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Foreword Deborah G. Douglas The ideas of this book are everywhere. Collectively, the authors of these essays have captured the most ancient and most modern notions of history and the telling of the story of technology. It is, quite simply, a treasure. However, every author, every publisher when contemplating a reprint has a fundamental concern: is this book now a relic or does it still have relevance and the capacity to shape a discipline? By analogy, I found myself thinking about a quarter-century-old Boston road map, which I recently discovered in my car’s glove compartment. It was fascinating as a historical document about the city I have called home off-and-on since 1973, but it is no longer a good guide to the current terrain. For sentimental reasons, I was thrilled that this book would remain in print and accessible, but I wondered, how would new readers consider this volume? This book was astonishing when it was first published. “Combustible,” “constructive,” “catalytic,” and “creative” were the alliterative quartet of adjectives that I wrote down in my seminar notes in the fall of 1987. The book was hot off the press when Professor Arnold Thackray assigned it to all incoming graduate students in the introductory seminar of the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of our older classmates had read drafts of one or two of these essays or had heard Professor Tom Hughes describe the 1984 workshop at the University of Twente, but our class was the first to perceive the sociology of technology not as a provisional idea but rather as received knowledge. Within weeks we cracked the binding of our respective copies as we considered —“discussed” and “argued” are more accurate ways of putting Deborah G. Douglas is the curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum. A specialist in aerospace history, Douglas is the author of American Women and Flight since 1940 and has curated more than two dozen exhibitions on a wide variety of science and technology topics. viii Foreword it—the ideas herein. The phrase “shaped and shaped by” quickly became part of our vernacular and identity as scholars. Not everyone has been quite as enamored by the social construction of technology as my Penn cohorts. It is, after all, a bold thing to lay claim to a new discipline, so it is important to acknowledge that this book proved as irritating to some as it was exhilarating to others. As a young and impressionable scholar, I read the book’s introduction as a descriptive (and exciting !) account of scholarly practice. For me, the thirteen essays were not, as some have since implied, dogmatic treatises but rather were like accounts of the various ascents up a mountain. Each offered a new insight, a pathway that enabled one to get to a place with a new and meaningful view of an important historical topic. As a scholar at the midpoint of my academic career, I now have a much deeper appreciation of the fact that those who commit themselves professionally to the study of technology revel in the field’s interdisciplinary qualities and limited licensure for practice. There is great freedom in heterogeneity . So looking at the book today, it is more audacious than I had originally thought. It is one thing to announce that there is such a field of inquiry as the “sociology of technology” and quite another to assert a formal method of inquiry. Since this book’s original publication, some of its contributors have become forceful and articulate advocates for the latter, and I see now that the intellectual agenda of what is now called the SCOT Program is unambiguous. The source of all epistemic power is based in constraint. All models, all methods of analysis, and all belief systems, no matter the duration of the scholar’s embrace, demand the acceptance of a particular structural framework to the exclusion of all other alternatives. For there to be technology, one has to be willing to offer at least a provisional definition; for there to be a field of scholarly endeavor, there has to be a community willing to identify with a common set of ideas. Whether or not one agrees with the ideas of social construction, the certainty and power with which anyone today can claim to being a scholar of technology owes much to this book. It is possible to read this new edition merely as a kind of historiographical...

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