The Social Construction of Technological Systems ─ New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of socialstudies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry--social construction of technology, orSCOT--that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The bookhelped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteenessays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys,eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, theyaffirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight totechnical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effectsof the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume--collectively called SCOT(after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after thepublication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from aSCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor of Technology and Society at the University of Maastricht. Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Thomas P. Hughes is Emeritus Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.