Social Construction of Technology: Its Antecedents and Evolution

Seminar in Theory: LIS 6278 Dr. Michelle Kazmer

Florence Paisey: Paper Two fmp04@fsu.edu April 2011

2 Science and technology have been related since the 19th century. However, the link between the two became obvious during WWII when science-based innovation underpinned advanced technologies. Such science-based innovations included pharmaceuticals, biomedicine, military technologies, nuclear power, chemicals, agriculture, IT, and communications (Law, 2008 p. 625). Following the war, technoscience (Haraway, 1997) was challenged by public scrutiny and fear that the innovations produced may have promised powerful advancement in health sciences, standards of living, and energy resources, but could also precipitate devastating consequences if misused and abused. Nuclear armament and potential war as well as the possible abuse of stem cell research were two of the many issues. Technologists, scientists, and their allies responded to this public concern in various ways. One of the most influential means in responding to public concern involved C. P. Snows Rede Lectures on the two cultures (Snow, 1959). C. P. Snow declared that each culture, the sciences and the humanities, were ignorant of the other. Snow viewed the two areas of intellectual activity as divided and argued that academe should bridge the two camps with the aim of balancing the vision of each. Both cultures, the scientific and the humanities, required education in the others knowledge base and values. Noted scientists and humanities scholars debated Snows assertions, yet his views prevailed and facilitated the foundation of science studies. Science studies aimed to examine the methods, theories, and outcomes of science as social phenomena (Van House, 2005). British higher education forged the discipline of science studies with the intent of broadening perspectives in both science and the humanities. Four principal schools of thought emerged from this endeavor all were interdisciplinary. The two most significant were science as ideology and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). These two strains of science studies garnered the most attention and both challenged the neutrality and elitism that had previously characterized the scientific endeavor as well as studying the materials and practices of science rather than scientific knowledge construction (Van House, 2005). One specific book influenced science studies significantly. This work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), came out of the history of science. Kuhns work debunked the stereotypical, deterministic notion of scientific endeavor and achievement.

3 Through case studies, Kuhn examined the role of organizational, procedural, and instrumental standards in scientific investigation, thus identifying the conditions under which scientists may perceive paradigmatic anomalies that, in turn, led to scientific discovery. These conditions involved a scientists perception and acceptance of observed anomalies. Such perception and its acceptance (despite resistance from established theory and authority) further investigation, which ultimately results in theoretical and paradigmatic change. In recognizing this process, Kuhn demonstrated that paradigmprescribed practices of investigation together with their associated apparatuses combine in contributing to both the conditions of stability in the scientific enterprise and potential perception of incongruent, anomalous occurrences during experimentation. Kuhn elevated the significance of apparatuses or technologies by emphasizing that a scientific paradigm largely determined the materials used to elaborate details of it. Within this perspective, a particular scientific paradigm and the apparatuses used for observation and measurement entwine inextricably variables reside in the apparatus that affect the outcome of investigations and ones perception of the outcome. Kuhn states, The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not the given of an experience, but the collected with difficulty (p. 126). In view of this, scientists working within different paradigms would employ different apparatuses or technologies. Each scientific paradigm prescribes specific laboratory conditions for its investigation. Scientists investigate each scientific paradigm with prescriptive procedures, operations, technologies, and human behaviors. As such, scientific laboratories can be viewed through the lens of their paradigms and allied behavioral repertoires, technological necessities, and priorities. Each scientific laboratory is a social and cultural microcosm. Not only are psychology and human perception implicated, but also sociological dimensions or community and culture. Kuhns description of scientists in terms of their investigation of paradigms and associated technologies widened the image of what constituted scientific endeavor. Rather than view science wholly in terms of abstract theorem and law, science also became identified with the way it was done; the techniques, technologies, conditions, and behaviors associated with its practice. In this way, the sociology of science and the sociology of technologies both became formal,

