The leading research orientation in contemporary science and technology studies, social constructivism has been controversial since its inception in the 1970s. It is primarily a set of methodological imperatives for the study of science and technology that focus on the means by which people, ideas, interests and things are organized in specific places and times to produce knowledge that carries authority throughout society, especially among those not originally involved in the knowledge-production process. Thus, social constructivists tend to stress the diversity of interpretations and applications of knowledge across social contexts. However, where philosophers and scientists might regard this variety as different representations or instantiations of an already completed form of knowledge, social constructivists treat the variety as part of the ongoing core knowledge-production process.

It follows that social constructivists do not recognize a sharp distinction between the production and consumption of knowledge. Thus, social constructivism has a “democratizing” effect on epistemology by levelling traditional differences in the authority granted to differently placed knowers. To a social constructivist, a technologist using a scientific formula is “constructing” the formula as knowledge in exactly the same sense as the scientist who originated the formula. Each depends on the other to strengthen their common “cycle of credibility” or “actor-network”, in the words of Bruno Latour, perhaps the leading social constructivist today. In contrast, most philosophers and scientists would raise the epistemic status of the original scientist to a “discoverer”, while lowering the status of the technologist to an “applier”.