The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.)

Citation

Bruni, A. (2003), "The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.)", Information Technology & People, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2003.16116bae.004

The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.)

The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.)

Edited by D. MacKenzie and J. WajcmanOpen University PressBuckingham,Philadelphia1999480 pp.ISBN: 0-335-19914-3 (hardback); 0-335-19913-5 (paperback)£16.99 (paperback); £50.00 (hardback)

Social relations and technological artefacts

Etymologically, “technology” (as the authors remind us in the Introduction), comes from the Greek words techne and logos, that is knowledge as well as artefact. The paradigm that considers science and technology as separate domains and activities appears today as a naïve perspective no longer acceptable in a society characterised by what Lasch (2001) has aptly named “technological forms of life”. A sociological approach views technology and science as intimately connected in post-industrial societies and its interest and peculiarity lie exactly in studying how scientists produce technology as well as how technologists develop science. In recent years, sociologists have stressed the fictitious nature of the science/technology distinction (Pickering, 1992 a, b), arguing for a new and anti-humanist conceptualization of the boundaries between humans, animals and machines (Lynch and Collins, 1998). Ethnographic and socio-historical investigations of scientific practices and controversies highlighted the intimate connections between the social interactions, textual rhetorics, cognitive processes, representations of reality and political alliances that form the “black-box” (Latour, 1987) of a technological innovation and/or diatribe (Law, 1992).

In accordance with this debate, MacKenzie and Wajcman propose not to take dichotomies (social/natural, human/artificial, science/technology, action/ mechanism) for granted, but to consider the everyday practices of scientific and technological researchers, how they benefit from (and sometimes contrast with) one another and how the development of a technological artefact can be thought of as a social process of “variation” and “selection”.

Starting from this perspective, the book collects the pioneer work of Winner, Hughes, Klein, Pinch and Fleck to suggest that different groups of actors might interpret the “same” technological object differently. Such a view implies that the stabilization of an artefact is basically a process of negotiation between different groups of social actors. This could easily be seen as just another version of what Pinch and Bijker (1987) have named “interpretative flexibility” of technology, but from MacKenzie and Wajcman’s perspective it indicates the possibility for an object (once defined) to be more or less compatible with the technologies and social relations already in existence. Stressing the “social shaping” (instead of the “social construction”) of technologies allows the editors to avoid the interpretations (and the critics) that assume that there is no other “reality” besides what is socially (and contingently) constructed and to highlight how “reality” is not an external factor, but an issue inextricably linked to the materiality of technological objects. The sociality of technological artefacts is developed by MacKenzie and Wajcman, referring to the political (Winner), economic (Braverman), historical (Noble), organizational (Suchman) and gender dimensions (Cockburn) of technologies, together with what appears to be a self-reproductive technological field, such as the military industry (Weber).

The basic assumption is that technological artefacts develop a “sociality” linked to the practices and the interactions of the wider social context and that every new technology cannot develop in a totally independent direction from the technological forms that precede it. This remark underlines the diverse “durability” of technological objects, the power relations embedded in them, the affordances (Gibson, 1979) peculiar to a technology and its participation in the reproduction of the social. And this, I believe, is the crucial point which makes this 2nd edition different from the previous one.

The technological assemblage of human interactions

As the editors state in the Introduction (p. 18): “Emphasis on the social shaping of technology is wholly compatible with a thoroughly realist, even a materialist viewpoint”. This is an important issue, because it concentrates on one of the core critiques that are usually advanced at the so-called “social constructionist” approach. The shift from a paradigm of “technological determinism” to a paradigm of “technology as social construction” has too often led researchers to deny or forget what seems to be a loop-process between technology and social relations. In other words, affirming the influences that social relations have on technology does not necessarily mean to discredit the influence of technological artefacts on the social world. Moreover, we could think about “social” and “technological” as two labels whose main aim is to organize reality in distinct spheres and domains and whose definition is an effect of the relations of the multiple intermediaries involved in the situation. In Callon’s (1991) definition, an “intermediary” is anything that puts actors in contact and defines their relations. From this point of view, actors too are intermediaries; yet (according to Callon (1991)) they are authors because they circulate other intermediaries and, in so doing, they mix, concatenate and transform them. The correspondence between actors and authors is something reliable only a posteriori, that is, they are not due to intrinsic properties and are constantly subject to revisions.

Continuing this line of thought, we enter a new approach, often called actor-network theory, developed in its origins by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law and “represented” in the book by an article by Strum and Latour. In this approach, agencies, identities, technologies and social worlds are an unstable assembly of human and non-human elements. Social relations can thus be analyzed as the product, unstable and only partly under the individual’s control, of a “heterogeneous engineering” (Law, 1994) which arranges human and non-human elements into a stable artefact. Assuming a sensibility moulded by anti-essentialist assumptions, we may state that the “social” and the “technological” are the effect of a network of relations which give material form and stability to an artefact. They are not a substance but an enactment performed into being, as heterogeneous practices are engineered into an action net. Actor-network theory (ANT) is directly linked with what Law (1994) calls “relationally materialist sociology” which conceives “reality” as an effect generated in a network of heterogeneous materials. Under Latour’s definition, ANT is a theory that states that we can obtain more by following circulations than by defining entities or essences or, in Latour’s terms (1999, p. 20), “a crude method to learn from the actors without imposing on them an a priori definition of their world-building capacities”.

Sadly (and this is the only criticism I could arouse), MacKenzie and Wajcman do not engage with this debate, confining themselves to a few remarks regarding the “philosophical ambitions” of actor-network theory and its advocacy for a radical “symmetry” in the treatment of human and non-human actors. The authors prefer to let the reader engage in a variety of perspectives, which, from Marx’s theses to the “cyborg witnesses” of Donna Haraway, show how technologies and social spaces produce together socio-technical scenarios. In MacKenzie and Wajcman’s book technological objects and social contexts mix with each other constantly to develop heterogeneous spaces of action. Constructing technology, one might conclude, is just an occasion to assemble the social.

Attila BruniUniversity of Trento, Trento, Italy