This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of technology. Recent work in science and technology studies (S&TS) and in particular the sociology of technology is reviewed as another (...) route into dealing with technology and materiality. The recent ideas in sociology of technology are exemplified with the author’s study of the development of the electronic music synthesizer. (shrink)

Sociology can be free from appraising value judgments, but characterizing value judgments are inseparable from it. It is thus a science that deals with the same questions as ideology reckons with, although in a purely characterizing way. Part of its concern is to judge cultures and it does this by measuring properties inherent in them. A culture is an ordering of symbols for a meaningful, dignified life. The dimensions for measuring any culture are (1) the sufficiency of its symbols, (2) (...) their attractive power through meaningful inclusion in coherent wholes, (3) their consistency through absorption into a single reference system and (4) their appositeness to human needs. (shrink)

The ArgumentWritten as one book, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England has become two. One book, treating Puritanism and science, has since become “The Merton Thesis.” The other, treating shifts of interest among the sciences and problem choice within the sciences, has been less consequential. This paper proposes that neglect of one part of the monograph has skewed readers' understanding of the whole. Society and culture contributed to institutionalization of science and the directions it took, neither one exclusively. Four (...) aspects of the neglected chapters are examined: their theoretical underpinnings, the conceptions providing foundations for this part specifically and for the monograph as a whole; their comparative neglect, attributed partly to the absence of a cognitive constituency for their claims; the problem of problem choice in science in Merton's work; and the Merton monograph and later social constructionism:their differences and affinities. (shrink)

In the general understanding, and also in scientific practice, technology and society are viewed as two distinct entities. Related to this view is the assumption that technology and human experience are quite different and unconnected and also the idea that modernity has uprooted, de-contextualized and disembodied technical rationality. Taking a contrary approach, this study represents a theoretical exploration aimed at showing that in the domain of technological development, there are significant margins for maneuver in which to recuperate and valorize human (...) and social action. As a work of theoretical sociology or social epistemology, this thesis approaches its subject from the theoretical background of the philosophy and sociology of technique. The historical and conventional assumptions of this theoretical background, it is argued, have been and continue to be characterized by a hegemonically defined essentialist paradigm. This paradigm has been fiercely counteracted by two opposed approaches, critical theory and pragmatism. The present work combines these approaches, usually considered mutually incompatible, for the development of a new theoretical gaze or perspective. The aim has been to engage in a theoretical research oriented to a new philosophy of praxis in order to instigate a critical and constructivist approach to technology. The main result expected of this work is the provision of a problematized and multifaceted semantic map leading to a multidimensional conceptual re-integration of skilled experience in human technical action. (shrink)