Technology admits a wide variety of definitions. First, it refers to physical objects or artefacts, for example, a car. Second, it refers to activities or processes—the system of car production, the pattern of organization around vehicle technologies, the behaviour and expectations of car users, and so on. Third, it can refer to the knowledge and skills associated with the production or use of technologies—the expertise associated with car design and use, as well to broader cultural images generated and sustained by the car industry.
Conventionally, technology has been the focus of social science interest from the point of view of its actual and potential impacts on society, or more specifically on work and the organization of labour. This follows the well-known position of technological determinism associated with some forms of Marxism: that technologies have the capacity to determine the course of historical evolution. In this view, then, the proper focus of social science attention is the effects of technology upon society. This position also draws upon views of the evolution of technology as a process whereby new developments are extrapolated from the existing (technical) state of affairs.
Against this it can be pointed out that technology is not independent of society; that ‘society’ can also have a significant impact upon the course of technological development; and that the determinist thesis is undermined by the many myriad examples where the effects of a technology diverge from the intended effects, or where a whole series of different effects result from the same technology (MacKenzie 1987; MacKenzie and Wajeman 1985).
These criticisms underpin the ‘social shaping’ approach to technology, wherein the central question is what shapes technology in the first place, before it has ‘effects’? What role does society play in shaping technology? Axiomatic to this approach is the presumption that technologies can not be considered neutral, but are the upshot of various social and political forces. A celebrated example is Winner’s (1985 [1980]) analysis of Robert Moses’s bridges on Long Island, New York: the apparently unremarkable structural form of these bridges is said in fact to embody the social class bias and racial prejudice of their designer. The bridges were designed with a low headway; buses could not pass under them, so that poor people and Blacks, who were habitually dependent on bus transportation, were kept off the roads. Hence the technology embodies sociopolitical factors.
A similar theme occurs in attempts to apply social constructivism as developed for the analysis of scientific knowledge (Bijker and Law 1992; Bijker et al. 1987). We thus find the same post-Kuhnian critique of preconceptions of technology as was applied to scientific knowledge: the role of the great individual inventor must be seen in social context; technological growth can no longer be seen as a linear accumulation of artefacts each extrapolated from an existing corpus of technological achievement; technology involves social process as well as product. In short, technology is to be regarded as the upshot of a process of social construction: a stabilized design or artefact is the contingent product of social circumstances rather than the logical outcome of technical trajectory.
Similarily, technology has been construed as a cultural artefact. In this way of thinking, technology is congealed social relations, that is, a frozen assemblage of the practices, assumptions, beliefs, language, and so on, involved in its design and manufacture. Technology is thus a cultural artefact or system of artefacts which provides for certain new ways of acting and relating. The apposite slogan is that technology is society made durable: technology re-presents a form of social order (a defined concatenation of social relations) in material form (Latour 1991). It freezes and offers this fixed version of social relations such that its adequately configured users re-enact the set social arrangements. They can only ‘adequately’ (that is, socially accountably) use/make sense of the technology if they conform to the community of social relations which the technology makes available (cf. Cooper and Woolgar 1993; Woolgar 1993).
It is unclear to what extent these social science perspectives pose a radical challenge to widely entrenched preconceptions about the nature of technology. The key point of the social science critique is that technologies do not contain intrinsic (or given) technical capacities and potential; these qualities are the upshot of contingent social shaping and/or their interpretation and use. Yet, arguably, critics themselves deploy uninterrogated versions of ‘what the technology can do’. At one level, there is the danger that the social study of technology becomes a mere application of the constructivist formula, thereby overlooking the strategic significance of this form of relativism for fundamental questions about the adequacy of social science explanation.
In order further to stress the interpretive flexibility of technology, the wide and contingent variety of possible designs and uses, it has been useful to deploy the metaphor of technology as a ‘text’. The analogy highlights the social contingency of the processes of both designing (writing) and using (consuming, interpreting, reading) technology. In particular, it draws attention to the complex social relations between producers and consumers, and points to the importance of conceptions of user which are embodied by the technology text. The technology text makes available a particular reading which can be drawn upon by adequately configured users.
One benefit of this perspective is that it sets technology within a more theoretical frame of understanding how cultural artefacts in general are created and used. The production and consumption of cultural artefacts in general can be understood as occurring in virtue of the reorganization of sets of social relations. However, by comparison with other cultural artefacts, technology and science are particularly hard: that is, the congealed social relations are especially costly to unpack; by contrast, for example, cultural artefacts such as social science texts comprise social relations which seem relatively easy and cheap to dismantle.
It is a truism that technology is increasingly central to modern social life. But from an analytic point of view, there is a useful sense in which it is useful to recognize that this has always been the case; it is just that features of life once popularly regarded as technology have now been absorbed into routine. For example, writing is not now commonly thought of as a technology, yet it is a practice and system whose initial introduction provoked profound questions about the nature of reason and practice (Ong 1982). This way of broadening our conception of technology—from physical objects and their associated patterns of social organization to a more general notion of ‘a system of social arrangements’—allows us to extend the perspective developed for the sceptical analysis of inherent technical qualities.
This perspective on technology has important implications for current thinking about the relation between technology and work. On the whole, this latter tradition has followed a determinist line by concentrating on the effects upon work organization of the introduction of new technologies. The sociology of technology proposes considerably more flexibility in the interpretation, use and implementation of technology in work situations.
Technology is also an important focus for examining and confronting deeply-held preconceptions about human nature. This follows from the fact that the emergence and evolution of a new technology can become the focus of discussion and concern about potential changes to the established order of social relationships. Thus, for example, just as seventeenth-century mechanical puppets aroused substantial moral concern about the implications for qualities defined as uniquely human, so too recent debates about artificial intelligence can be understood as discussions about what, after all, are the quintessential features of human (that is, non-mechanical) nature.
Steve Woolgar
Brunel University
References
Bijker, W.E. and Law, J. (eds) (1992) Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Socio-technical Change, Cambridge, MA.
Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P. and Pinch, T. (eds) (1987) The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MA.
Cooper, G. and Woolgar, S. (1993) ‘Software is society made malleable: the importance of conceptions of audience in software and research practice’, PICT Policy Research Paper 25, Uxbridge.
Latour, B. (1991) ‘Technology is society made durable’, in J. Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London.
MacKenzie, D. (1987) Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, Cambridge, MA.
MacKenzie, D. and Wajeman, J. (eds) (1985) The Social Shaping of Technology, Milton Keynes.
Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London.
Winner, L. (1985 [1980]) ‘Do artefacts have politics?’ in D. MacKenzie and J.Wajeman (eds) The Social Shaping of Technology, Milton Keynes.
Woolgar, S. (1993) ‘The user talks back’, CRICT Discussion Paper 40, Uxbridge.
