Chapter 15
Social Construction of Technology
The social construction of technology is one approach among several constructivist ways of studying science and technology that emerged in the 1980s. Here, “constructivist” means that the truth of scientific facts and the working of technical artifacts are studied as accomplishments – as being constructed rather than as intrinsic properties of those facts and machines. The term “social construction of technology” can be used to denote two different things. First, it is a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. And, second, it is a theory about the development of technology and its relation to society.
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