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Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion John Law If you want to learn how to pray, go to sea. —Portuguese proverb, quoted by Diffie and Winius (1977) How do objects, artifacts, and technical practices come to be stabilized? And why do they take the shape or form that they do? In this chapter I advocate and exemplify an approach to these questions that stresses (1) the heterogeneity of the elements involved in technological problem solving, (2) the complexity and contingency of the ways in which these elements interrelate, and (3) the way in which solutions are forged in situations of conflict. This “network” approach draws on and parallels work by Callon (1980 and this volume) and is developed in relation to secondary empirical material about the technology of the fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Portuguese maritime expansion. In order to clear the ground and situate my argument, I start by commenting briefly on two alternative approaches to the social study of technology. The first approach is sometimes called social constructivism.1 This outgrowth of the sociology of science assumes that artifacts and practices are underdetermined by the natural world and argues that they are best seen as the constructions of individuals or collectivities that belong to social groups. Because social groups have different interests and resources, they tend to have different views of the proper structure of artifacts. Accordingly , the stabilization of artifacts is explained by referring to social interests that are imputed to the groups concerned and their differential capacity to mobilize resources in the course of debate and controversy. Social constructivists sometimes talk of this process as one of “closure.” Closure is achieved when debate and controversy about the form of an artifact is effectively terminated. The merits of the social constructivist approach are obvious. Many artifacts are, indeed, forged in controversy and achieve their final form 106 Simplifying the Complexity when a social group, or set of groups, imposes its solutions on other interested parties by one means or another. The fate of the electric vehicle in France (Callon, this volume) is amenable to such analysis, as are such other cases as the British TSR-2 aircraft (Law 1985), the Concorde aircraft (Feldman 1985), the third airports of London and Paris (Feldman 1985), the bicycle (Pinch and Bijker 1984 and this volume), and aspects of the development of missile guidance systems (MacKenzie, this volume).2 Indeed, it is easy to think of examples. Whenever there is controversy, the contingent and constructed nature of artifacts becomes manifest, and explanations in terms of differential power and social interests become attractive. The second approach, which comes from the history of technology and in particular from the work of T. P. Hughes (1979a, 1983, this volume), understands technological innovation and stabilization in terms of a systems metaphor. The argument is that those who build artifacts do not concern themselves with artifacts alone but must also consider the way in which the artifacts relate to social, economic, political, and scientific factors. All these factors are interrelated, and all are potentially malleable. The argument, in other words, is that innovators are best seen as system builders: They juggle a wide range of variables as they attempt to relate the variables in an enduring whole. From time to time strategic problems arise that stand in the way of the smooth working or extension of the system. Using a military metaphor, Hughes talks of these problems as reverse salients, and he shows the way in which entrepreneurs tend to focus on such problems and juxtapose social, technical, and economic variables as they search for a solution. Hughes’s study of Edison illustrates both the systemic nature of much technological activity and the importance of the notion of a reverse salient. Edison’s problem (his reverse salient) was simultaneously economic (how to supply electric lighting at a price that would compete with gas), political (how to persuade politicians to permit the development of a power system), technical (how to minimize the cost of transmitting power by shortening lines, reducing current, and increasing voltage), and scientific (how to find a high-resistance incandescent bulb filament). That Edison succeeded in resolving this set of problems reveals his success as a system builder, and it also shows that, as Hughes puts it, “the web is seamless”—that the social was indissolubly linked with the technological and the economic.3 The social constructivist and systems approaches have much in common. First, they concur that technology is not fixed by...

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