The "turn to technology"

A decisive moment in the development of STS was the mid-1980s addition of technology studies to the range of interests reflected in science studies programs. During that decade, two works appeared en seriatim that signaled what Steve Woolgar was to call the “turn to technology”: Social Shaping of Technology (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985) and The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Bijker, Hughes et al., 1987). MacKenzie and Wajcman primed the pump by collecting a highly readable collection of articles attesting to the influence of society on technological design. In a seminal article, Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker attached all the legitimacy of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge to this development by showing how the sociology of technology could proceed along precisely the theoretical and methodological lines established by the sociology of scientific knowledge. This was the intellectual foundation of the field they called the social construction of technology.

The "turn to technology" helped to cement an already growing awareness of underlying unity among the various emerging STS programs. More recently, there has been an associated turn to materiality, whereby the socio-technical and material co-produce each other. This is especially evident in work in STS analyses of biomedicine (such as Carl May, Nelly Oudshoorn, and Andrew Webster).