in two distinctly different ways. The first form, ‘closed-in hardness,’ occurs when the humans involved have a high inclusion in the associated technological frame. For example, upon meeting problems with printing a letter, a student with a high inclusion in the personal computer (PC) users’ technological frame will check cabling,
control panels, and printer definitions. Only after some time will it occur to her that she could also write the letter by hand: she was ‘closed in’ by the PC technology. Another student having the same problem, but with a low inclusion in the PC users’ technological frame, has no clue about cables or control panels; he can barely locate the power switch. He experiences the second kind of impact by technology: ‘closing-out obduracy.’ He sees no alternative but to leave the technology aside and pick up his fountain pen. In both cases, the technology has an impact on these students, but in completely different ways. These two forms of hardness of technology can also be seen on the societal level. Automobile technology, for example, exerts a ‘closed-in hardness’ on the inhabitants of Los Angeles, much differentiation within auto culture, but few alternatives outside it. The standardization of main power voltage and wall plugs means a ‘closing-out obduracy’ to most people; accept it by buying the right plug and apparatus, or refrain from using electricity. This constructivist analysis provides a theoretical perspective on both SCOT and the technological impact on society. It offers a reconciliation of the previously opposed social constructivist and technological determinist views. This reconciliation needs some theoretical elaboration to extend the conclusion of the previous section: that the distinction between technology and society can be transcended and that the proper subject matter for analysis is sociotechnology. The concept ‘technological frame’ provides the theoretical linkage between the two views. A technological frame describes the actions and interactions of actors, explaining how they socially construct a technology. But since a technological frame is built up around an artifact and thus incorporates the characteristics of that technology, it also explains the influence of the technical on the social. Part of the societal impact of the standard Dutch family house was that it dominated architectural thinking in the 1950s through the 1970s, and thus made it very difficult to conceive alternatives; architects and even members of the critical Women’s Advisory Committees were ‘closed in’ by the builders’ technological frame, only seeing the two-parent–two-child house. Since the early 1990s, researchers in social constructivist studies of technology had indeed recognized that explaining the social shaping of technology could only mean half an understanding of the relations between technology and society (Bijker and Law, 1992). Technological determinism, as Wyatt (2008) convincingly argues, needs to be taken seriously. Research into the hardness of technology thus adds to a more balanced understanding of the relationship between the technical and the social; Hommels (2005) explicitly builds on SCOT and actor–network theory in her analysis of the relations between technology and society, while Leonardi (2012) also brings in organizational sociology to understand how the intertwinement (or ‘imbrication’ as he calls it) of technological and organizational changes results in new forms of sociomaterial stability. Work on the embeddedness of technology in society, partly in the context of policyoriented European projects, or on the ‘domestication’ of technology further explores this agenda of an integrated understanding of SCOT and the technical impact on society (Lie and Sorensen, 1996). The earlier work of Don Ihde (1979) and postphenomenology approaches in the philosophy of
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technology similarly give a new interpretation of the role of the material artifacts (Verbeek, 2005).
Broadening the Social Construction of Technology To understand the recent developments in SCOT, it is helpful to widen our scope beyond the initial narrow interpretation of SCOT. In their new preface, Bijker and Pinch review the developments in SCOT at large, or SCOTS, since 1987 (Bijker et al., 2012[1987]). One development is the investigation of a whole new range of empirical domains, with associated conceptual innovations. Internet and computer studies are the first example (Abbate, 1999; Edwards, 1996). In nanotechnologies, there is a broad recognition among scientists, engineers, and policy makers of the need to look beyond the laboratory (Bijker et al., 2009; Mody, 2011). Scholars such as MacKenzie (2006), Callon (1998), and Pinch and Swedberg (2008) now also extend SCOT, broadly conceived, into the study of economics and financial markets. The newly emerging field of sound studies is heavily indebted to SCOT too (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012). Within organizational sociology, there has been a recent interest in SCOT by scholars such as Garud and Karnoe (2001), and Orlikowski (1992). These studies have a clear interventionist agenda and help to translate SCOT insights to a wider readership of managers and organization specialists.
