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The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research. Edited by Keith Grint and Rosalind Gill. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995. Pp. vii+216; notes, index. $24.95 (paper).
The publication of Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, and Thomas Hughes's edited volume The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) introduced many historians of technology to the methods and scholarship of sociologists of technology. Within the pages of that yellow volume some of us made our first acquaintance with SCOT, EPOR, and Actor Network Theory (ANT) . The Gender-Technology Relation offers readers interested in following the development of the "broad church of social construction" (p. 18) a new set of issues and methods to engage with. Like previous encounters, this volume offers historians a mixture of potentially useful tools and innovative ideas as well as frustrating jargon and unexamined assumptions about both technology and history.
Historians are not the intended primary audience for this collection of essays. Instead, the authors hope to contribute to a debate between...