Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change (review)
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Ralph Schroeder challenges what he labels the new “orthodoxy” of social constructivism which asserts that “science and technology never determine social change in and of themselves or independently” (p. 1). Schroeder’s mission is a worthy one; every notion that threatens to become conventional wisdom ought to be called out (even if I am myself called out as an “extreme” constructivist [p. 101]). Schroeder sees his book as a “defense of scientific and technological determinism” (p. 5).
Schroeder, a scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute, argues that the critics of technological determinism are correct in this sense: Science and technology do not necessarily, in themselves, alter life outside of their own sphere of rational action. However, the critics are wrong in subsuming science and technology within other spheres of life, as simply part of culture. Rather, science and technology alter the extra-social world, the material conditions of life, and thus, indirectly, the social world. Schroeder contends, for example, that the automobile, telephone, and television “had the uniform effect of diversifying leisure and sociable activities” (p. 99), even if they did not change the quality of personal relationships. One way that we can see the deterministic effects of technology, he contends, is in the convergence in their development across societies—in, for example, the pervasiveness of automobile use in both Sweden and the United States.
The great bulk of this short book is devoted to discussing and debating theories of science and technology. Indeed, Schroeder begins the concluding chapter by listing the many new concepts he has now added to the discussion. In this way, Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change fits into the English cultural studies tradition of abstract and theoretical inquiry. Schroeder’s empirical materials are essentially illustrative. Rather than trying to canvass the research literature, here and there he draws on a published empirical study to make his point. This approach is somewhat alien to historians of technology, with their emphasis on extensive and detailed [End Page 679] empirical work. Given that Schroeder has been involved in studying computer-aided communications and “virtual communities,” concrete examples from that work would have enriched the book.
For the most part Schroeder circumscribes his claims for technological determinism, but at one level he makes an expansive claim. Borrowing from Max Weber, he repeatedly writes of science and technology “disenchanting” the world (e.g., p. 35 and pp. 124–25), meaning that they displace the mystical and magical in human culture with rational, instrumental analysis. Even though this is a taken-for-granted trope in many theoretical circles, one wonders about its empirical validity. After all, about three times as many Americans today believe in angels as believe in evolution.
No doubt Schroeder would expect some push-back from adherents of a more constructivist position, whether it be followers of Bruno Latour on science or of Wiebe Bijker et al. on technology. He has provided the service of forthrightly challenging a position with which students of technology perhaps have become too comfortable.
Dr. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include the Dexter Prize–winning America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992) and, coauthored, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last Hundred Years (2006).
