Description
Book SynopsisReviews of the 1st Edition:
"....This book is a welcome addition to the sociology of technology, a field whose importance is increasingly recognised." - Sociology
"....sets a remarkably high standard in breadth of coverage, in scholarship, and in readability and can be recommended to the general reader and to the specialist alike." - Science and Society
"....This remarkably readable and well-edited anthology focuses, in a wide variety of concrete examples, not on the impacts of technologies on societies but in the reverse: how different social contexts shaped the emergence of particular technologies." - Technology and Culture
- How does social context affect the development of technology?
- What is the relationship between technology and gender
- Is production technology shaped by efficiency or by social control?
Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic - something we may welcome, or about whic
Trade Review"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
Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Editors' note
Preface to the Second Edition
/f002Part 1: Introductory essay and general issues
Introductory essay: the social shaping of technology
Do artifacts have politics?
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium
Edison and electric light
Inventing personal computing
Constructing a bridge
Competing technologies and economic prediction
The social construction of technology
Redefining the social link
from baboons to humans
Caught in the wheels
the high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering
Making 'white' people white
/f002Part 2: The technology of production
Introduction
The watermill and feudal authority
The machine versus the worker
Technology and capitalist control
Social choice in machine design
the case of automatically controlled machine tools
The material of male power
What machines can't do
politics and technology in the industrial enterprise
Writers, texts and writing acts
gendered user images in word processing software
Learning by trying
the implementation of configurational technology
Working relations of technology production and use
/f002Part 3: Reproductive technology
Introduction
The industrial revolution in the home
A gendered socio-technical construction
the smart house
A woman's place
Dolores Hayden on the 'grand domestic revolution'
Inserting Grafenberg's IUD into the sex reform
The decline of the one-size-fits-all paradigm, or, how reproductive scientists try to cope with post-modernity
/f002Part 4: Military technology
Introduction
Cold war and white heat
the origins and meanings of packet switching
Manufacturing gender in military cockpit design
The American army and the M-16 rifle
The Thor-Jupiter controversy
The weapons succession process
Theories of technology and the abolition of nuclear weapons
Bibliography
Index.
