The social shaping of technology / edited by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman.

PART 1: Introductory essay and general issues -- Introductory essay: the social shaping of technology -- Do artifacts have politics? -- Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium -- Edison and electric light -- Inventing personal computing -- Constructing a bridge -- Competing technologies and economic prediction -- The social construction of technology -- Redefining the social link: from baboons to humans -- Caught in the wheels: the high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering -- Making 'white' people white -- PART 2: The technology of production -- Introduction -- The watermill and feudal authority -- The machine versus the worker -- Technology and capitalist control -- Social choice in machine design: the case of automatically controlled machine tools -- The material of male power -- What machines can't do: politics and technology in the industrial enterprise -- Writers, texts and writing acts: gendered user images in word processing software -- Learning by trying: the implementation of configurational technology -- Working relations of technology production and use -- PART 3: Reproductive technology -- Introduction -- The industrial revolution in the home -- A gendered socio-technical construction: the smart house -- A woman's place -- Dolores Hayden on the 'grand domestic revolution' -- Inserting Grafenberg's IUD into the sex reform -- The decline of the one-size-fits-all paradigm, or, how reproductive scientists try to cope with post-modernity -- PART 4: Military technology -- Introduction -- Cold war and white heat: the origins and meanings of packet switching -- Manufacturing gender in military cockpit design -- The American army and the M-16 rifle -- The Thor-Jupiter controversy -- The weapons succession process -- Theories of technology and the abolition of nuclear weapons

Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic - something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production; domestic and reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise - though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all - the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology and society. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives.