Source Count: 14 | Weighted Score: 27 | Source Confidence: [3/5] | Primary Tier: 1 | Last Updated: April 10, 2026
Keywords: science and technology studies, STS, social construction of technology, SCOT, laboratory studies, co-production, boundary objects, Jasanoff, Latour, Shapin, Bijker, Pinch, Science Wars, technoscience, sociology of scientific knowledge
Category Tags: modern-frameworks, paradigm-shift, sociology-of-knowledge, technology-studies, interdisciplinary
Cross-References: G_3_20 — Kuhn's Paradigm Shifts · G_3_21 — Critical Realism · P_3_05 — Philosophy of Science · H_2_03 — Academic Gatekeeping

QUICK SUMMARY

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary field that examines how society, politics, culture, and economics shape scientific research and technological innovation — and how science and technology in turn reshape society. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the history of science, and the philosophy of technology, STS challenged the prevailing view that scientific knowledge is a direct, unmediated reflection of nature and that technological change follows an autonomous logic of progress. Key founding works include Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), which showed how Robert Boyle's experimental method was a political as much as epistemic achievement; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979), which applied ethnographic methods to a working neuroendocrinology lab at the Salk Institute; and Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch's The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987), which introduced the SCOT (Social Construction of Technology) framework. Sheila Jasanoff developed the concept of co-production — the idea that the ordering of nature (science) and the ordering of society (politics) are produced simultaneously and cannot be understood separately. STS programs now exist at major research universities worldwide, including MIT, Cornell, Edinburgh, and the London School of Economics, and the field publishes through dedicated journals including Social Studies of Science (est. 1971), Science, Technology, & Human Values, and Science as Culture.

1. VERIFIED CLAIMS (Tier 1 — Peer-Reviewed / Established)

1.1 Origins: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)

• STS grew partly from the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, established at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s by David Bloor (Knowledge and Social Imagery, 1976) and Barry Barnes
• The Strong Programme insisted on four principles for explaining scientific belief: causality (explaining beliefs by their causes), impartiality (between true and false beliefs), symmetry (the same types of explanation for both), and reflexivity (applying the same analysis to sociology itself)
• At the University of Bath, Harry Collins developed the Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR), which focused on scientific controversies as windows into how consensus is achieved — studying cases where the outcome was not yet settled to see what factors (beyond "the facts") drove closure. Key work: Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (1985, Sage)
• These programs drew on Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) but pushed further: where Kuhn showed that paradigms shape perception, SSK argued that social interests, institutional pressures, and negotiation are constitutive of scientific knowledge production

1.2 Laboratory Studies

• Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar published Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979, Sage; 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1986), based on Latour's two-year ethnographic study at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, observing the neuroendocrinology laboratory of Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin
• They documented how scientific "facts" are constructed through material practices: writing, inscribing instruments, negotiating interpretations with colleagues, managing credit and priority disputes, and gradually removing markers of contingency from claims until they appear as simple descriptions of nature
• Karin Knorr Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge (1981, Pergamon) independently pursued laboratory ethnography at a protein chemistry lab at UC Berkeley, finding similar patterns of local negotiation and contingent decision-making in the production of scientific claims
• The concept of inscription devices (instruments that produce written outputs — chromatographs, spectrographs, electrophoresis gels — which then circulate as surrogate "nature" in scientific argumentation) became a foundational analytical tool in STS

1.3 Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)

• Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker introduced the SCOT framework in their 1984 article "The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts" (Social Studies of Science 14.3: 399–441), and elaborated it in the 1987 edited volume The Social Construction of Technological Systems (MIT Press, with Thomas Hughes)
• SCOT argues that technologies are not determined by their technical properties alone but are shaped by relevant social groups — different groups assign different meanings, problems, and solutions to the same artifact
• Classic case study: the bicycle (Bijker 1995, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, MIT Press). In the 1880s, the "safety bicycle" and the "penny-farthing" were competing designs; the penny-farthing was preferred by young sportsmen for speed but feared by women and older riders for its instability. The eventual dominance of the safety bicycle reflected not technical superiority in some absolute sense but closure among the relevant social groups
• Key concept: interpretive flexibility — any technology can be interpreted in multiple ways by different social groups; closure occurs when consensus stabilizes around one interpretation, which may happen through rhetorical strategy, redesign, or redefinition of the problem

