Theories and Models of Technological Change: Semantics and Substance

Abstract

Like many historians of technology, I experience a certain amount of culture shock when I read articles such as those collected in this issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values. Analysis of technology in hands of European scientists gathered here proceeds in a very different style from what I am accustomed to. It is more theoretical and abstract. It employs special vocabularies. It asks different questions. And, as Wiebe Bijker has said, it eschews continuous time dimension so beloved of historians.1 The vocabulary alone is enough to disconcert most resolute student. Every article introduces words and terms that are new to me. In Johan Schot's article I find hard, structured selection environment, nexus, boundary-spanning roles, strategic niche management from Arie Rip, and script, or scenario from Madeleine Akrich. Knut S0rensen and Nora Levold limit themselves to meso level and decomposability, but Iskender Gokalp indulges in social communication spaces, borderland situations, ensemble effect, intersection area, technostructures, and bracketing. Speaking for this genre of scholarship as a whole, Bijker goes so far as to assert, as a positive good, that the old vocabulary ... has been demolished,2 leaving reader to wonder about a common ground for discourse. But there is common ground here, in spite of novel language. Behind differences of style and terminology, one also detects certain ideas and concepts that sound familiar. Second thought reveals that many of terms introduced in these essays have long been familiar in historical literature under different rubrics. Some parallels will make point. Schot's technological nexus turns out, as he freely admits, to be similar to Susan Douglas's translator,3 and Douglas had term from Hugh G. J. Aitken.4 Interestingly enough, Schot's term is also similar to Aitken's gate-

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