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The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology Ruth Schwartz Cowan The sociology of technology, if it is ever to justify its existence as a subdiscipline , should take as its proper domain of study those aspects of social change in which artifacts are implicated. The processes by which one artifact supplants another (technological change) or by which an artifact reorganizes social structures (technological determinism) or by which an artifact diffuses through society (technological diffusion) are fundamentally sociological in character, subsets, as it were, of the larger topic of social change. Properly constituted historical investigations can be used (and indeed must be used) as the raw material for studies of social change, but many historians of technology have had cause to wonder what “properly constituted” could possibly mean in this particular context. In their contribution to this volume Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker have provided some useful guidance on this matter. A properly constituted history of science, they remind us, should be impervious to the question of whether or not the ideas being examined historically are true or false by current standards. Similarly, they argue, a properly constituted history of technology should consider artifacts that were “failures” on the same par with artifacts that were “successes.” The task of such a historical investigation is not to glorify the successes but to understand why some artifacts succeed and others fail. To fulfill this obligation, historians of technology must be careful, as they have not often been, to track down all the possible technological solutions that have been offered to a given social problem, and then they must be equally careful to examine those solutions in the context of the time period in which the choices were being made. Today’s “mistake” may have been yesterday’s “rational choice.” Pinch and Bijker go one or two steps further, however. They assert that historical case studies, which can provide new methods for studying technology and new theories for the sociology of technology, must also be alert to the existence of what they call relevant social groups, groups that 254 Strategic Research Sites influence the creation, the demand for, the production, the diffusion, the acceptance, or the opposition to new technologies. In the history of science, they remind us, this prescription is relatively easy to fulfill because science is generated by and fills the needs of relatively circumscribed social groups; no more than a handful of European males were, for example, responsible for the destruction of the Ptolemaic universe and the construction of the Copernican. Four or five centuries later the same could still be said about those who created, confirmed, and affirmed the neo-Darwinian synthesis or the theory of plate tectonics, to cite other examples. In the history of technology the situation is different—and potentially infinitely confusing—because a large number of relevant social groups are involved in the success or failure of any given artifact (ranging, for example, from the small group of craftsmen or engineers who may be responsible for innovation to the somewhat larger group of managers who may make decisions about the innovation, to the even larger group of production experts who must turn the innovation into an artifact, to the even larger group of people who must distribute, market, and sell it, and then to the potentially even larger group of people who will consume it). Any one of those groups, or individuals acting within the context of their group identity or (worse) combinations of those groups or (even worse yet) some other group not yet enumerated (such as purchasing agents for governments), may be responsible for the success or failure of any given artifact. How is the historian of technology who wishes to become “properly constituted” going to cope with such an infinitely expandable universe of relevant social groups? Pinch and Bijker have given us a prescription but precious few suggestions about how it might be filled. In my own work I have found it possible to begin filling the prescription by focusing on the actual or potential consumer of an artifact and imagining that consumer as a person embedded in a network of social relations that limits and controls the technological choices that she or he is capable of making. The concept of network that I utilize is similar to the one defined by John Law and by Michel Callon in their separate contributions to this volume—a temporal association between heterogenous and interacting elements—but I differ from Law...

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