Social Shaping of Technology

Donald MacKenzie holds a personal Chair in Sociology at Edinburgh University, where he has taught since 1975. He is the author of Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh University Press, 1981), Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (MIT Press, 1990) and of Knowing Machines: Essays in Technical Change (MIT Press, 1996). The second of these books won the Ludwig Fleck prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and was joint winner of the 1993 Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association. His numerous articles in the sociology and social history of science and technology have won three further international prizes, and have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Polish and Greek.Judy Wajcman is Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She has previously taught and researched at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Warwick in England and the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her books include Women in Control: Dilemmas of a Workers' Co-operative (Open University Press, 1983), Feminism Confronts Technology (Polity Press, 1991) and Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management (Polity Press, 1998). Her publications in the sociology of technology and gender relations have been translated into German, Greek and Portuguese.

"Delanty has written a fluent and succinct overview of social theory, including informed commentary and critique...The book presents some very good potted accounts of the various theoretical positions in the social sciences and sets out issues that are not yet resolved. It should be added to the reading lists of theory and methodology courses in the social sciences." - The Times Higher

• Notes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsEditors' notePreface to the Second Edition/f002Part 1: Introductory essay and general issuesIntroductory essay: the social shaping of technologyDo artifacts have politics?Modest_Witness@Second_MilleniumEdison and electric lightInventing personal computingConstructing a bridgeCompeting technologies and economic predictionThe social construction of technologyRedefining the social linkfrom baboons to humansCaught in the wheelsthe high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineeringMaking 'white' people white/f002Part 2: The technology of productionIntroductionThe watermill and feudal authorityThe machine versus the workerTechnology and capitalist controlSocial choice in machine designthe case of automatically controlled machine toolsThe material of male powerWhat machines can't dopolitics and technology in the industrial enterpriseWriters, texts and writing actsgendered user images in word processing softwareLearning by tryingthe implementation of configurational technologyWorking relations of technology production and use/f002Part 3: Reproductive technologyIntroductionThe industrial revolution in the homeA gendered socio-technical constructionthe smart houseA woman's placeDolores Hayden on the 'grand domestic revolution'Inserting Grafenberg's IUD into the sex reformThe decline of the one-size-fits-all paradigm, or, how reproductive scientists try to cope with post-modernity/f002Part 4: Military technologyIntroductionCold war and white heatthe origins and meanings of packet switchingManufacturing gender in military cockpit designThe American army and the M-16 rifleThe Thor-Jupiter controversyThe weapons succession processTheories of technology and the abolition of nuclear weaponsBibliographyIndex.