Social Shaping of Technology
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.
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Sources
- MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.). Open University Press. ISBN: 9780335199136
- Williams, R., & Edge, D. (1996). The social shaping of technology. Research Policy, 25(6), 865-899. DOI: 10.1016/0048-7333(96)00885-2 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Social Shaping of Technology (SST) Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/science-technology-studies/social-shaping-of-technology
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