A Turn to Politics and the Normative We live in technological cultures; our modern, highly developed societies cannot be fully understood without taking into account the role of science and technology. SCOT and the broader SCOTS program both offer a conceptual framework for politicizing this technological culture. Although such a technological culture already is infused with politics, ‘politicizing’ here means showing hidden political dimensions, placing issues on the political agenda, and opening issues up for political debate. The SCOT approach not only gives an affirmative answer to Winner’s (1980) question ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ but it also offers a way to analyze such politics. Technology is socially (and politically) constructed; society (including politics) is technically built, and technological culture consists of sociotechnical ensembles. Studies that develop this agenda, again, typically draw on social constructivist technology studies in the broader sense. One of the most fruitful bodies of work is the analysis of gender and technology (Lerman et al., 2003). Works such as MacKenzie’s (1990) history of guided missiles, Hecht’s (2009 [1998]) history of nuclear power in France, Gottweis’ (1998) study of genetic politics, and Vaughan’s (1996) account of the Challenger disaster demonstrate that the new framework can also be productive for the analysis of classical political themes. The issue of political decision making about technological projects acquires special guise in the light of social constructivism. If it is accepted that a variety of relevant social groups are involved in the social construction of technologies, and that
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the construction process continues through all phases of an artifact’s life cycle, it makes sense to expand the set of groups involved in political deliberation about technological choices. Thus, several countries have experimented with consensus conferences, public debates, and citizens’ juries. One of the key issues here is the role of expertise in public debates. The SCOT approach suggests that all relevant social groups have some form of expertise, but that no one group – for example, scientists or engineers – has a special and a priori superiority over the others. A final development with a strong political and normative edge can be mentioned, which is the turn toward development and globalization. Work in SCOT has increasingly turned to a more global arena, rather than restricting attention to the northern and western hemispheres. This leads, for example, to a fresh approach to long-standing questions in other domains, compared with the typical SCOTS perspective, on the relations between science, technology, and society. One example is cold war history in connection to issues of development and colonization (Hecht, 2011), another is the role of innovation in public health (Engel and Bijker, 2012). In addition to investigating new topics at a global scale, studies are reconceiving traditional technology as a site for sociotechnical innovation (Mamidipudi et al., 2012). Possibly even more exciting than applying the received SCOTS perspectives to new geographies and questions, is the promise of truly new insights by extending the research into these domains, raising new questions, and developing collaborations with scholars and practitioners from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Such new insights will, the author expects, range from the empirical to the theoretical, and from the epistemological to the political.
See also: Actor-Network Theory; Gender and Technology: From Exclusion to Inclusion?; Laboratory Studies: Historical Perspectives; Risk, Sociology and Politics of; Science and Technology Studies: Experts and Expertise; Scientific Controversies; Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Strong Program, Sociology of; Technological Determinism; Technology Assessment.
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Abstract The ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) is one approach among several constructivist ways of studying science and technology that emerged in the 1980s. SCOT can be used to denote two different things. First, it is a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. And second, it is a theory about the relation between society and technology. This article sketches the genealogy of the social construction of technology by distinguishing mild and radical versions. Within the radical versions, broad and narrow forms are identified; the narrow one is denoted by the acronym ‘SCOT.’ Historically, the development of SCOT is closely linked to the sociology of scientific knowledge and to the science, technology, and society movement in the 1970s. An important starting point was to criticize technological determinism. In the 1980s and 1990s, it developed primarily as an academic enterprise, but then also found application in the policy domain, in innovation management, and in discussions about new forms of democracy.
