Teaching the Social Construction of Technology: Time to Revise or Time to Forget?

A wealth of classical texts has been produced in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This literature plays an important role in teaching. Apart from being used to educate new generations of academicians, teaching is also a way in which members of a scientific community engage with the theoretical foundations of their field. While acknowledging the value of the STS heritage, a range of issues has arisen due to the nature of the classical texts. Many of these texts were written in the 1980s and include claims that may be viewed in a different light today. Those teaching the classical STS literature not only need to take early reviews into account but also recent findings that are relevant to the issues at stake. In this paper, I discuss Pinch and Bijker’s “Social Construction of Technology” (SCOT) and point out weaknesses in this highly regarded work. The findings of contemporary cycle research challenge the empirical foundation upon which Pinch and Bijker developed the conceptual claims of SCOT. Against this backdrop, the goal of writing this paper was to encourage a critical reading of Pinch and Bijker’s classical work and propose a way in which the “Social Construction of Technology” can be taught in an informed way.

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