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  • How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology
  • Philip Scranton (bio)
How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. vii+340. $40.

This collection originated in a series of panels at the 1999 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Given the broadly "present/ recent" orientation of much 4S scholarship, it is unsurprising that seven of the twelve essays offer minimal historical perspective, and only three of the five that are historically grounded reference the era before 1965. Still, sophisticated contemporary work of the sort presented here can contribute valuably to research strategies, not least through evoking and analyzing promising conceptual and theoretical venues and invoking themes and domains where more historical study would be useful.

In their introduction, Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch provide a critical [End Page 818] overview of theoretical approaches to user dynamics in the construction and appropriation of technologies. Their evaluation of social-construction-of-technology, actor-network, feminist, and cultural-studies perspectives provides ideal reading for graduate students and experienced researchers alike. The empirical studies seek to employ these methods and concepts creatively, attending to familiar technological themes (electrification, computers, automobiles) and to appreciably more novel ones (vaccination, contraception), both for users and non-users/resisters. Five essays focus on the politics of medical and health technologies, although only one of these places them in a historical context. In my own research, I have sought to find in-depth, post-1940 studies in this area, with negligible results. There appears to be ample room for historians to move beyond the household into institutional settings for activating and consuming technologies. Institutions represent underexplored locales with perhaps distinctive users, designers, gender issues, feedback blockages, and power relations.

This institutional emphasis has been important to anthropology's "communities of practice" literature, several of whose scholars—such as Lucy Suchman and Julian Orr—are cited in this volume, but without having real influence. Indeed, contributors Dale Rose and Stuart Blume argue that the attention science, technology, and society studies pay to technology-user "configurations" too often ignores "the structures (markets or non-markets) within which technologies are designed and made available" (p. 127). They note that these structures include corporations, hospitals, and sports arenas, and stress the need to achieve a focus on the role of the state, which points to a plausible agenda for research on medical technologies and no doubt others as well.

In a richly documented and carefully developed cross-national study that repays close reading, Rose and Blume take up the theoretical and political dimensions of vaccination. They explore the complex negotiations attending state-mandated/state-promoted vaccination programs, the variants of collective protection, and the politics and epistemology of contests between citizens and agencies. Wholly different, but equally provocative, is Trevor Pinch's analysis of missionary work for the Moog synthesizer's portable model, the Minimoog, during the early 1970s. One adept salesman deserves credit for reframing perceptions of the Moog (and its successors) from recording-studio oddities to bandstand necessities. Reaching out from this, Pinch argues somewhat grandly that technical salespeople are the "missing masses" in technology-user studies. I suspect he is right, though only further research across a range of technologies will indicate how large these masses were and what roles they actually played. An essay by Ellen van Oost treats gendered electric-shaver designs (and their marketing) by Philips from the late 1930s through the 1990s. Well-illustrated and cogently argued, this study chiefly confirms well-appreciated understandings of gender and design rather than opening new research paths. [End Page 819]

The other historically inflected contributions come from scholars familiar to SHOT members, Ronald Kline and Johan Schot, the latter's essay coauthored with the accomplished Adri Albert de la Bruhèze. Kline's article, drawn from his larger work on rural technological change, provides a concise summary of that study's key points on telephony and electrification. Schot and de la Bruhèze explore the mediation of innovation in the Netherlands, identifying two strikingly different postwar processes for paper milk cartons and snack foods. In an...

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