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	Social Shaping of Technology	Actor-Network Theory Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1985	1984
Originator	Donald MacKenzie, Judy Wajcman, Robin Williams, David Edge	Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law
Type	Analytic tradition and method in the sociology of technology	Material-semiotic theory and analytic method
Seminal source	MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.). Open University Press. ISBN: 9780335199136	Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199256051
Aliases	SST analysis, Social shaping approach, Shaping of technology framework	ANT analysis, Sociology of translation, Actant-network mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	The Social Shaping of Technology (SST) is the umbrella tradition in the sociology of technology that rejects technological determinism and argues that the content and trajectory of technical artefacts are themselves outcomes of social, economic, organisational, and political choices. Rather than treating technology as an autonomous force whose effects society must merely absorb, SST analysis opens the 'black box' of design and shows that at every stage—conception, development, standardisation, and use—things could have been, and were, decided otherwise.	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.