Constructivist Studies of Science and Technology The social construction of technology (SCOT) is one approach among several constructivist ways of studying science and technology that emerged in the 1980s. Here, ‘constructivist’ means a scholarly orientation that treats the truth of scientific facts and the working of technical artifacts as accomplishments – as being constructed – rather than as intrinsic properties of those facts and machines. The term ‘social construction of technology’ can be used to denote two different things. First, it refers to a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. Second, it signifies a theory about the development of technology. Historically, the development of SCOT is closely linked to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and to the science, technology, and society (STS – an acronym later used as much for science and technology studies) movement in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, it developed primarily as an academic enterprise, but then also found application in the policy domain, in innovation management, and in discussions about new forms of democracy. The phrase ‘social construction’ was first used by Berger and Luckmann (1966) in their Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Building on the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and social theory, and particularly on the work of Alfred Schutz, they argue that social reality is constructed through human actions and that the processes through which it is constructed should be the object of the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann focus on the social construction of ordinary knowledge of the sort that we use to make our way in a particular society. They are concerned with the reality of social institutions and their focus is on society at large, rather than on natural reality and the subcultures, such as fields of science and technology, that contend with it. Nevertheless, provocative lines of scholarship developed around such themes as the social construction of mental illness, deviance, gender, law, and class. In the 1970s, the theme of social construction was applied to scientific facts (Latour and Woolgar, 1986[1979]), and in the 1980s
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developed for an approach to artifacts (Bijker et al., 2012 [1987]). Constructivist studies of science and technology come in a wide variety of forms, both mild and radical (Sismondo, 1993). The mild versions merely stress the importance of including the social context when describing the development of science and technology. Examples in the history of technology include Constant’s (1980) account of the turbojet revolution and Nye’s (1998) studies of the electrification of America. The radical versions argue that the content of science and technology is socially constructed. In other words, the radical claim is that the truth of scientific statements and the technical working of machines are not derived from nature alone, but are constituted in social processes. Radical constructivist studies of science and technology share the same background and have similar aims, and to an extent studies in both areas have been carried out by the same authors. The remainder of this article will focus on technology studies and more precisely on the radical versions of SCOT.
The Origin and Development of the Social Construction of Technology SCOT grew out of the combination of three distinct bodies of work: the STS movement, SSK, and the history of technology. The first started in the 1970s, mainly in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Often led by science and engineering faculty members, its goal was to enrich the curricula of both universities and secondary schools by studying issues such as scientists’ social responsibilities, the risks of nuclear energy, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and environmental pollution. The movement was quite successful, especially in science and engineering schools and faculties, and some of the STS courses were incorporated into degree requirements. SSK emerged in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom on the basis of work in the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science. The central
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methodological tenets of the ‘strong program’ (especially its symmetry principle) seemed equally applicable to technology. The symmetry principle called for a similar explanatory approach to scientific knowledge, regardless of whether it was now held to be true or false; in other words, sociological interests and group processes would be used to explain the development and acceptance of ‘true’ as well as ‘false’ knowledge. In studying technology, this should mean that working and nonworking machines were to be analyzed symmetrically and in the same terms. In the history of technology, especially in the United States, an increasing number of scholars began to raise more theoretical and sociologically inspired questions (Constant, 1980; Hughes, 1983; Cowan, 1983). Path-breaking advocacy for this body of work in the history of technology was provided by the reader edited by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999[1985]). Citing the title of this volume, the phrase ‘social shaping of technology’ is often used to denote a broader area of research, including work in industrial sociology, technology policy, and the economics of technical change. Researchers from these three traditions convened an international workshop in 1984 in the Netherlands. The subsequent volume – Social Construction of Technological Systems – from that workshop, edited by an STSer, a historian of technology, and a sociologist of scientific knowledge, has been heralded as the starting point of SCOT. On the occasion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s 150th anniversary, this volume was included in the list of 30 most influential titles ever published by MIT Press, and it was republished in an anniversary edition 25 years later, with a new preface reviewing the development of the field since 1987 (Bijker et al., 2012[1987]). To understand the role of this workshop and volume, it is helpful to distinguish between a broad and narrow usage of the phrase ‘social construction of technology’ (but do note that both notions fall within the radical meaning of social constructivism). When broadly used, ‘SCOT’ encompasses all the work represented in the 1987 volume, including the actor–network approach by Callon, Latour, and