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The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987; paper ed., 1989. xi + 405 pp. References, index. Paper, $35.00. ISBN: 0-262-52137-7.
How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies. Edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. ix + 340 pp. References, index. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $20.00. ISBN: cloth, 0-262-15107-3; paper, 0-262-65109-2.
The Social Construction of Technological Systems, first published in 1987, is the classic statement of the social construction of technology (SCOT) research school that emerged in the sociology and history of technology in the 19805. How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, published sixteen years later, shares a common editor (Trevor Pinch) and an intellectual background with the former book, but sees itself as representing and addressing social studies of science and technology, which have now moved beyond the SCOT school. Both volumes drew the focus of scholars toward technology users, the latter more forcefully and with sharper focus than the former. The move toward users represented by these books has profoundly influenced my own work, both in what these scholars consider and in what they ignore.
The first edited volume, consisting of four sections with several papers in each, claims to represent a "new type of technology study" (p. 3). Part One of the book, "Common Themes in Sociological and Historical Studies of Technology," includes three essays: one by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, laying out the precepts of social construction and showing that they apply as much to technology as to science; one by Thomas P. Hughes on his notion of "technological systems"; and one by Michel Gallon, illustrating the actor-network approach. All three chapters, using varied examples, deny that science and technology are distinct or that innovation is linear. Indeed, they portray the innovation process as one involving variation, selection, and stabilization of technology. All three also show that the traditional independent inventor was not alone during the period of "interpretive flexibility" that preceded the technology's stabilization. Pinch and Bijker illustrate the role of social groups such as bicycle clubs and women cyclists in shaping the Penny-farthing bicycle. Hughes...