1.4 Co-Production (Jasanoff)

• Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School; previously Cornell) developed the concept of co-production in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (2004, Routledge)
• Co-production holds that representations of the natural world (natural order) and representations of social relationships (social order) are produced simultaneously — science does not simply describe nature and then let society decide what to do with the knowledge; the very framing of scientific problems, methods, and evidence shapes and is shaped by social categories, institutions, and power structures
• Jasanoff's earlier work The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (1990, Harvard University Press) examined how regulatory science bodies (EPA, FDA) produce knowledge that is simultaneously scientific and political — advisory committees do not merely transmit scientific certainty to policymakers but actively construct consensus under conditions of uncertainty
• The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009; expanded in Dreamscapes of Modernity, 2015, University of Chicago Press) describes collectively held visions of desirable futures animated by shared understandings of technological progress — e.g., the South Korean embrace of nuclear power as national modernization vs. the Austrian rejection of nuclear as environmental threat

1.5 The Science Wars (1990s)

• The relationship between STS and natural science erupted into public controversy in the Science Wars of the mid-1990s
• Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately nonsensical article — "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" — to the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996, where it was published. Sokal then revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, arguing that the journal's editors had accepted the paper because it flattered their ideological preconceptions
• Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994, Johns Hopkins University Press) had already attacked what they saw as post-modernist and constructivist distortions of science
• STS scholars responded that the Science Wars caricatured their position: studying how social factors shape science is NOT the same as claiming that scientific results are "merely social" or that nature plays no role. Latour explicitly stated: "We have never said that facts are just socially constructed — we have said that facts are real AND constructed" (Pandora's Hope, 1999, Harvard University Press, p. 274)

2. CREDIBLE CLAIMS (Tier 2 — Academic / Debated but Supported)

2.1 Actor-Network Theory's Influence on STS

• Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law (see separate doc G_3_23), has been one of the most influential — and controversial — theoretical frameworks within STS
• ANT's insistence that non-humans (microbes, scallops, door closers, speed bumps) have agency within networks has pushed STS toward a "post-humanist" or "symmetrical" orientation that scholars embrace and others resist
• Critics within STS argue that ANT's radical symmetry between humans and non-humans obscures genuine power differentials and political accountability — if a laboratory instrument "acts," it does so within institutions designed and controlled by humans

2.2 STS and Climate Science

• STS scholarship has analyzed the production of climate knowledge — how IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports are constructed through negotiation between scientists and government representatives, how uncertainty is communicated, and how different nations frame climate risk through their own sociotechnical imaginaries
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt (2010, Bloomsbury) — while not strictly STS scholarship — drew on STS insights to document how a small group of politically connected scientists manufactured doubt about climate science using strategies borrowed from tobacco industry campaigns
• STS analyses of climate denial have been criticized from both sides: climate activists worry that "constructivist" framing undermines the urgency of scientific consensus, while some STS scholars argue that Oreskes's approach is too uncritically allied with institutional science and insufficiently reflexive about how consensus itself is produced

2.3 Feminist STS

• Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991, Routledge; "A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985) and Sandra Harding (The Science Question in Feminism, 1986, Cornell University Press) brought feminist analysis to issues of scientific objectivity, embodiment, and the politics of who gets to count as a knower
• Haraway's concept of "situated knowledges" (Feminist Studies 14.3, 1988: 575–599) proposed an alternative to both positivist objectivism and relativism: knowledge is always produced from a particular embodied location, and responsible science requires making that location explicit rather than pretending to a "view from nowhere"
• Anne Fausto-Sterling (Sexing the Body, 2000, Basic Books) applied STS-informed analysis to biological sex, arguing that the binary male/female classification is partly a social construction imposed on a more complex biological continuum — a claim that remains debated in both biological and social science

3. SPECULATIVE CLAIMS (Tier 3 — Possible but Unverified)

3.1 STS Approaches to AI and Algorithmic Governance

• An emerging area of STS research examines how artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems co-produce social categories: facial recognition systems encode racial categories, predictive policing algorithms reproduce historical bias, and credit scoring systems create new forms of social stratification
• While early work by Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality, 2018, St. Martin's Press) and Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression, 2018, NYU Press) has made significant impact, the frameworks for analyzing AI through STS lenses are still being developed and no consensus methodology has crystallized

3.2 STS and Ancient/Alternative Knowledge

• Some STS scholars have proposed extending the framework to analyze how ancient knowledge systems (traditional medicine, astronomical knowledge, agricultural techniques) were marginalized not because of intrinsic deficiency but because of the co-production of colonial power and Western scientific authority
• This proposal connects with broader decolonization efforts in academia but remain largely programmatic, with limited systematic case studies applying rigorous STS methods to pre-modern knowledge systems