Law, and the technological systems approach advocated by Hughes. The author uses the acronym SCOTS, after the title of the 1987 volume, to indicate this broad meaning. Used more narrowly, it refers primarily to the program set out by Pinch and Bijker (1984). For this latter program of the social construction of technology, the acronym SCOT was introduced; but this acronym is now increasingly used in the broad sense too, without reference to one specific approach in constructivist studies of technology. The remainder of this article is primarily about SCOT in the narrow sense, although in the last sections, the author broadens the review by returning to SCOTS. SCOT developed like any normal scientific program: its agenda, central concepts, and even unit of analysis shifted in response to research findings and discussions among contributing scholars. In that sense, one can distinguish early and late (or recent) versions of SCOT. An important, although negative, starting point for SCOT was a criticism of technological determinism. Technological determinism was taken to comprise two basic claims: (1) technology develops autonomously and (2) technology determines societal development to an important degree. These claims were seen as intellectually impoverished
and politically debilitating. Proponents of SCOT argued that technological determinism involves a poor research strategy, because it entails a teleological, linear, and one-dimensional view of technological development. In addition, they considered it politically debilitating because technological determinism suggests that the paths taken by technological development are inevitable, thus making social and political interventions a futile endeavor. To bolster this critique, it was necessary to show that the development, stabilization, and even working of technology are socially constructed, with the emphasis on social. Key concepts in this program, as will be discussed in the next section, are ‘relevant social group,’ ‘interpretive flexibility,’ ‘closure,’ and ‘stabilization.’ The unit of analysis was the single artifact (that is, a tool, a device, or a machine). The choice of the artifact as unit of analysis was a choice of the ‘hardest possible case,’ similar to the choice of mathematics and natural sciences by the Strong Programme (David Bloor) and the Empirical Programme of Relativism (Harry Collins). To show that even the working of a bicycle or a lamp is socially constructed seemed a harder task, and thus – when successful – more convincing, than to argue that technology at a higher level of complexity and aggregation was socially shaped. The agenda of demonstrating the social construction of artifacts by detailed analysis at the microlevel resulted in a wealth of case studies. A few years later, the program was broadened in two ways (Bijker and Law, 1992). First, new questions were raised at a meso- and macrolevel of aggregation: for example, about the political construction of radioactive waste, clinical budgeting in the British National Health Service, or technically mediated social order. Second, the agenda was broadened to include, once again, the issue of technology’s impact on society, which had been bracketed for the sake of refuting technological determinism. Concepts developed for this agenda were ‘technological frame,’ and various conceptualizations of the obduracy of technology. The unit of analysis was broadened from the singular technical artifact to the more comprehensive and heterogeneous sociotechnical ensemble. The emphasis now was on ‘construction’ rather than on ‘social’ – a similar shift had occurred in the social construction of science, for example, when Latour and Woolgar dropped the word ‘social’ from the subtitle of their book Laboratory Life when it was reprinted in 1986. The aim became to study the mutual shaping, or ‘coproduction,’ of society and technology, rather than explaining how distinct ‘social factors’ shaped a separate domain of ‘technology’ (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). Current research in SCOT continues to broaden the empirical, theoretical, and, indeed, political agendas of SCOT. The author returns to these agendas in the final two sections.
The Social Construction of Technology as a Heuristic for Research As a heuristic for studying technology in society, research in SCOT can be set out as a progression through three steps (Bijker, 1995). Key concepts in the first step are ‘relevant social group’ and ‘interpretive flexibility.’ An artifact is described through the eyes
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of relevant social groups: groups that are relevant because the way they attribute a meaning to the artifact, shapes the artifact’s development. Accordingly, relevant social groups can be identified as actors who refer to the artifact in the same basic way. For example, bicycle producers, young athletic ordinary users, women cyclists, and anticyclists each described the highwheeled ordinary bicycle in the 1870s in a distinctive way. Because the description of an artifact through the eyes of different relevant social groups produces different descriptions – and, in a sense, different artifacts – the researcher is able to demonstrate the ‘interpretive flexibility’ of the artifact. Although it is common to speak of one artifact, in practice there are many. In the case of the ordinary bicycle, for example, it was an unsafe machine in the eyes of women, but a macho machine in the eyes of the young male ordinary users. For the typical woman of the era, the bicycle was a machine in which the skirt got entangled and from which the woman frequently made a steep fall; for the ‘young man of means and nerve’ riding the bicycle was a means to impress people (including young ladies). In the second step, the researcher follows how interpretive flexibility diminishes over time, as some artifacts gain dominance over others and meanings converge, and in the end one artifact results from this process of social construction. Here, key concepts are ‘closure’ and ‘stabilization.’ Both concepts are meant to describe the outcome of the process of social construction. ‘Stabilization’ stresses process: a process of social construction can take several years in which the degree of stabilization slowly increases up to the moment of closure. ‘Closure,’ a concept stemming from SSK and describing the way scientific controversies end (Collins, 1985), highlights the irreversible end point of a discordant process in which several artifacts (e.g., bicycle designs) coexisted for awhile, before being succeeded by a single model. In the third step, the processes of stabilization described in the second step are analyzed and explained by interpreting them with a broader theoretical framework. The explanation seeks to answer why a given social construction process follows one course, rather than another. The central concept here is ‘technological frame.’ A technological frame structures the interactions among the members of a relevant social group, and shapes their thinking and acting. It is similar to Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’ with one important difference: ‘technological frame’ is a concept that applies to all kinds of relevant social groups, while Kuhn intended ‘paradigm’ exclusively for scientific communities. (However, these days, the popularized ‘paradigm’ seems to apply to all sorts of communities and imagined communities.) A technological frame is built up when interaction ‘around’ an artifact begins. In this way, existing practice guides future practice, although without logical determination. The cyclical movement thus becomes artifact, technological frame, relevant social group, new artifact, new technological frame, new relevant social group, etc. Typically, a person will be included in more than one social group, and thus also in more than one technological frame. For example, the members of the Women’s Advisory Committees on Housing in the Netherlands are included in the technological frame of male builders, architects, and municipality civil servants. This allows them to interact with these men in shaping public housing designs. But at the same time, many of
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these women are included in the feminist technological frame, which enables them to formulate radical alternatives to the standard Dutch family house that dominates the male builders’ technological frame (Bijker and Bijsterveld, 2000). This three-step research process thus amounts to (1) sociological analysis of an artifact to demonstrate its interpretive flexibility, (2) description of the artifact’s social construction, and (3) explanation of this construction process in terms of the technological frames of relevant social groups. The remainder of this section discusses some methodological issues and points of criticism. It is important to appreciate that SCOT provides a research heuristic for interpretive sociology, not a research machine to churn out case studies as Russell (1986) and Winner (1993) seem to suggest. For example, the adage ‘identify all relevant social groups by searching citations of the artifact by a variety of actors’ does not diminish the researcher’s obligation to decide which groups are important to include in the account, and which groups only obfuscate the picture by adding useless details. As a research heuristic, SCOT shows its debt to the history of technology by emphasizing case studies and narrative, and to SSK by a preference for qualitative methods such as ethnography. Besides providing a theory of technology and society (as discussed in the next section), SCOT aims at helping researchers to give detailed and insightful accounts of the development of technology in society. Concepts such as ‘relevant social group’ and ‘interpretive flexibility’ primarily help to open up a case and to ask original and thought-provoking questions; they are less important for telling the story (see the debate between Angus Buchanan, John Law, and Philip Scranton (1991)). These case studies may be historical or contemporaneous. When doing the latter kind of study, the researcher will often find herself or himself drawn into the case and become one of the actors. It is also a mistake to think that SCOT research focuses only on the early stages of an artifact’s development, the design and prototype phases. If the key idea of SCOT – that all kinds of relevant social groups contribute to the social construction process – is taken seriously, then one should also accept that this construction process takes place in all contexts and all phases. Thus, for example, the automobile in the United States acquired a specific functionality in rural areas where it was used as a stationary power supply to washing machines, butter churns, corn shellers, water pumps, and wood saws, well after it had come off the production line as a transportation vehicle (Kline and Pinch, 1996). Two concepts, seamless web and symmetry, may be fruitfully used to highlight one specific methodological characteristic of SCOT research. The phrase ‘seamless web of technology and society’ is often used as a reminder that nontechnical factors are important for understanding the development of technology, and that these factors are closely related to one another as well as the technology. A second, more sophisticated, meaning is that it is never clear a priori and independent of context whether an issue should be treated as technical or social. Was the Challenger accident a technical failure, an organizational mistake, or primarily a lack of adequate funding (Vaughan, 1996)? The activities of engineers and designers are best described as heterogeneous engineering, network building,
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or system building, rather than as straightforward technical invention. The recognition that all kinds of social groups are relevant for the construction of technology supports this second way of using the seamless web metaphor. The third interpretation of that metaphor extends the symmetry principle from the strong program in the sociology of knowledge into the principle of general symmetry. Not only should one treat working and nonworking machines symmetrically, but also the very distinction between the social and the technical world can be treated in that way. The ‘stuff’ of the fluorescent lamp’s invention is economics and politics as much as electricity and fluorescence (Bijker, 1995). Let us call this ‘stuff’ sociotechnology. The relations that play a role in the development of the fluorescent lamp are thus neither purely social nor purely technical; they are sociotechnical. The principle of general symmetry casts this into a methodological principle: human and nonhuman actors should be treated similarly, and the construction of society and the construction of technology should be explained in symmetrical terms (Callon, 1986). In other words, technical reductionism and social reductionism are both out of play as explanatory strategies. Instead, new forms of explanation need to be developed. The next section includes an example.
