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The "turn to technology" (and beyond)[edit]

See also: Social construction of technology

A decisive moment in the development of STS was the mid-1980s addition of technology studies to the range of interests reflected in science. During that decade, two works appeared en seriatim that signaled what Steve Woolgar was to call the "turn to technology".^[4] In a seminal 1984 article, Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker attached the sociology of scientific knowledge to technology by showing how the sociology of technology could proceed along the theoretical and methodological lines established by the sociology of scientific knowledge.^[5] This was the intellectual foundation of the field they called the social construction of technology. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman primed the pump by publishing a collection of articles attesting to the influence of society on technological design (Social Shaping of Technology, 1985).^[6]

The "turn to technology" helped to cement an already growing awareness of underlying unity among the various emerging STS programs. More recently, there has been an associated turn to ecology, nature, and materiality in general, whereby the socio-technical and natural/material co-produce each other. This is especially evident in work in STS analyses of biomedicine (such as Carl May and Annemarie Mol) and ecological interventions (such as Bruno Latour, Sheila Jasanoff, Matthias Gross, and S. Lochlann Jain).

Important concepts[edit]