Vulnerability in Technological Cultures: New Directions in Research and Governance ed. by Anique Hommels, Jessica Mesman, and Wiebe E. Bijker (review)

In 2009, Technology and Culture published an essay by Wiebe Bijker, one of the editors of this volume, titled “Globalization and Vulnerability: Challenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary.” In that essay, Bijker argued that “vulnerability” should be central to the Society for the History of Technology’s agenda for its second fifty years. Vulnerability in Technological Cultures has the even more ambitious aim of using “vulnerability” as a means of connecting the insights of STS with the research agendas of social scientists engaged in studying risk. Ultimately, the editors tell us, they hope this intervention will result not just in empirical insights but changes in policymaking.

What does “vulnerability” mean in the context of risk studies? Before I read this volume, I thought I knew. The term is widely used in disaster studies to call attention to the particularly devastating effects disaster events can have on people who are already socially vulnerable because of poverty, racism, or other causes. In this collection, people can be vulnerable, but so can technological systems. Vulnerability can be negative, but it can also have positive effects. In the introduction, the editors even prescribe “broadening the analysis from risk to vulnerability” (p. 3), seemingly suggesting that risk and vulnerability are overlapping or even interchangeable terms.

The essays range widely over a variety of topics and approaches. Some are highly theoretical, others are based on traditional sociological and anthropological fieldwork; many involve a mixture of theory, prescription, and empirical examples. None are explicitly historical, although a number of them document aspects of recent history. The editors have chosen to divide the volume into three sections which gradually move the reader from description to prescription.

The first section includes five case studies. Four focus on India, including a fascinating description by Sheila Jasanoff of the legal aftermath of the Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal. The second section is Exploring the Ambiguity of Vulnerability. It mixes another Indian case study—a more theoretical essay—and two studies of risk in European industry. I was particularly taken with a participant-observer study of the way Swedish railroad workers have created what the author calls a “bricolage” approach to controlling risk in repairing tracks actively in use. Their method involves a mix of rules, expert prescriptions, and practices evolved from experience. The final group of essays covers the governance of vulnerability. Like many other terms used in this volume, “governance” means different things to different authors. It includes state-sponsored regulation, medical prevention programs, and pragmatist ethics. The common denominator is that all of the authors in this section are proposing alternatives to what one calls “classical” risk management, which they rightly point out can result in excessive or ineffective measures for controlling risk.

Over the years, historians of technology have fruitfully borrowed from the analytical toolkits used by sociologists of science and technology. Since the 1980s, Wiebe Bijker has played a prominent role in this transfer of conceptual technologies. Vulnerability in Technological Cultures offers a great deal to historians interested in studying technology and risk. The introductory essay includes an overview of current theoretical approaches to vulnerability that can help historians and STS scholars get their bearings in the risk literature. It is supplemented by an excellent bibliography. The more empirical essays in the volume often provide insights into how people deal with risk in the present-day world; these are potentially mappable onto historical case studies. However, the sheer number of tools and approaches here is overwhelming. The language is sometimes jargon-laden and obtuse. Readers trained primarily within the discipline of history should be prepared to work hard to get what they need.