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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social construction of technology | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_technology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:12:17.191936+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Relevant social groups ==== The most basic relevant groups are the users and the producers of the technological artifact, but most often many subgroups can be delineated – users with different socioeconomic status, competing producers, etc. Sometimes there are relevant groups who are neither users, nor producers of the technology, for example, journalists, politicians, and civil organizations. Trevor Pinch has argued that the salespeople of technology should also be included in the study of technology. The groups can be distinguished based on their shared or diverging interpretations of the technology in question.
==== Design flexibility ==== Just as technologies have different meanings in different social groups, there are always multiple ways of constructing technologies. A particular design is only a single point in the large field of technical possibilities, reflecting the interpretations of certain relevant groups.
==== Problems and conflicts ==== The different interpretations often give rise to conflicts between criteria that are hard to resolve technologically (e.g., in the case of the bicycle, one such problem was how a woman could ride the bicycle in a skirt while still adhering to standards of decency), or conflicts between the relevant groups (the "Anti-cyclists" lobbied for the banning of the bicycles). Different groups in different societies construct different problems, leading to different designs.
=== Second Stage: Closure === The second stage of the SCOT methodology is to show how closure is achieved. Over time, as technologies are developed, the interpretative and design flexibility collapse through closure mechanisms. Two examples of closure mechanisms:
Rhetorical closure: When social groups see the problem as being solved, the need for alternative designs diminishes. This is often the result of advertising. Redefinition of the problem: A design standing in the focus of conflicts can be stabilized by using it to solve a different, new problem, which ends up being solved by this very design. As an example, the aesthetic and technical problems of the air tire diminished, as the technology advanced to the stage where air tire bikes started to win the bike races. Tires were still considered cumbersome and ugly, but they provided a solution to the "speed problem", and this overrode previous concerns. Closure is not permanent. New social groups may form and reintroduce interpretative flexibility, causing a new round of debate or conflict about a technology. (For instance, in the 1890s automobiles were seen as the "green" alternative, a cleaner environmentally-friendly technology, to horse-powered vehicles; by the 1960s, new social groups had introduced new interpretations about the environmental effects of the automobile, eliciting the opposite conclusion.)
== Subsequent extension of the SCOT theory == Many other historians and sociologists of technology extended the original SCOT theory.
=== Technological Frame ===
=== Relating the content of the technological artifact to the wider sociopolitical milieu === This is often considered the third stage of the original theory. For example, Paul N. Edwards shows in his book "The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America" the strong relations between the political discourse of the Cold War and the computer designs of this era.
== Criticism == In 1993, Langdon Winner published a critique of SCOT entitled "Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology." In it, he argues that social constructivism is an overly narrow research program. He identifies the following specific limitations in social constructivism:
It explains how technologies arise, but ignores the consequences of the technologies after the fact. This results in a sociology that says nothing about how such technologies matter in the broader context. It examines social groups and interests that contribute to the construction of technology, but ignores those who have no voice in the process, yet are affected by it. Likewise, when documenting technological contingencies and choices, it fails to account for those options that never made it to the table. According to Winner, this results in conservative and elitist sociology. It is superficial in that it focuses on how the immediate needs, interests, problems and solutions of chosen social groups influence technological choice, but disregards any possible deeper cultural, intellectual or economic origins of social choices concerning technology. It actively avoids taking any kind of moral stance or passing judgment on the relative merits of the alternative interpretations of a technology. This indifference makes it unhelpful in addressing important debates about the place of technology in human affairs. Other critics include Stewart Russell with his letter in the journal Social Studies of Science titled "The Social Construction of Artifacts: A Response to Pinch and Bijker". Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti criticize the concept of social construction of technology for being a false dichotomy with a technologically determinist straw man that ignores third, fourth and more alternatives, as well as for overlooking the process of how the technology is developed as something that can work. For example, accounting for which groups would have interests in a windmill cannot explain how a windmill is practically constructed, nor does it account for the difference between having the knowledge but for some reason not using it and lacking the knowledge altogether. This distinction between knowledge that have not yet been invented and knowledge that is merely prevented from being used by commercial, bureaucratic or other socially constructed factors, which it is argued that SCOT overlooks, is argued to explain the archaeological evidence of rich technological cultures in the aftermath of the collapse of civilizations (such as early medieval technology in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, which was much richer than it is depicted as by the "Dark Medieval" stereotype) as a result of technology being remembered even when prevented from being used with the potential to being put into use when the artificial repression is no longer in place due to societal collapse.
== See also == History of science and technology Industrial sociology Science and technology studies (STS) Social shaping of technology Social shaping of technology Sociocultural evolution Sociology of scientific knowledge Systems theory Technology and society Technology dynamics Theories of technology
== Notes ==
== References == Pinch, Trevor J. and Wiebe E. Bijker. "The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other." Social Studies of Science 14 (August 1984): 399–441.doi:10.1177/030631284014003004 Russell, Stewart. "The Social Construction of Artefacts: Response to Pinch and Bijker." Social Studies of Science 16 (May 1986): 331–346.doi:10.1177/0306312786016002008 Pinch, Trevor J. and Wiebe E. Bijker. "Science, Relativism and the New Sociology of Technology: Reply to Russell." Social Studies of Science 16 (May 1986): 347–360. Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Sismondo, Sergio. "Some Social Constructions." Social Studies of Science, 23 (1993): 515–53.
== External links == STS Wiki