Controlling Technology: An Issue for the Social Studies of Science

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 1984, Pages 97-113

  Johnston, Ron ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84970776817     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: 14603659     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631284014001008     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 4.
2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (London, 1818).
3. E.S. Ferguson, ‘Towards a Discipline of the History of Technology’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 11 (1974), 13.
4. C. Mitcham, ‘Philosophy and the History of Technology’, in G. Bugliarello and D.B. Doner (eds), The History and Philosophy of Technology (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 163-201.
5. C.W. Pursell, ‘History of Technology’, in P.T. Durbin (ed.), A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine (New York: The Free Press, 1980), 70-120, quote at 74-75.
6. T.P. Hughes, ‘Emerging Themes in the History of Technology’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 20 (1979), 699-711.
7. M.R. Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); D.F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977).
8. P. Uselding, ‘Studies of Technology in Economic History’, Research in Economic History, Vol. 2, Suppl. 1 (1977), 159-219.
9. For example, see D.S.L. Cardwell, ‘The Academic Study of the History of Technology’, History of Science, Vol. 7 (1967), 112-24.
10. N. Rosenberg, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Rosenberg, ‘Marx as a Student of Technology’, Monthly Review, Vol. 28 (1976), 56-77; Rosenberg, ‘American Technology: Imported or Indigenous’, American Economic Review, Vol. 67 (1977), 21-26; Rosenberg, ‘Technological Interdependence in the American Economy’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 20 (1979), 25-50; Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
11. For example, see D. Dickson, Alternative Technology: The Politics of Technological Change (London: Fontana, 1974); H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); L. Levidow and B. Young (eds), Science, Technology and the Labour Process, Marxist Studies Vol. 1 (London: CSE Books, 1981); D. MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, in press.
12. K.R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1968).
13. J. Agassi, ‘The Confusion Between Science and Technology in the Standard Philosophies of Science’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 7 (1966), 348-66.
14. H. Skolimowski, ‘The Structure of Thinking in Technology’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 7 (1966), 371-83.
15. Though it is interesting to note that Barry Barnes recently considered the relationship to be sufficiently well established to provide an appropriate model for an interactive relationship between science and other sub-cultures: see Barnes, ‘The Science-Technology Relationship: A Model and a Query’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 12 (1982), 166-72.
16. R. Johnston, ‘The Internal Structure of Technology’, in P. Halmos (ed.), The Sociology of Science, Sociological Review Monographs No. 18 (1972), 117-30; G. Dosi, ‘Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories’, Research Policy, Vol. 11 (1982), 147-62. More recently, a specific theoretical and empirical research programme to apply a social constructivist model to technology has been making useful progress: see W. Bijker, J. Bonig and E. van Oost, ‘The Social Construction of Technological Artefacts’, paper presented to the EASST Conference, Deutschlandsberg, Austria, September 1982; T. Pinch, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts - Strategic and Methodological Imperatives for a Unified Approach Towards the Study of Science and Technology’, paper presented to the CNRS Workshop, Paris, March 1983.
17. This point has been argued by E. Layton, ‘Technology as Knowledge’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 15 (1974), 31-41.
18. J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. 364-402.
19. K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), Chapter 1.
20. See, for example, A.F. Chalmers, What is This Thing Called Science? (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1978), Chapter 6; and, most tellingly, I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 91-196.
21. A recent Special Issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 11, No. 1 (February 1981), carries a review and a number of cases demonstrating this point.
22. D. Robbins and R. Johnston, ‘The Role of Cognitive and Occupational Differentiation in Scientific Controversies’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6 (1976)
23. See, for example, P. Bourdieu, ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason’, Social Science Information, Vol. 14 (1975), 19-47; B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life (London and Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979); K. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (New York: Pergamon, 1981).
24. This commitment is hardly surprising, given that the book is drawn from his doctoral thesis: D. Collingridge, The Fallibilist Theory of Value and its Application to Decision-Making (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aston in Birmingham, UK, 1979).
25. See, for example, R.V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence in 1939-1945 (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1978); M. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1974); A. Smith, A Peril and a Hope (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962); R.A. Chapman, Decision-Making (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
26. As a concrete example of this, Donald MacKenzie has pointed out to me that Collingridge's analysis rests on accepting at face value the official US rationale for the ABM - that it would deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear attack. The actual political process, as revealed in Ted Greenwood, Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975), involves a variety of other elements of strategy, bureaucratic intrigue, careerism, and other features common in the process of government decision-making. Another clear exposition of the reality of government decision-making is provided in Mel Horwitch's Clipped Wings: The American SST Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
27. P. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Penguin, 1971).
28. E. Wenk, Margins for Survival: Overcoming Political Limits in Steering Technology (New York: Pergamon, 1979), 72.
29. C.E. Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
30. See P. Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times (London: Heinemann, 1980).