The Social Construction of Technology as a Theory of Technology in Society SCOT also provides a theoretical perspective on the relation between technology and society, and on their joint developments or coevolution. As discussed earlier, the development of technology can be explained as a social process in which an open variety of relevant social groups participate. This social process does not stop when an artifact leaves the factory, but continues when users endow the technology with specific uses and meanings. Laws of physics and economics are relevant but insufficient to characterize a technology’s development. Artifacts can be shown to have interpretive flexibility, due to the different constructions that various social groups make. When these relevant social groups interact, typically one meaning of the artifact will gain dominance and stabilize. At the end of that social process, closure occurs, and interpretive flexibility vanishes. Analogously, the development of social institutions in modern society cannot be fully understood without taking into account the role of technology. Such institutions as the church, capitalism, the government, organized labor, communication systems, and education may keep the social fabric of society together; but where would all of these be without technology? Social order in modern society can only be explained by reference to technology (Latour, 1992). This requires a view of technology’s impact on society. In SCOT, conceptualizing the hardness or obduracy of technology does this. An artifact can be hard in two distinctly different ways. The first form, ‘closed-in hardness,’ occurs when the humans involved have a high inclusion in the associated technological frame. For example, upon meeting problems with printing a letter, a student with a high inclusion in the personal computer (PC) users’ technological frame will check cabling,
control panels, and printer definitions. Only after some time will it occur to her that she could also write the letter by hand: she was ‘closed in’ by the PC technology. Another student having the same problem, but with a low inclusion in the PC users’ technological frame, has no clue about cables or control panels; he can barely locate the power switch. He experiences the second kind of impact by technology: ‘closing-out obduracy.’ He sees no alternative but to leave the technology aside and pick up his fountain pen. In both cases, the technology has an impact on these students, but in completely different ways. These two forms of hardness of technology can also be seen on the societal level. Automobile technology, for example, exerts a ‘closed-in hardness’ on the inhabitants of Los Angeles, much differentiation within auto culture, but few alternatives outside it. The standardization of main power voltage and wall plugs means a ‘closing-out obduracy’ to most people; accept it by buying the right plug and apparatus, or refrain from using electricity. This constructivist analysis provides a theoretical perspective on both SCOT and the technological impact on society. It offers a reconciliation of the previously opposed social constructivist and technological determinist views. This reconciliation needs some theoretical elaboration to extend the conclusion of the previous section: that the distinction between technology and society can be transcended and that the proper subject matter for analysis is sociotechnology. The concept ‘technological frame’ provides the theoretical linkage between the two views. A technological frame describes the actions and interactions of actors, explaining how they socially construct a technology. But since a technological frame is built up around an artifact and thus incorporates the characteristics of that technology, it also explains the influence of the technical on the social. Part of the societal impact of the standard Dutch family house was that it dominated architectural thinking in the 1950s through the 1970s, and thus made it very difficult to conceive alternatives; architects and even members of the critical Women’s Advisory Committees were ‘closed in’ by the builders’ technological frame, only seeing the two-parent–two-child house. Since the early 1990s, researchers in social constructivist studies of technology had indeed recognized that explaining the social shaping of technology could only mean half an understanding of the relations between technology and society (Bijker and Law, 1992). Technological determinism, as Wyatt (2008) convincingly argues, needs to be taken seriously. Research into the hardness of technology thus adds to a more balanced understanding of the relationship between the technical and the social; Hommels (2005) explicitly builds on SCOT and actor–network theory in her analysis of the relations between technology and society, while Leonardi (2012) also brings in organizational sociology to understand how the intertwinement (or ‘imbrication’ as he calls it) of technological and organizational changes results in new forms of sociomaterial stability. Work on the embeddedness of technology in society, partly in the context of policyoriented European projects, or on the ‘domestication’ of technology further explores this agenda of an integrated understanding of SCOT and the technical impact on society (Lie and Sorensen, 1996). The earlier work of Don Ihde (1979) and postphenomenology approaches in the philosophy of
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technology similarly give a new interpretation of the role of the material artifacts (Verbeek, 2005).
