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	Social Shaping of Technology	Social Construction of Technology
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	Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker
Type	Analytic tradition and method in the sociology of technology	Constructivist theory of technological development
Seminal source	MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.). Open University Press. ISBN: 9780335199136	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.
Aliases	SST analysis, Social shaping approach, Shaping of technology framework	SCOT, Social constructivism of technology, Interpretive flexibility analysis
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.	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.