Reviews 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 which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter
fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its
distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected
at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops.
General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology
to society and different types of technology are examined: the
technology of production; domestic and reproductive technology; and
military technology.
The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to
show that production technology is shaped by social relations in
the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and
biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated
social science has tended to ignore or trivialise - though these
are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors
are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes
the most frightening technology of all - the technology of
weaponry, especially nuclear weapons.
The editors argue that social scientists have devoted
disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society,
and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes
technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established
work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer
feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is
to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this
reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking
about the relationship between technology and society. This second
edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into
account new research and the emergence of new theoretical
perspectives.
General
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