Why is there no discipline of technology in the social sciences?

Abstract

In this paper, I try to understand why no major field of technology ever emerged in the English-language social sciences, using 19th century anthropology as a case study. According to etymology, technology should refer to a logos, a field of study or discourse, about techne, technical knowledge and practice. Yet no such general field exists. Instead, during first half of the 20th century, the English term technology lost its earlier meaning as a field of study, becoming roughly equivalent to the 19th century term industrial arts. In this sense, technology is clearly a form of human activity that should fall under the purview of the social sciences. But technology does not exist as an established field of study in any social science, even under another name. At the end of the 19th century, however, technology was proposed as one of the core fields in the emerging field of anthropology by John Wesley Powell, one of the founders of the discipline in the United States. Yet Franz Boas, a young German scholar who had recently moved to the United States, argued against this focus on technology, in part because of its links to the dominant evolutionary paradigm, which Boas opposed. Similar stories can be culled from the history of other social sciences, such as economics and sociology. What accounts for this pattern? Although no single explanation suffices, this pattern is rooted in the deeply ingrained prejudice among intellectuals that favors works of the mind over works of the hand, and theory over practice.