SCOT Answers, Other Questions: A Reply to Nick Clayton

We welcome the opportunity offered by the editor of T&C to engage in this debate. As well as addressing specific questions raised by Nick Clayton we hope to move the discussion forward by focusing in particular upon the role of theoretical concepts in the history of technology. Clayton criticizes our account of the history of the bicycle and concludes that overall SCOT does not answer. We will readily concede that Clayton, as a specialist historian of the bicycle, is able to offer a more complete historical narrative drawing upon research not available to us eighteen years ago, but we will also argue that his conclusion about the (in)adequacy of SCOT does not hold and is based upon a misconception of the relationship between theory and empirical evidence in the history of technology (or indeed any other field). Our essay “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,” in which we outlined the approach known as SCOT, was programmatic.1 The original journal article (longer, and published three years earlier than the account in the book) was published as a discussion paper.2 It reviewed different bodies of literature and was written to stimulate theoretical debate over how best to do the sociology and history of technology. It used historical vignettes (in the original version drawn from both science E X C H A N G E

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