Broadening the Social Construction of Technology To understand the recent developments in SCOT, it is helpful to widen our scope beyond the initial narrow interpretation of SCOT. In their new preface, Bijker and Pinch review the developments in SCOT at large, or SCOTS, since 1987 (Bijker et al., 2012[1987]). One development is the investigation of a whole new range of empirical domains, with associated conceptual innovations. Internet and computer studies are the first example (Abbate, 1999; Edwards, 1996). In nanotechnologies, there is a broad recognition among scientists, engineers, and policy makers of the need to look beyond the laboratory (Bijker et al., 2009; Mody, 2011). Scholars such as MacKenzie (2006), Callon (1998), and Pinch and Swedberg (2008) now also extend SCOT, broadly conceived, into the study of economics and financial markets. The newly emerging field of sound studies is heavily indebted to SCOT too (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012). Within organizational sociology, there has been a recent interest in SCOT by scholars such as Garud and Karnoe (2001), and Orlikowski (1992). These studies have a clear interventionist agenda and help to translate SCOT insights to a wider readership of managers and organization specialists.
A Turn to Politics and the Normative We live in technological cultures; our modern, highly developed societies cannot be fully understood without taking into account the role of science and technology. SCOT and the broader SCOTS program both offer a conceptual framework for politicizing this technological culture. Although such a technological culture already is infused with politics, ‘politicizing’ here means showing hidden political dimensions, placing issues on the political agenda, and opening issues up for political debate. The SCOT approach not only gives an affirmative answer to Winner’s (1980) question ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ but it also offers a way to analyze such politics. Technology is socially (and politically) constructed; society (including politics) is technically built, and technological culture consists of sociotechnical ensembles. Studies that develop this agenda, again, typically draw on social constructivist technology studies in the broader sense. One of the most fruitful bodies of work is the analysis of gender and technology (Lerman et al., 2003). Works such as MacKenzie’s (1990) history of guided missiles, Hecht’s (2009 [1998]) history of nuclear power in France, Gottweis’ (1998) study of genetic politics, and Vaughan’s (1996) account of the Challenger disaster demonstrate that the new framework can also be productive for the analysis of classical political themes. The issue of political decision making about technological projects acquires special guise in the light of social constructivism. If it is accepted that a variety of relevant social groups are involved in the social construction of technologies, and that
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the construction process continues through all phases of an artifact’s life cycle, it makes sense to expand the set of groups involved in political deliberation about technological choices. Thus, several countries have experimented with consensus conferences, public debates, and citizens’ juries. One of the key issues here is the role of expertise in public debates. The SCOT approach suggests that all relevant social groups have some form of expertise, but that no one group – for example, scientists or engineers – has a special and a priori superiority over the others. A final development with a strong political and normative edge can be mentioned, which is the turn toward development and globalization. Work in SCOT has increasingly turned to a more global arena, rather than restricting attention to the northern and western hemispheres. This leads, for example, to a fresh approach to long-standing questions in other domains, compared with the typical SCOTS perspective, on the relations between science, technology, and society. One example is cold war history in connection to issues of development and colonization (Hecht, 2011), another is the role of innovation in public health (Engel and Bijker, 2012). In addition to investigating new topics at a global scale, studies are reconceiving traditional technology as a site for sociotechnical innovation (Mamidipudi et al., 2012). Possibly even more exciting than applying the received SCOTS perspectives to new geographies and questions, is the promise of truly new insights by extending the research into these domains, raising new questions, and developing collaborations with scholars and practitioners from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Such new insights will, the author expects, range from the empirical to the theoretical, and from the epistemological to the political.
See also: Actor-Network Theory; Gender and Technology: From Exclusion to Inclusion?; Laboratory Studies: Historical Perspectives; Risk, Sociology and Politics of; Science and Technology Studies: Experts and Expertise; Scientific Controversies; Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Strong Program, Sociology of; Technological Determinism; Technology Assessment.
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