A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

The Social Construction of Technology as a Heuristics for Research

As a heuristics for studying technology in society, the social construction of technology can be laid out in three consecutive research steps (Bijker 1995).

Key concepts in the first step are “relevant social group” and “interpretive flexibility.” An artifact is described through the eyes of relevant social groups. Social groups are relevant for describing an artifact when they explicitly attribute a meaning to that artifact. Thus, relevant social groups can be identified by looking for actors who mention the artifact in the same way. For describing the high-wheeled Ordinary bicycle in the 1870s, such groups were, for example, bicycle producers, young athletic Ordinary users, women cyclists, and anti-cyclists. Because the description of an artifact through the eyes of different relevant social groups produces different descriptions – and thus different artifacts – this results in the researcher’s demonstrating the “interpretive flexibility” of the artifact. There is not one artifact; there are many. In the case of the Ordinary bicycle: there was the Unsafe machine (through the eyes of women) and there was the Macho machine (through the eyes of the young male Ordinary users). For women, the bicycle was a machine in which your skirt got entangled and from which you frequently made a steep fall; for the “young men of means and nerve” riding it, the bicycle was a machine with which to impress a lady.

In the second step, ...