4 though separate disciplines of study. Kuhns recognition that scientific inquiry necessitates supportive material artifacts blurred the boundaries between theorem and artifact, creating a sense of fluidity between the two fields. However, while science studies and the sociology of science became a burgeoning field of inquiry, the sociology of technology emerged as a credible discipline, but continued as a second cousin to science. The traditional academic division and associated attitudes and activities between pure science and innovative technologies remained. Science and technology carried on in separate frames they were each marked off by a separate set of boundary markers or brackets of a conventionalized kind (Goffman, 1972 p. 252). Their definitions and purposes diverged; each of their roles and repertoires on the scientific stage varied. A scientist arrived at the laboratory with a circumscribed role that implicitly reflected variables related to social norms the imprimatur of the superior nature of pure science, disinterestedness in monetary interests, and its detached, positivist orientation (Merton, 1957). Where a scientist arrived with a transcendent role; a technologist arrived with a material, relational, and pragmatic role a role that some viewed as parasitic on fundamental science (Cotgrove, 1970). The positivist orientation and attitudes persisted, science [was] about the discovery of truth, whereas technology was about the application of truth (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1989). The scope of the scientist was higher order thought and conceptualization; the scope of the technologist was something akin to a mechanic. Nonetheless, Kuhns perspective on scientific achievement had hit the mark. While the social traditions that defined science and scientists were slow to erode, the formal conception of the scientific endeavor had become inseparable from its apparatuses, materials, practices, and technologies. At the start, science studies and science, technology, and society studies (STS) focused on the social organization of scientific communities, the variables at play, the norms and associated values, and the processes of construction of scientific knowledge (Bijker & Pinch, 1984). Science, technology, and society studies (STS) unified many disciplines with the aim of opening the black box of technology and understanding the socio-economic influences pressed into both the content of technologies and processes of innovation (Williams & Edge, 1996 p. 866). STS was antithetical to technological determinism, maintaining that an assemblage

5 of social factors influenced the inscriptions embedded in technology. STS drew on history, history of science, science studies, science and technology studies, sociology of scientific knowledge, education, philosophy of science, anthropology, and technology (Law, 2008). Research in STS was initially conducted through case studies and then followed with ethnographies. The first and groundbreaking ethnography was Laboratory Life (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). This study recorded the microprocesses of negotiation with how the work is done, what it means, what is known, whose work is good, and so on (Van House, 2005 p. 11). It examined the behavior and interaction of the scientists as well as the material artifacts and how methodologies and equipment are embodied with skill and produce observable findings. With these studies, There was an even greater insistence on the materiality of the laboratory, its apparatuses, its physical organisation, and its practices (Law, 2008). Van House (2005) identifies numerous aspects in which STS relates to information studies. A few of these uses include the importance of informal and formal methods of sharing and evaluating information, reputation economies, and the significance of practice, equipment, and technicians in the construction of knowledge as well as the publication of papers. Latour & Woolgar (1986) state that participants in their study affirmed that the primary objective of their work was the production of papers. Following Latour & Woolgars groundbreaking laboratory study, many STS researchers shifted their focus to the social shaping of technology (SST). The emphasis in the social shaping of technology (SST) is in how the design and implementation of technology are patterned by a range of social and economic factors as well as narrowly technical considerations (Edge & Williams, 1996). Proponents of SST maintained that technology and artifacts are shaped by the meanings ascribed to them within a constellation of subjective human realities, social interactions, and the inscription that resides within the technology. With regard to information studies, both SST and STS have focused on information and communication technologies and socio-technical systems such as digital libraries. Within the social shaping of technology, several theoretical frameworks can be mapped. Such frameworks include Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Activity Theory, Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), Symbolic Interactionism, and Feminist STS,

