Anti Anticonstructivism or Laying the Fears of a Langdon Winner to Rest

Abstract

In recent paper, Langdon Winner (1993) characterizes new sociology of technology as an intellectual tragedy. Assuming high moral ground, he accuses everyone linked with of being, among other things, elitist, implicitly conservative, blase, and politically naive. Winner appears to be declaring war on something despicable and asking each of us to make our loyalties known: are you one of us or one of them? Although accepting that important differences exist among leading practitioners of social constructivism and that some of writers he mentions might actually object to being classified as constructivists, Winner maintains that basic disposition and viewpoint of constructivist remains fairly consistent (p. 366) and that beyond dispute there has been a concerted push to affirm social constructivism as coherent mode of analysis and to include or exclude writers according to their degree of adherence to new canonical standard (p. 377). After being confronted with Winner's call to arms against heinous constructivism, it is relief to have some characteristically wise and instructive words from Clifford Geertz. According to Geertz, a scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying (1984,263). The fear and loathing Winner expresses toward social constructivism strongly resembles harmful pattern of intellectual dread that Geertz identifies under rubric antirelativism. Winner wishes to whip up something like anticonstructivism. I feel no particular inclination to defend an extremely amorphous research program that, for want of better name, can be labeled the social construction of technology; and yet, I do feel compelled to condemn