Content area
Full Text
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = Hum Stud (2016) 39:101112
DOI 10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5
THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER
Michael Lynch1
Published online: 22 March 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract Berger and Luckmanns concept of social construction has been widely adopted in many elds of the humanities and social sciences in the half-century since they wrote The Social Construction of Reality. One eld in which constructivism was especially provocative was in Science and Technology Studies (STS), where it was expanded beyond the social domain to encompass the practices and contents of contemporary natural science. This essay discusses the relationship between social construction in STS and Berger and Luckmanns original conception of it, and identies problems that arose from indiscriminate uses of constructivism.
Keywords Science and Technology Studies (STS) Sociology of scientic
knowledge Social constructivism Natural science
Introduction
Among the many notable aspects of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmanns (1966) The Social Construction of Reality is that it is the rst book to use the terms social construction in its title (Hacking 1999: 24). Their basic argument is that stable social institutions emerge from highly exible possibilities at the individual and interactional level, which become externalized and objectivated, eventually being taken for granted as realities. New cohorts are socialized into (and through) such institutions, and deviance is managed through social control processes, so that individuals internalize and identify with the institutional norms and roles that circumscribe their actions. Knowledge, in a very broad sense of the term, runs through this circuit from individuals to institutions, and back, though Berger and Luckmann add that individuals typically do not recognize that the institutions they
& Michael Lynch
1 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10746-016-9385-5&domain=pdf
Web End = Social Constructivism in Science and Technology Studies
123
102 M. Lynch
treat as external realities are human constructs, and as such could (and under different conditions do) differ from the specic forms they currently take in a given society. Consequently, for well-socialized members of such a society, institutions that originated through social actions (as constructed orders) are now taken for granted as objective and unchangeable,...