Excellent collection of sociologically-based texts related to the topic of sociotechnical change.
This page includes transcriptions from the following sections of Bijker & Law (1992) - Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change:
General Introduction - Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law - page 1
I. DO TECHNOLOGIES HAVE TRAJECTORIES? - page 17
II. TRAJECTORIES, RESOURCES, AND THE SHAPING OF TECHNOLOGY - page 105
III. WHAT NEXT? TECHNOLOGY, THEORY AND METHOD - page 201
11. Postscript: Technology, Stability, and Social Theory - John Law and Wiebe E. Bijker - page 290
A number of chapters from this text have been split off into their own pages. These include the following:
1. The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change - John Law and Michel Callon - page 21
3. The Social Construction of Fluorescent Lighting, or How an Artifact Was Invented in Its Diffusion Stage - Wiebe E. Bijker - page 75
6. Artifacts and Frames of Meaning: Thomas A. Edison, His Managers, and the Cultural Construction of Motion Pictures - W. Bernard Carlson - page 175
7. The De-Scription of Technical Objects - Madeline Akrich - page 205
8. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts - Bruno Latour - page 225
9. A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies - Madeline Akrich and Bruno Latour - page 259
[3] {technology, pure, compromise, development, momentum, beauty, creation, design, build} The idea of "pure" technology is nonsense. Technologies always embody compromise. Politics, economics, theories of the the strength of materials, notions about what is beautiful or worthwhile, professional preferences, prejudices and skills, design tools, available raw materials, theories about the behavior of the natural environment -- all of these are thrown into the melting pot whenever an artifact is designed or built.
[3] {technology, determinism, technological determinism, science, momentum, trajectory, transition, transformation, change} Technologies do not, we suggest, evolve under the impetus of some necessary inner technological or scientific logic. They are not possesed of an inherent momentum. If they evolve or change, it is because they have been pressed into that shape.
[3] {technological, social, technology, society, pure, boundaries, blur, engineering, public} We need to remind ourselves that when we talk of the technoligical, we are not talking of the "purely" technological -- that no such beast exists. Rather we are saying that the technological is social. Already, then, we find that we need to blur the boundaries of categories that are normally kept apart. There is no real way of distinguishing between a world of engineering on the one hand and a world of the social on the other.
[7] {artifact, compromise} ...artifacts embody trade-offs and compromises. In particular, they embody social, political, psychological, economic, and professional commitments, skills, prejudices, possibilities, and constraints.
[8] {technology, paradigm, momentum, determinism, technological determinism, innovation, trajectory} ...technologies do not provide their own explanation. If there is no internal technical logic that drives innovation, then technologically determinist explanations will not do. This means that we should be similarly cautious of explanations that talk of technical trajectories or paradigms. Even if we can identify a paradigm, this does not mean that we have thereby identified what it is that drives the way in which it is articulated. And even if we can observe a trajectory, we still have to ask why it moves in one direction rather than another.
[8-9] {history, determinism, technological determinism, change} There is no grand plan to history -- no economic, technical, psychological, or social "last instance" that drives historical change.
[9] {technological change, technology, innovation} ...technologies are born out of conflict, difference, or resistance... Such differences may or may not break out into overt conflict or disagreement.
[9] {inventors, innovators, technology, protagonist, inventor} Technologies, then, form part of, or are implicated in, the strategies of protagonists.
[9-10] {settling, firming, technology, stabilize, network, accomodation} ...how do they firm up? ...a technology is stabilized if and only if the heterogeneous relations in which it is implicated, and of which it forms a part, are themselves stabilized. In general, then if technologies are stabilized, this is because the network of relations in which they are involved -- together with the various strategies that drive and give shape to the network -- reach some kind of accommodation. Little can be said about this process in the abstract.
[11] {technology, invention, innovation, context, unpredictability} Technology does not spring, ab initio, from some disinterested found of innovation. Rather, it is born of the social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place. A product of the existing structure of opportunities and constraints, it extends, shapes, reworks, or reproduces that structure in ways that are more or less undpredictable. And, in so doing, it distributes, or redistributes, opportunities and constraints equally or unequally, fairly or unfairly.
[17] {technology, invention, innovation, cycle, life cycle, trajectory, path} The idea that technologies have natural trajectories is deeply built into the way we talk. Almost as deep is the notion that any individual technology moves through a natural life cycle: from pure through applied research, it moves to development, and then to production, marketing, and maturity. As we have stated in the introduction, many recent studies in the social history and sociology of technology suggest that these models of innovation are quite inadequate.
[107] {technology, innovation, push, pull, supply, demand, invention, promise, dream, expectation} ...technological innovation may start neither with invention (technology push) nor with consumer demand (demand pull) but rather in an interactive, time-dependent, process of sociotechnological bootstrapping in which promises about technoogies and social relations are played off against one another in the search for durable solutions.
[201] {actor network theory, technological frame, society, technology} Notions like technological frame and actor-network... all assume that the social and the technical are constituted and distinguished in one movement...
[290] {social, technological, society, technology, determinism, social determinism, technical determinism, heterogeneity} All relations should be seen as both social and technical... Purely social relations are found only in the imaginations fo sociologists, among baboons, or possibly, just possibly, on nudist beaches; and purely technical relations are found only in the wilder reaches of science fiction. This, then is the postulate of heterogeneity -- a postulate suggesting that both social determinism and its mirror image, technological determinism, are flawed. This is because neither the (purely) social nor the (exclusively) technical is determinant in the last instance. Indeed, what we call the social is bound together as much by the technical as by the social. Where there was purity, now there is heterogeneity. Social classes, occupational groups, organizations, professions -- all are held in place by intimately linked social and technical means.
[290] {dead media, historiography, symmetry, failure, losers, winners, archaeology, genealogy, Bloor, 1976} ...Bloor's (1976) principle of symmetry -- the demand that true and false beliefs (or, in the case of technology, both devices that work and those that fail) -- should be analyzed in the same terms.
[296] {inside, outside, interior, exterior} But how is the inside distinguised from the outside?...physical exclusion... shifts in materials and media... [and] organizational arrangements...
[301-302] {technological frame, frame, definition} The notion of technological frame (see Bijker 1987) refers to the concepts, techniques, and resources used in a community -- any community, not simply a community of technologists. Technological frame is thus a combination of the explicit theory, tacit knowledge, general engineering practice, cultural values, prescribed testing procedures, devices, material networks, and systems used in a community... Technological frame is thus concerned with structuring relations, whether social or technical. It is also a bridge between structure and action. And that bridge both points to ways in which structure may be influenced by action and makes it possible to predict that certain kinds of structure will lead to one kind of action, and other structures to alternative actions.
[302-303] {radical innovation, innovation, invention, inventor, creativity, very cool concept!} The... situation considered by Bijker (and here his case is the early history of the bicycle) occurs when there is no single dominant group and, as a result, no effective set of vested interests. Under such circumstances, if the necessary resources are available to a range of actors, there will be many different innovations. Furthermore, these innovations may be quite radical. More than in the other cases, the success of an innovation depends on the formation of a constituency, a group that comes to adopt the proposed technological frame.