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	Social Construction of Technology	Controversy Mapping
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	2010
Originator	Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker	Bruno Latour (Sciences Po médialab); codified by Tommaso Venturini
Type	Constructivist theory of technological development	Qualitative descriptive method and pedagogy
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.	Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258-273.
Aliases	SCOT, Social constructivism of technology, Interpretive flexibility analysis	Cartography of controversies, Mapping scientific controversies, Controversy analysis
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.	Controversy mapping is a descriptive method for exploring and representing socio-technical disputes while they are still open and unsettled, before they harden into accepted facts or stable technologies. Developed as a teaching practice by Bruno Latour and codified by Tommaso Venturini at the Sciences Po médialab, it asks the analyst to dive into the heat of a debate, follow the actors and their arguments without prematurely taking sides, and render the resulting complexity legible through maps and visualisations. It treats controversy not as a pathology to be resolved but as the privileged moment in which the social and the technical are visibly being assembled.