SHOT at Fifty

Abstract

Technology and Culture enters its fiftieth year of publication with the strongest revenue base in its history, a growing number of new submissions, and a publication rate of approximately 30 percent, reflecting the quality of its referees. The journal's database can search for referees or book reviewers by expertise in subject matter, geographical area, and time period. As of this writing, the database references 4,738 people, more than 1,500 of whom being what an editor would call go-to people. They represent SHOT/T&Cs primary asset, a pool of expertise that has begun to expand out beyond SHOT/ T&C's early Western civilization bias to a world of research questions that more accurately reflects technological practices as global and multicultural. As the session organizers requested, our three speakers this evening approach this half-century mark variously. Tom Hughes concentrates on SHOTs earliest years. Wiebe Bijker and Rebecca Herzig, on the other hand, attend to SHOT in the present. SHOT's healthy state, they both argue, renders new moral challenges inescapable. I will comment on each talk and then add some observations of my own about how SHOT/ T&C reached its current level of organizational maturity.