The Social Construction of Technological Systems Quotes

“when technology predominantly was composed of prosthetic devices (functional additions to the mechanical abilities of the human body), it could always be argued that humans are unique by virtue of their intellectual faculties; no prosthetic device could emulate a human’s ability to reason, know, and understand. The work of AI, however, attempts to develop a technology that emulates action and performance previously accredited to unique human intellectual abilities. Consequently, the advent of computers, and of AI in particular, has raised questions about the uniqueness of man in a slightly different form. For example, in some discussions, emotion is now invoked as the category of attributes that testify to man’s uniqueness, just as intellect was invoked when the debate focused on prosthetic technologies.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Discussions about technology—its capacity, what it can and cannot do, what it should and should not do—are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans. Attempts”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“If rewards come from solving problems and if different people have differing capacities for solving different types of problems, then disputes as to what problems most require solution can only be expected. Engineers and accountants, to take an obvious example, differ widely in the type of problem that they can solve competently. They notoriously disagree on whether the reverse salients blocking the growth of a particular enterprise are financial or technological in nature. Similarly, engineers with different skills and types of experience may also disagree on whether, for example, the technological reverse salients are hardware problems or software problems.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Actors create and maintain systems, and if they fail to do so, the systems in question cease to exist. The stability of systems is a frequently precarious achievement in the face of potentially hostile forces, both social and natural.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Successful system builders cannot work with a rigid demarcation between the system and the environment in which the system develops. They continuously seek to mold that environment so that the growth of the system is facilitated, often incorporating what was previously environment into the system, as happened when electrical supply companies came to control the regulative agencies set up to police them.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Three situations were distinguished to characterize the developmental process of an artifact at some stage: no dominant technological frame, one technological frame, and several dominant technological frames. It is stressed that these situations should not be interpreted as forming a rigid scheme of phases through which an artifact successively has to pass. Rather, it is a heuristic device to simplify the description of the “seamless web” of history. In”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“My contention is that especially young, recently trained engineers are in a position to recognize and to react on a presumptive anomaly: They are trained within the technological frame but have low enough inclusion to question the basic assumptions of that frame.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion John Law”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“How brave, then, were the Vivaldi brothers and their men when they sailed their galleys past the pillars of Hercules and out of recorded history! We do not know in what form disaster finally struck. What we can guess, however, is that the galleys, emergent objects constituted by a heterogeneous engineer, were dissociated into their component parts. The”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Let me, then, define technology as a family of methods for associating and channeling other entities and forces, both human and nonhuman. It is a method, one method, for the conduct of heterogeneous engineering, for the construction of a relatively stable system of related bits and pieces with emergent properties in a hostile or indifferent environment. When I say this, I do not mean that the methods are somehow different from the forces that they channel. Technology does not act as a kind of traffic policeman that is distinct in nature from the traffic it directs. It”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“The term “pattern” is preferable to “model” because a pattern is a metaphor suggesting looseness and a tendency to become unraveled.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“When the social groups involved in designing and using technology decide that a problem is solved, they stabilize the technology. The result is closure. Closure and stabilization, however, are not isolated events; they occur repeatedly during technological development. To”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Technology/science,” “pure/applied,” “internal/external,” and “technical/ social” are some of the dichotomies that were foreign to the integrating inventors, engineers, and managers of the system- and network-building era. To”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology