SHOT at Fifty

Technology and Culture enters its fiftieth year of publication with the strongest revenue base in its history, a growing number of new submissions, and a publication rate of approximately 30 percent, reflecting the quality of its referees. The journal’s database can search for referees or book reviewers by expertise in subject matter, geographical area, and time period. As of this writing, the database references 4,738 people, more than 1,500 of whom being what an editor would call “go-to people.” They represent SHOT/T&C’s primary asset, a pool of expertise that has begun to expand out beyond SHOT/T&C’s early Western civilization bias to a world of research questions that more accurately reflects technological practices as global and multicultural. As the session organizers requested, our three speakers this evening approach this half-century mark variously. Tom Hughes concentrates on SHOT’s earliest years. Wiebe Bijker and Rebecca Herzig, on the other hand, attend to SHOT in the present. SHOT’s healthy state, they both argue, renders new moral challenges inescapable. I will comment on each talk and then add some observations of my own about how SHOT/T&C reached its current level of organizational maturity.

Tom Hughes

Tom Hughes takes us back to a time before the “we” that would become SHOT had taken shape. Tom’s recollections of the first two annual meetings and Technology and Culture’s first issue reveal a surprising number of questions that would help shape SHOT’s early vision: the journal’s title, Technology and Culture; the value of interdisciplinary work; failure studies as complements to success stories; Peter Drucker’s critique of historical practice as too focused on devices and not enough on work; Robert Multhauf ’s argument that science and technology practitioners were by then fully intertwined, with only blurred definitional boundaries. This thematic variety should not obscure the early field’s narrow conception of what counted as technology and who counted as technological actors of interest. A triumphant passion for Western engineering achievement pervades the discussions and publications, about which Tom observes that “one is struck by their [the founders’] neglect of preindustrial-era crafts and their emphasis on big machines and their products. . . . Not only were the founders male, but they indicated little interest in technologies which females had usually dominated.”¹

Hughes calls attention to Mel Kranzberg’s pragmatism. The makeup of the founding committee and the early tables of contents show Kranzberg’s persuasive ability to recruit high-profile early contributors, though not always their best work. Tom brings nuance to the oft-repeated mantra that SHOT’s warmth and congeniality stemmed from Mel’s commitment to encouragement and hospitality within SHOT and T&C’s author constituency: “preeminence, and not congeniality, was needed at the beginning.”² But along with recruitment strategies, Tom’s inchoate array of topics and methods points forward to what would come to be called “contextual history of technology.” Early SHOT reveals a core idea whose genius has, now at age fifty, outgrown the narrowing limitations of a 1950s worldview.

Wiebe Bijker

Wiebe Bijker affirms SHOT’s success in achieving the dream and hope of the founding generation, a coherent institutional and intellectual identity. SHOT’s healthy state leads him to urge the society “to engage with two questions that are among the most urgent challenges of humankind: globalization and vulnerability.”³ Indigenous cotton from India, suitable for low-input farming and local spinning and weaving, looks to be making a global comeback as a high-quality cloth woven from thread produced in innovative micro-spinning machines, which can operate at the village level alongside village weavers. Then, using the tools of globalization (transport, IT inventory management, etc.), indigenous Indian cotton can compete in the global marketplace. Globalization, when studied with fine-grain understanding of the technologies and cultures involved, need not default in every instance to very large international firms like Monsanto.

Bijker’s sense of technological vulnerabilities runs in two directions: technologically sophisticated societies are, because of their complexities, necessarily vulnerable to system breakdowns (think Bhopal, Chernobyl, or [End Page 624...