Introduction

One of the great lapses of the sociological imagination has surely been an appreciation of the role of technology in society. The “founding fathers” – if we may except Marx – paid it scant attention, and their intellectual descendents have done little better. Mark Shields says:

What is stunning is of course the lack of interest in aphenomenonwhichby all accounts has been one of the prime levers of change in modern societies. The classical mission of sociology, to offer a new reflexive self-understanding for post-feudal, industrial societies, would seem to encourage sociologists to position the study of technology at the very centre of their intellectual programme. Instead, they have marginalised and disdained technology, treating it as a trivial corollary of economic or scientific rationality, and of sociological relevance only insofar as it had effects on other societal patterns (Ogburn 1922; Gouldner and Peterson 1962). Technology has been taken seriously as a sociological phenomenon itself by only a very few sociologists (Gilfillan 1935; Noble 1984). For the most part, it has been left to renegade traditions like Marxism and labour-process theory (MacKenzie 1984), recently reinforced by the new social studies of technology (SST) to unpack the “black box” of technology and reposition it as an authentic societal phenomenon. However, these traditions have adopted more or less sectarian standpointswith respect to mainstream sociology and have reinforced, rather than weakened, sociological prejudices regarding the ontological and epistemological “otherness” of technology.

This is not the place to dwell on the many reasons for the suppression of technology in the sociological project. What we can do here is examine how, given the nature of technology and the deep structure of academic sociology, technology might be incorporated into the sociological program in a way commensurate with its societal importance.

As to the nature of technology, it is now clear that it is far from the straightforward means (or set of tools) that sociologists have generally taken it to be.