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	Social Construction of Technology	Actor-Network Theory Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	1984
Originator	Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker	Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law
Type	Constructivist theory of technological development	Material-semiotic theory and analytic method
Seminal source	Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399-441.	Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199256051
Aliases	SCOT, Social constructivism of technology, Interpretive flexibility analysis	ANT analysis, Sociology of translation, Actant-network mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) is a constructivist framework holding that technological artefacts are shaped by the interpretations and negotiations of relevant social groups rather than by technical logic alone. Introduced by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984, it shows that an artefact has 'interpretive flexibility'—different groups see different problems and solutions in it—until a process of closure stabilises one design as the obvious one.	Actor-Network Theory analysis treats society and technology as a single woven fabric, mapping how heterogeneous human and non-human actors—engineers, scallops, documents, machines, regulators—are linked into networks through a process of translation. Rather than explaining technical outcomes by appeal to pre-given social categories, ANT follows the actors themselves and describes how durable arrangements are assembled, stabilised, and sometimes undone.