---
title: "Theories of technology"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_technology"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:26:44.901095+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Other Stances ===
Additionally, many authors have posed technology so as to critique and or emphasize aspects of technology as addressed by the mainline theories. For example, Steve Woolgar (1991) considers technology as text in order to critique the sociology of scientific knowledge as applied to technology and to distinguish between three responses to that notion: the instrumental response (interpretive flexibility), the interpretivist response (environmental/organizational influences), the reflexive response (a double hermeneutic). Pfaffenberger (1992) treats technology as drama to argue that a recursive structuring of technological artifacts and their social structure discursively regulate the technological construction of political power. A technological drama is a discourse of technological "statements" and "counterstatements" within the processes of technological regularization, adjustment, and reconstitution.
An important philosophical approach to technology has been taken by Bernard Stiegler, whose work has been influenced by other philosophers and historians of technology including Gilbert Simondon and André Leroi-Gourhan.
In the Schumpeterian and Neo-Schumpeterian theories technologies are critical factors of economic growth (Carlota Perez).

== Analytical theories ==
There are theories of technological change and innovation which are not defined or claimed by a proponent, but are used by authors in describing existing literature, in contrast to their own or as a review of the field.
For example, Markus and Robey (1988) propose a general technology theory consisting of the causal structures of agency (technological, organizational, imperative, emergent), its structure (variance, process), and the level (micro, macro) of analysis.
Orlikowski (1992) notes that previous conceptualizations of technology typically differ over scope (is technology more than hardware?) and role (is it an external objective force, the interpreted human action, or an impact moderated by humans?) and identifies three models:

The technological imperative: focuses on organizational characteristics which can be measured and permits some level of contingency
Strategic choices: focuses on how technology is influenced by the context and strategies of decision-makers and users
Technology as maker of structural changes:: views technology as a social object
DeSanctis and Poole (1994) similarly write of three views of technology's effects: 

Decision-making: the view of engineers associated with positivist, rational, systems rationalization, and deterministic approaches
Institutional school: technology is an opportunity for change, focuses on social evolution, social construction of meaning, interaction and historical processes, interpretive flexibility, and an interplay between technology and power
An integrated perspective (social technology): soft-line determinism, with joint social and technological optimization, structural symbolic interaction theory
Bimber (1998) addresses the determinacy of technology effects by distinguishing between the:

Normative: an autonomous approach where technology is an important influence on history only where societies attached cultural and political meaning to it (e.g., the industrialization of society)
Nomological: a naturalistic approach wherein an inevitable technological order arises based on laws of nature (e.g., steam mill had to follow the hand mill)
Unintended consequences: a fuzzy approach that is demonstrative that technology is contingent (e.g., a car is faster than a horse, but unbeknownst to its original creators become a significant source of pollution)

== References ==

== Bibliography ==
Bentley, Raymond (2019). Technological Change In The German Democratic Republic, Routledge
Denis, A. and Valacich, J. (1999). Rethinking media richness: towards a theory of media synchronicity. Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science.
Desanctis, G. and Poole, M. S. (1990). Understanding the use of group decision support systems: the theory of adaptive structuration. In J. Fulk, C. S., editor, Organizations and Communication Technology, pages 173–193. Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
MacKensie, D. and Wajcman, J (1985) The Social Shaping of Technology, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Pinch, T. and Bijker, W. (1992). The social construction of facts and artifacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In Bijker, W. and Law, J., editors, Shaping Technology/Building Society, pages 17–50. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.