Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 21 (Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker)

"The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts" (1987)

Background notes:

• Pinch = sociologist and former chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Cornell University
• Pinch = significant contributor to the study of Sound culture, and his books include a major study of Robert Moog 
• Bijker = Dutch professor, chair of the Department of Social Science & Technology at the Faculty of Arts & Culture in the Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands 
• Bijker = fields of research include social and historical studies of science, technology and society; theories of technology development; methodology of science, technology and society studies; democratisation of technological culture; science and technology policies; ICT, multimedia and the social-cultural dimensions of the information society; gender and technology; and meta studies of architecture, planning, and civil engineering.
• They started the movement known as Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) within the sociology of science. Advocates of SCOT--social constructivists--argue that technology does not determine human action, but that human action shapes technology. They also argue that the ways in which a technology is used cannot be understood without understanding how that technology is embedded in its social context.
• SCOT holds that those who seek to understand the reasons for acceptance or rejection of a technology should look to the social world. It is not enough, according to SCOT, to explain a technology's success by saying that it is "the best"--researchers must look at how the criteria of being "the best" is defined and what groups and stakeholders participate in defining it. In particular, they must ask who defines the technical criteria by which success is measured, why technical criteria are defined in this way, and who is included or excluded. SCOT is not only a theory, but also a methodology: it formalizes the steps and principles to follow when one wants to analyze the causes of technological failures or successes.
  

Reading Response:
Pinch and Bijker are social constructionists (in fact, they started the movement). In their work, they emphasize invention (that science is essentially a human process, rather than predetermined), and they criticize holistic views of technology. Their interest in successes and failures in innovation interested me. By examining the detailed and heterogeneous structure of specific technologies, and focusing on groups of inventors and users, we may be able to see the social negotiations that produce and determine final and accepted facts and artifacts (through a social consensus). Through their integrated approach, using EPOR and SCOT, they suggest that a social study of science and technology will benefit from each other's independent sociologies. This will lead us to a method for determining how (or even whether) we can distinguish science from technology.