From its advent in the latter 1980s, the 'new' sociology of technology purposefully focused its attention on the emergence and design of major new technologies. This was due in large measure to the intellectual heritage of the sociology of scientific knowledge. But it was also, justifiably, a reaction against the technological determinism of most 'impact' studies in the 'technology and society' tradition. Yet, the 1987 book which really put constructivist sociology of technology on the map, The Social Construction of Technological Systems, included in its collection an article by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, 'The Consumption Junction',' which challenged the emerging orthodoxy by calling for research into the sociotechnical processes surrounding users, not just designers in particular, ordinary people and consumer technologies rather than the powerful institutions and large industrial or military technologies which have been the focus of most seminal work since. Making Technology Our Own? is a collection of work which analyzes the dynamics between technology, gender and everyday life, very much in the spirit of Cowan's appeal. Significantly, it comes from Norway, where there are already established streams of work on these topics,2 and a wider civic commitment to increasing user influence over the shaping of technology (for example, in the workplace). Making Technology Our Own? is thus explicitly a political as well as an academic project, with the question mark apparently challenging both technological optimism as well as technological pessimism. In a very thoughtful introductory synthesis of relevant theory, Merete Lie and Knut Sorensen argue that the concept of everyday life which spans traditional sociological boundaries of work and home, reproduction and production is vital to understanding 'the highly ambiguous nature of modern technology [because] technology is a standardizing globalizing, and bureaucratizing effort [which] is always appropriated and re-embedded in a local context when it is put to use' (16-17). Although the book is largely written for a technology studies audience, the editors