Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. J.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1987, 2012).
Anniversary edition with foreword by Deborah G. Douglas and a new preface by Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch
This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry–social construction of technology, or SCOT–that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies.
The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume–collectively called SCOT (after the volume’s title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.
From the Foreword by Deborah G. Douglas
(…) This book was astonishing when it was first published. “Combustible,” “constructive,” “catalytic,” and “creative” were the alliterative quartet of adjectives that I wrote down in my seminar notes in the fall of 1987. The book was hot off the press when Professor Arnold Thackray assigned it to all incoming graduate students in the introductory seminar of the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of our older classmates had read drafts of one or two of these essays or had heard Professor Tom Hughes describe the 1984 workshop at the University of Twente, but our class was the first to perceive the sociology of technology not as a provisional idea but rather as received knowledge. Within weeks we cracked the binding of our respective copies as we considered—“ discussed” and “argued” are more accurate ways of putting it—the ideas herein. The phrase, “shaped and shaped by,” quickly became part of our vernacular and identity as scholars.
Wiebe Bijker is Professor of Technology and Society at FASoS, Maastricht University.
