SCOT Answers, Other Questions: A Reply to Nick Clayton

We welcome the opportunity offered by the editor of T&C to engage in this debate. As well as addressing specific questions raised by Nick Clayton we hope to move the discussion forward by focusing in particular upon the role of theoretical concepts in the history of technology. Clayton criticizes our account of the history of the bicycle and concludes that overall SCOT does not answer. We will readily concede that Clayton, as a specialist historian of the bicycle, is able to offer a more complete historical narrative drawing upon research not available to us eighteen years ago, but we will also argue that his conclusion about the (in)adequacy of SCOT does not hold and is based upon a misconception of the relationship between theory and empirical evidence in the history of technology (or indeed any other field).

Our essay "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other," in which we outlined the approach known as SCOT, was programmatic.¹ The original journal article (longer, and published three years earlier than the account in the book) was published as a discussion paper.² It reviewed different bodies of literature and was written to stimulate theoretical debate over how best to do the sociology and history of technology. It used historical vignettes (in the original version drawn from both science and technology) to illustrate the sort of theoretical approach we advocated. The book published by one of us, although going into more empirical detail, was explicitly conceived of as a theoretical contribution toward understanding the development of technology and offered an explicit disclaimer not to offer new findings on the history of the bicycle.³ Given this, we could easily dismiss Clayton's critique as misdirected and irrelevant. We will not do so, however. We want to take up the challenge for two very different reasons. The first is that indeed we highly value empirical research as one of the cornerstones of technology studies. This implies that even when we use case studies merely as illustrative examples we would like them to be empirically sound. A discussion about their empirical adequacy is thus wholly appropriate. The second reason to take up Clayton's challenge is a more fundamental issue: Clayton seems to misunderstand the interplay of theoretical and empirical work in the history (and sociology) of technology.

We will thus take this debate into two arenas: first, the empirical details of the history of the bicycle; second, the interaction between theoretical concepts and empirical data. (In practice it will be difficult to separate the two.) We note in passing that Clayton has himself made some factual errors. However, we first need to clear away some mistakes. Clayton misunderstands what constitutes SCOT. He shows this confusion early on when he writes that "All of the contributors to The Social Construction of Technological Systems claimed to be following the SCOT approach." This is patently false. In the general introduction to that volume the editors explained that "three approaches played a more or less dominant role and hence have guided the studies in this volume" (p. 4), and named these as "the social constructivist approach," the "systems" approach, and the "actor networks" approach.⁴ In defense of Clayton, we note that many other careless readers have made this mistake. We will not use our limited space here to summarize SCOT.⁵ In the context of this debate, it is sufficient to follow Clayton's discussion of three SCOT concepts.

Clayton discusses three (or rather four) central concepts of SCOT: relevant social groups, interpretative flexibility, and closure and stabilization. His general strategy is to point to (supposed) empirical errors in the bicycle case study and then conclude that the concepts must be wrong. This is an elementary non sequitur...