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General Introduction The origin of this book can be traced back to the Burg Landsberg, an old castle crowning a steep hill in Deutschlandsberg, Austria. This is a remote place without worldly temptations, and the participants of the first meeting of the newly formed European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) could but stick together and work hard.1 It was here, during a cocktail session in the early evening of September 25, 1982, that two of the three editors of this book met for the first time. Encouraged by their concurring interests in a constructivist approach to the study of technology and by drinking the famous regional pink champagne, Trevor Pinch, a sociologist of science, and Wiebe Bijker, a sociologist of technology , decided to start a joint project. The object would be to bring together Pinch’s detailed studies of the development of science with Bijker’s studies of technology. Pinch obtained a scholarship and moved for half a year from the University of Bath to the Twente University of Technology. Eventually this research resulted in a number of papers in which Pinch and Bijker argued that an integrated approach to the social study of science and technology would be feasible and fruitful. Specifically, they proposed a social constructivist approach, thereby extending the relatively new but already wellestablished sociology of scientific knowledge into the realm of technology. In passing, they discarded most of the existing approaches to technology advocated by historians, philosophers, and economists. This general condemnation , although it had the benefit of defining their stance quite clearly, obviously lacked subtlety. Whatever its cause—youthful enthusiasm or the pink champagne—they would soon be corrected. The first results of the joint project were presented to an atelier de recherche in Paris, March 1983. At this meeting were a number of French and British sociologists of science. The response was somewhat more than Bijker and Pinch had expected. Clearly, among students of scientific xl General Introduction knowledge there was an emerging interest in the social study of technology . A snowball started rolling. In some Paris restaurant a group of four agreed to convene a meeting later that year in order to pursue this new approach—a sociology of technology. Two months later a letter was dashed off to inform more colleagues of this meeting. The number of participants by this stage had increased to fifteen. In their reactions some of these sociologists argued for the need to invite historians of technology also. Now being a couple of months older and a little wiser, Bijker and Pinch happily agreed. Tom Hughes was spotted in Europe, and other American historians of technology were contacted during a visit by Bijker to the United States in November 1983. The number of participants increased to twenty. Now the rolling snowball was growing almost out of control. Offers to participate in the workshop started to come in from unexpected corners. We felt like football trainers who have to decide which players are allowed on the field and which are condemned to the substitutes’ bench. The only solution we saw to this problem was to continue in the “pink champagne style”: without any formal guidelines and with just our own implicit criteria about the works’ being interesting. We had decided to adhere strictly to a maximum of thirty participants, because we thought that a larger number would hamper the emergence of the kind of collective discussion we hoped for. Inevitably this excluded many scholars who could have contributed greatly. However, we did not want to run the risk of the workshop breaking down into small subgroups with parallel lines of discussion. After all, we were organizing a workshop, not a conference. Drawing on our experiences in the Burg Landsberg, we located the workshop in De Boerderij (“The Farm”) on the campus of the Twente University of Technology. The modern architecture of De Boerderij, with its combination of high ceilings and low timbers, into which many a head bumped, constrained and concentrated our intellectual endeavor. Escape from this building would lead you into the Dutch countryside with even fewer worldly temptations than the Austrian mountains could offer. A heavy program, rental bicycles to move between the hotel and De Boerderij, and the food and drink at hand further defined the circumscribed environment . The work ethic prevailed. As has been noted elsewhere,2 this pressure cooker could have easily exploded. The differences in historical, sociological, and philosophical approaches and the idiosyncrasies of six different nationalities meant...

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