The Social Construction of Artefacts: a Response to Pinch and Bijker

Abstract

In their paper on 'The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts', Pinch and Bijker advocate an integrated social constructivist approach to explaining scientific knowledge and technological artefacts, suggesting how each separate sociological field might benefit the other. In particular, they compare the Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR) for science and the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) programme. They suggest that since their explanatory goals are similar, a relativist approach, and concepts such as 'interpretative flexibility' and 'closure', may be useful in both. I am concerned here with technology rather than science, except insofar as EPOR may have influenced SCOT or come to do so as the relationship is furthered.1 I fully support the objective of developing an explanation of the content of technology as a social product, and so I welcome Pinch and Bijker's discussion. I agree with their criticisms of economists' 'black box' treatments, linear models of innovation, and descriptive historiography. I want, however, to identify a number of weaknesses in the SCOT approach as described in the paper in particular, its espousal of relativism and of an evolutionary model of technological change; its treatment of 'social groups'; and its explanation of their means of influence on development. I shall argue that to transfer the concepts of a sociology of science to technology is to ignore basic differences between the two, as activities and as products. We should do better to try to situate the social processes producing technologies in an established framework that