General Introduction

General Introduction The origin of this book can be traced back to the Burg Landsberg, an old castle crowning a steep hill in Deutschlandsberg, Austria. This is a remote place without worldly temptations, and the participants of the first meeting of the newly formed European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) could but stick together and work hard.1 It was here, during a cocktail session in the early eve ning of September 25, 1982, that two of the three editors of this book met for the first time. Encouraged by their concurring interests in a constructivist approach to the study of technology and by drinking the famous regional pink champagne, Trevor Pinch, a sociologist of science, and Wiebe Bijker, a sociologist of technology, decided to start a joint project. The object would be to bring together Pinch’s detailed studies of the development of science with Bijker’s studies of technology. Pinch obtained a scholarship and moved for half a year from the University of Bath to the Twente University of Technology. Even tually this research resulted in a number of papers in which Pinch and Bijker argued that an integrated approach to the social study of science and technology would be feasible and fruitful. Specifically, they proposed a social constructivist approach, thereby extending the relatively new but already well-established sociology of scientific knowledge into the realm of technology. In passing, they discarded most of the existing approaches to technology advocated by histo rians, philosophers, and economists. This general condemnation, although it had the benefit of defining their stance quite clearly, obviously lacked subtlety. Whatever its cause—youthful enthusiasm or the pink champagne— they would soon be corrected. The first results of the joint project were presented to an atelier de recherche in Paris, March 1983. At this meeting were a number of French and British sociologists of science. The response was somewhat more than Bijker and Pinch had expected. Clearly, among students of scientific knowledge there was an emerging interest in the social study 2 General Introduction of technology. A snowball started rolling. In some Paris restaurant a group of four agreed to convene a meeting later that year in order to pursue this new approach—a sociology of technology. Two months later a letter was dashed off to inform more colleagues of this meeting. The number of participants by this stage had increased to fifteen. In their reactions some of these sociologists argued for the need to invite historians of technology also. Now, being a couple of months older and a little wiser, Bijker and Pinch happily agreed. Tom Hughes was spotted in Europe, and other American historians of technology were contacted during a visit by Bijker to the United States in November 1983. The number of participants increased to twenty. Now the rolling snowball was growing almost out of control. Offers to participate in the workshop started to come in from unexpected corners. We felt like football trainers who have to decide which players are allowed on the field and which are condemned to the substitutes’ bench. The only solution we saw to this problem was to continue in the “pink champagne style”: without any formal guidelines and with just our own implicit criteria about the works’ being interesting. We had decided to adhere strictly to a maximum of thirty participants, because we thought that a larger number would hamper the emer gence of the kind of collective discussion we hoped for. Inevitably this excluded many scholars who could have contributed greatly. How ever, we did not want to run the risk of the workshop breaking down into small subgroups with parallel lines of discussion. After all, we were organizing a workshop, not a conference. Drawing on our experiences in the Burg Landsberg, we located the workshop in De Boerderij (“The Farm”) on the campus of the Twente University of Technology. The modern architecture of De Boerderij, with its combination of high ceilings and low timbers, into which many a head bumped, constrained and concentrated our intellectual endeavor. Escape from this building would lead you into the Dutch countryside with even fewer worldly temptations than the Austrian mountains could offer. A heavy program, rental bicycles to move between the hotel and De Boerderij, and the food and drink at hand further defined the circumscribed environment. The work ethic prevailed. As has been noted elsewhere,2 this pressure cooker could have easily exploded. The differences in historical, sociological, and philo sophical approaches and the idiosyncracies of six different national ities meant that the workshop could have been a dialogue of the deaf. However, quite the contrary happened. All the participants ap peared to have come not only to talk but also to listen. Almost every General Introduction 3 one played an active part, either by presenting a paper or by acting as a discussant. The workshop was marked by an open and sympathetic intellectual atmosphere, and discussions of a genuinely interdisciplin ary nature occurred. More specifically, a high tolerance was shown for different and sometimes even incompatible concepts and ap proaches. If a new idea was not found to be immediately convincing, it was not knocked down but discussed critically and then “carried along” to later sessions while we suspended final judgment. New strands of discussion emerged, linking different papers together on a level that no one had envisaged in advance. At the end of the workshop the intellectual excitement was such that it was decided to publish a special journal issue or a book on the basis of the papers and the discussions. This volume is the result. The intellectual excitement, if we may use these grandiose words once more, has continued long after the workshop. Authors have been stimulated by the discussions and have revised their contributions substantially. In some chapters new empirical results have been incorporated. Of course, the workshop cannot claim all, or even most, of the credit for this. On the contrary, the success of the workshop is symptomatic of a generally emerging interest in a new type of tech nology study. Other indications of this new interest are the recently published books edited by Rachel Laudan (1984a) and by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (1985). This new type of technology study can be characterized by three trends in the sort of analysis attempted. Authors have been concerned with moving away from the individual inventor (or “genius”) as the central explanatory concept, from technological determinism, and from making distinctions among technical, social, economic, and political aspects of technological development. The last point has been aptly summarized by using the metaphor of the “seamless web” of society and technology. The two edited collections mentioned provide an adequate account of the origins of these trends. Moreover, together they provide a fairly comprehensive review of the relevant literature of previous traditions in the history, sociology, and philosophy of technology. Hence we have restricted ourselves in this book to giving only a short sketch of the well-established traditions from which we define our point of departure (Pinch and Bijker, this volume). “Technology” is a slippery term, and concepts such as “technolog ical change” and “technological development” often carry a heavy interpretative load.3 It seems unfruitful and indeed unnecessary to devote much effort to working out precise definitions at least at this stage of the research in progress. Three layers of meaning of the word 4 General Introduction “technology” can be distinguished (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985). First, there is the level ofphysical objects or artifacts, for example, bicycles, lamps, and Bakelite. Second, “technology” may refer to activities or processes, such as steel making or molding. Third, “tech nology’’can refer to what people know as well as what they do; an example is the “know-how” that goes into designing a bicycle or operating an ultrasound device in the obstetrics clinic. In practice the technologies dealt with in this collection cover all three aspects, and often it is not sensible to separate them further. Also, instead of trying to distinguish technology from science (or indeed from any other activity) in general terms, it seems preferable to work from a set of empirical cases that seem intuitively paradigmatic. In this volume a broad range of technologies is examined, including bicycles, missiles, ships, electric vehicles, electric power systems, the cooking stove, pharmaceuticals, ultrasound, dyes, and expert systems. Having said what we are trying to get away from, where are we heading? It is too early to specify this with any precision without violating the fruitful and stimulating heterogeneity of the emerging field. In the context of the workshop, however, it can safely be said that three approaches played a more or less dominant role and hence have guided the studies in this volume. The first, the social construc tivist approach, has been inspired by recent studies in the sociology of scientific knowledge.4 Key concepts within this approach are “inter pretative flexibility,” “closure,” and “relevant social groups.” One of the central tenets of this approach is the claim that technological artifacts are open to sociological analysis, not just in their usage’but especially with respect to their design and technical “content.” The second approach, stemming largely from the work of the historian of technology Thomas Hughes, treats technology in terms of a “sys tems” metaphor. This stresses the importance of paying attention to the different but interlocking elements of physical artifacts, institu tions, and their environment and thereby offers an integration of technical, social, economic, and political aspects. Moreover, the key concepts of “reverse salient” and “critical problem,” which define the parts of a system where at certain stages innovative energy is focused, enable us to link the micro- and macrolevels of analysis.

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