The Social Shaping of Technology

If you’re reading this journal, you should read this book. Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman do a brilliant job of framing the current intellectual space where sociotechnical issues are being debated. This, their second edition, comes 15 years after the Ž rst and re ects expanded attention to the roles of information and communication technologies (ICT), feminist theory, and the breadth of research regarding the intersections of technologies and people. The writing is lively, the material is timely, and the conceptual and empirical issues are central to the collective interests of those who read The Information Society. I’m not aware of similar general anthologies on the social shaping of technology (though Bijker’s 1995 book has some overlap). Within the broad community of scholars studying the roles of ICT, Kling’s (1996) anthology, Dutton’s (1999) book, and Coakes, Willis, and Lloyd-Jones’s (2000) edited volume link nicely to the material in this second edition. MacKenzie and Wajcman’s collection reminds me that our work is part of a broader dialogue on the social shaping of technology, one that is being carried across several other research domains. Seeing the literature that I know tied to examples of the social shaping of different technologies provides me an important new perspective on the role, place, and worth of research into ICT. The book’s 30 chapters are grouped into four sections: general issues, technology of production, reproductive technology, and military technology. Beyond the useful collection of articles in the Ž rst section, I don’t Ž nd these overlygeneralized groupings to be of much use. However, I found the book’s overview and the summaries at the start of each section to be excellent syntheses of the research issues that frame the social shaping of technology. Two chapters in the Ž rst section help make clear the emphasis on shaping instead of impact. Thomas Hughes’s chapter on Edison’s efforts to make an electrical distribution system is the Ž rst of these. Beyond the captivating view of history presented, this excerpt provides insight into Hughes’s theory of technological systems. This theory highlights the relationship between context, components and collections of technologies , the importance of reverse salients, and the social setting in which all this occurs. Hughes’s conceptualization of technological systems is very useful to contemporary scholars of ICT-based networks, some of Hughes’s principles Ž nd their way into actor–network theory, and we would be wise to revisit this work. The second chapter that helps me best understand the shaping (versus impact) of technology perspective is Ronald Kline’s and Trevor Pinch’s overview of the social construction of technology (SCOT)approach. In this chapter they both outline SCOT and respond to recent criticisms about the meaning of relevant social group and interpretive  exibility. Of the many Ž ne chapters in the other three sections of the book, four seem most relevant for ICT researchers. Both Paul Ceruzzi’s chapter on inventing personal computing and Linda Abbate’s chapter on packet switching networks provide vivid depictions of the social milieu in which computing takes place. Fleck’s chapter on implementing manufacturing resource planning (MRP) systems predates and also frames most of the Ž ndings arising from current work on enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations. Fourth, and for me the most illuminating , is Anne-Jorunn Berg’s dissection of the technology-Ž rst design  aws embodied in the of “house-of-the-future” concept homes. Her analysis illustrates the context of design and showcases how naive models of use can become embedded into large-scale artifacts. Certainly the theories and concepts contained in this book can inform and help shape research into ICT. However, there is very little material included in this edition