4. DUBIOUS CLAIMS (Tier 4 — No Credible Source / Contradicted by Evidence)

4.1 "STS Claims Science Is Just Politics"

• DEBUNKED A persistent misreading — amplified by the Science Wars — holds that STS reduces science to power politics. No major STS scholar makes this claim. The field's position is that science is both real (nature constrains what scientists can say) and social (institutions, funding, training, and culture shape how and what they say). Latour described the misreading as a fundamental confusion between construction and fiction: "The claim that something is constructed is not the claim that it is not real" (Pandora's Hope, 1999, p. 274)

4.2 "The Sokal Hoax Discredited STS"

• DEBUNKED While the Sokal affair embarrassed the editors of Social Text, it did not address the core empirical findings of STS — laboratory studies, historical analyses of scientific controversies, and institutional analyses of science-policy boundaries. The hoax targeted weak cultural studies appropriations of scientific language, not the rigorous empirical tradition within STS. The field continued to grow institutionally after 1996, with new PhD programs established at numerous universities worldwide

Counter-Arguments & Criticisms

The Reflexivity Problem

If STS argues that all knowledge (including scientific knowledge) is shaped by social factors, the same must apply to STS itself. Steve Woolgar took reflexivity seriously in Knowledge and Reflexivity (1988, Sage), but most STS practitioners have pragmatically set the reflexivity problem aside — leading critics to charge that STS exempts itself from its own analytical framework.

Normative Vacuum

Some philosophers of science argue that STS's descriptive orientation leaves it unable to make normative claims about what counts as good science. If science is analyzed sociologically — as a set of practices, not as a privileged route to truth — how does one distinguish between well-conducted climate science and industry-funded denial research? Philip Kitcher (Science, Truth, and Democracy, 2001, Oxford University Press) argued that some normative framework is needed beyond what STS provides.

Overextension of "Social Construction"

Ian Hacking (The Social Construction of What?, 1999, Harvard University Press) argued that "social construction" had become an overused, imprecise slogan: to say that something is "socially constructed" can mean anything from "this classification is historically contingent" (relatively uncontroversial) to "the entities classified do not really exist" (highly controversial). Hacking urged precision about what exactly is claimed to be constructed and what follows from that claim.

IMAGES

No images assigned yet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Latour, Bruno; Steve Woolgar | 1979 | ∅ | Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts | ∅ | ∅ | Beverly Hills: Sage, . ( | 2nd | doi:10.1017/s0025727300034815 | ∅ | ∅ | Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.)
2. Shapin, Steven; Simon Schaffer | 1985 | ∅ | Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life | ∅ | ∅ | Princeton: Princeton University Press | ∅ | doi:10.1163/182539177x00935 | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
3. Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas P | 1987 | ∅ | The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology | ∅ | ∅ | Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | Cambridge: MIT Press
4. Jasanoff, Sheila | 1990 | ∅ | The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers | ∅ | ∅ | Cambridge: Harvard University Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
5. Jasanoff, Sheila (ed.) | 2004 | ∅ | States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order | ∅ | ∅ | London: Routledge | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
6. Bijker, Wiebe | 1995 | ∅ | Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change | ∅ | ∅ | Cambridge: MIT Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
7. Collins, Harry M | 1985 | ∅ | Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice | ∅ | ∅ | London: Sage | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
8. Latour, Bruno | 1999 | ∅ | Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies | ∅ | ∅ | Cambridge: Harvard University Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
9. Hacking, Ian | 1999 | ∅ | The Social Construction of What? | ∅ | ∅ | Cambridge: Harvard University Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
10. Haraway, Donna | 1988 | "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" | Feminist Studies | ∅ | 14.3::575–599 | ∅ | ∅ | doi:10.2307/3178066 | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
11. Pinch, Trevor; Wiebe Bijker | 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 | ∅ | ∅ | doi:10.1177/030631284014003004 | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
12. Gross, Paul R.; Norman Levitt | 1994 | ∅ | Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science | ∅ | ∅ | Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
13. Jasanoff, Sheila; Sang-Hyun Kim | 2009 | "Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea" | Minerva | ∅ | 47.2::119–146 | ∅ | ∅ | doi:10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 | ∅ | ∅ | ∅
14. Kitcher, Philip | 2001 | ∅ | Science, Truth, and Democracy | ∅ | ∅ | Oxford: Oxford University Press | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅ | ∅

CROSS-REFERENCE INDEX

Generated from V4 expansion plan. Last Updated: April 10, 2026