6 among others. Each of these frameworks offers a means of describing and interpreting how sociotechnical factors and interactions affect human associations as well as how human or social associations affect the direction and construction of knowledge, associations, and technologies. The social construction of technology (SCOT) is explicitly and singularly concerned with how sociotechnical factors play into the development, closure, and stabilization of technology and artifacts. This framework is a direct outgrowth of social constructivism and emphasizes how individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. Social constructivism argues that social phenomena are created, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans. Such social phenomena include social organization, knowledge, technologies, artifacts, and the characteristic materiality of cultures. The social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is (and must be) reproduced by people acting on their perceptions, interpretations, and their knowledge of reality. In other words: With such a program [social construction] all knowledge and all knowledge claims are to be treated as socially constructed; that is, explanations for the genesis, acceptance, and rejection of knowledge claims are to be sought in the domain of the social world rather than in the natural world (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987 p.18). Because social constructs, as facets of reality and objects of knowledge are not "given" by nature, they must be constantly maintained and re-affirmed in order to persist. Williams and Edge (1996) point out the significance of embedded socioeconomic patterns in the both the content and the processes of social construction and innovation. The socioeconomic basis of technological development is nowhere more evident than with the complex enterprises of the innovator-entrepreneurs Thomas Edison and George Eastman. Each inventor presided over companies that adapted their innovations to social factors (including geographical) and manufactured, marketed, and distributed these innovations (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987). In the contemporary era, a parallel might be Mark Zuckerburg and associates who developed and marketed Facebook. If anything is socially shaped, constantly maintained and reaffirmed to persist, it must be Facebook!

7 One of the seminal papers that relates social constructionism to technology is Bijker & Pinchs The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other (1984). They state, science and technology are both socially constructed cultures and bring to bear whatever cultural resources are appropriate for the purposes at hand (p. 404). They emphasize that technological shaping occurs with the meaning that social groups assign to technology and the problems stipulated within this meaning. SCOT views the development of technology as an interactive process or discourse among technologists or engineers and relevant (or interested) social groups stakeholders. These interested groups or stakeholders feature largely on the social landscape. It is at this nexus; the juncture between science and technology on the one hand and society or social interests on the other that the social construction of technology takes off. The central concepts that guide the process of social shaping in SCOT include relevant social groups, interpretive flexibility, controversies, closure, and stabilization. Each relevant social group is characterized by particular variables and each group holds a stake in a particular technology. Each stakeholder or group characterizes innovations with variant problems and solutions. These stakeholders might be entrepreneurs, economists, politicians, educators, students or any cohesive group with an identity. The problems and solutions that these social groups identify trace the path of interpretive flexibility and ultimate stabilization for the artifact. The interpretive flexibility of the artifact denotes how differently various stakeholders perceive its potential value, use, and efficacy. In addition to these central concepts in the application of SCOT, two other aspects are significant. These are the technological frame and inclusion. A technological frame refers to the problem-solving ideas and practices employed by a technological community or inventor. This is a multifaceted concept and includes what counts as a problem as well as the strategies available for solving the problems and the requirements a solution has to meet (Bijker, 1987). In Bijkers view, a technological frame includes current theories and practice, testing procedures, market, social groups, and goals. In order for an innovation to come about, the inventor not only needs the scientific

8 background to experiment, but also needs to see the potential of the product the inventor must have vision and translate that vision into a practical goal. The translation of technological vision or foresight into a practical goal necessarily includes the significant interested social groups. The notion that social groups weigh in and influence or shape the direction of an innovation relates to inclusion within the technological frame. Given that a technological frame is multifaceted, actors or social groups will be diverse and view the innovation from different perspectives and controversies with varying degrees of interest. The more inclusive or multidimensional the technological frame, the better chance that the innovation will attain closure and ultimate stabilization. This surface summary of the antecedents of the social construction of technology (SCOT) has emphasized how technologies or apparatuses have realized their intrinsic worth in the scientific endeavor. Moreover, in achieving this position, it became clear that neither scientific achievement nor technological innovation proceeded along a detached, linear, deterministic path. Rather, scientific anomalies and social factors influence the discovery, construction, design, and production of knowledge and technology. One of the many theories on how the social shapes technology is the social construction of technology (SCOT). This theoretical framework offers a means of analyzing how social factors shape innovations and how the process of innovation, in turn, provides insight into problems and their solutions.

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