OK, it wasn’t quite brunch. It was timbits, and we brought our own coffee. But Wiebe Bijker was definitely at the ACT Lab for what was billed as an “informal chat” with students. He was excellent.
Now this guy, this Wiebe Bijker, is a Dutch dude, and the founder of what is variously referred to as a method, a theory and a school – the social construction of technology, or simply SCOT. I suppose he is properly considered the co-founder of SCOT, because the seminal article written on this innovative new approach to technology studies was co-authored with Trevor Pinch.
Two things struck me about him. First, his age. He was a youthful guy – not young, but with the essence of youth. I imagined him to be a well-fed, frumpy old fuddydud. Talk about stereotyping. But anyhow. He was not “cool” in the way kids today might conceive it, but was fit and snappily dressed, with a humble, kind way about him.
The second thing was also surprising but perhaps should not have been. His politics. He has some. And not just any; he is an activist academic who seems to envision his work as necessarily political. Now this was (actually) shocking to me because one of the initial critiques of SCOT was that it did not include evaluative criteria. Langdon Winner (1993), in particular, was hot and bothered about this. He produced a scathing critique which suggested that any advances made through this line of inquiry “take place at a significant cost: a willingness to disregard important questions about technology and human experience…†(p. 4). According to Winner, SCOT’s most offensive flaw is its “almost total disregard for the social consequences of technical choice†(ibid). One can fairly hear his voice dripping with disgust. Winner regards Pinch and Bijker’s notion of interpretive flexibility as a handmaiden of relativism for its failure to attribute any meaning to a technology or its uses. Because technology is considered neutral in the quest to understand technical development, interpretive flexibility devolves into moral and political indifference (p. 7). Winner also charges that SCOT’s “ways of modeling the relationship between social interests and technological innovation will conceal as much as they reveal†(p. 5).
Feenberg, too, has pointed out some of these things. Perhaps this is why his first question to Bijker was about second thoughts. Does he have any, based on how Science and Technology Studies has evolved since SCOT’s birth in 1984?
Bijker replied: “I only have had second thoughts rarely. [They] are about the evolutionary model [of SCOT] with its explicit stages of variation and selection. I think it worked well then. It came from my tech studies side not Trevor [Pinch]’s sociology of knowledge side. I needed it to open up the implicit linear models of technology. The evolutionary model helped to argue that there were alternative models to technical determinism.”
But Bijker noted that there are also very mechanical interpretations – mechanical models of evolution that problematize the 1984 SCOT model, which is based on a biological interpretation of evolution.
Feenberg suggested that Simondon’s concept about the evolution of technology might be useful. Simondon’s concept of the progressive “concretization” of technological development explains how a technical artefact constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line. “It refers to the condensation of various functions in a single technical structure oriented toward efficiency” (From Essentialism to Constructivism). Gradually, fewer technical structures serve more functions; one example is the air cooled engine, where the engine casing both contains and cools the engine. Feenberg generalizes Simondon’s notion of concretization to describe the way in which social actors layer interests into technology: the same structures get layered with new functions as new actors get involved.
Bijker said he’d also had second thoughts about the label “social” in SCOT. “We wanted to argue against technological determinism and we did so by saying there is no linear logic, that artifacts are socially constructed. We ‘won’ – yes, things could have been otherwise. Then there we were in a world where everything was socially constructed; there was no way to talk about impacts. That’s a very silly world – to come up with a conceptual apparatus that doesn’t allow you to talk about effects on society.”
Bijker continued: “To get that back you need also to be able to talk about the technical shaping of society. The artifact was a unit of analysis and its social shaping had been conceptualized. Now, society had to be a unit of analysis and you want technology’s impact on it. Then Callon, Latour and Feenberg talked about socio-technical networks…”
For Bijker, the idea of the network is too specific; instead he talks about technical ensembles. “We were all groping for a way of labeling that unit of analysis that wouldn’t implicitly choose for either technical or social; are we happy with just ‘why’ questions and don’t want to answer ‘how’ questions?”
Roy Bendor, of les ACTants, asked what Bijker considered to be the aims of STS, its social commentary. This is where the talk turned political, much to my surprise.
“I’m not ashamed to take an explicit, personal, normative stance but I also think when you’re studying a certain practice its heuristically productive to keep normative judgment at the back of your mind and trace empirically how norms and values are constructed.”
Hmmm.
Bijker used an “automotive” metaphor to describe the development of STS, which he conceptualizes largely as an academic detour. “It started with a political agenda that was successful within academia but not very successful in society. It didn’t succeed to stop nuclear power in the Netherlands (the Russians had to help with Chernobyl). The idea was, let’s achieve more fundamental sociological understanding then return to political issues; this describes the past 15 years…
“About five years ago, we started to raise the question, was this really detour and can we return to the main political question or are we stuck there? According to my roadmap, it’s still an academic highway; [the feeling is] ‘don’t bother us with this political stuff.’ There is also a policy street; some people are really able to sell this work. I’m pleading for a democratic (or politicization in Dutch) boulevard which combines the political agenda, but in less of a short term, instrumental way as the policy street, with academic research.”
On the topic of the politicization of technology, Feenberg admitted his doubts about the application of the principle of symmetry to technology. “The enormous differences in power and wealth in society at large make it absurd to talk about symmetry [e.g. Big Tobacco]. It’s hard to end a controversy when your adversary has 1000 times the amount of money you have and are cynical. This raises serious methodological problems and forces you back into more traditional sociological methods like ideology, class.”
Nodding amenably, Bijker agreed that it doesn’t make sense to use symmetry ontologically, as do Latour or Callon. Nonetheless, he maintained that it could be a useful heuristic device. He gave the example of his study of the flourescent lamp, and a battle between the all powerful General Electric and the utility companies, who were at some point able to force GE to do something it didn’t really want.
“My argument then would be, not that there are not huge power differences in the world, but explaining a development by using a concept like power is begging the question, why is one actor or institution more powerful than another?”
For Bijker, a symmetrical analysis means that “you don’t import implicitly, uncritically your preconceptions of the world but try to find out how these extreme differences in power, wealth, class are reproduced in the particular case you are studying. Hueristic advice: you will see more, that will help you understand what’s going on. The problem is, this works on micro level, but of course there’s more going on. I am one of the old STS guys who loves to use Marx, so I’m not denouncing Marxist theory. How to connect macro structure to microanalysis difficult.”
There was more to the conversation, but it jumped around a bit, and was less cohesive. Plus I think I’ve gone on quite long enough.