1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Social construction of technology (SCOT) is a theory within the field of science and technology studies.
SCOT is not only a theory, but also a methodology: it formalizes the steps and principles to follow when one wants to analyze the causes of technological failures or successes.
At the point of its conception, the SCOT approach was partly motivated by the ideas of the strong programme in the sociology of science (Bloor 1973).
The strong programme adopts a position of relativism or neutralism regarding the arguments that social actors put forward for the acceptance/rejection of any technology.
For example, having experienced the obvious success of the chain-driven bicycle for decades, it is tempting to attribute its success to its "advanced technology" compared to the "primitiveness" of the Penny Farthing, but if we look closely and symmetrically at their history (as Pinch and Bijker do), we can see that at the beginning bicycles were valued according to quite different standards than nowadays.
The early adopters (predominantly young, well-to-do gentlemen) valued the speed, the thrill, and the spectacularity of the Penny Farthing – in contrast to the security and stability of the chain-driven Safety Bicycle.
Many other social factors (e.g., the contemporary state of urbanism and transport, women's clothing habits and feminism) have influenced and changed the relative valuations of bicycle models.
A weak reading of the Principle of Symmetry points out that there often are many competing theories or technologies, which all have the potential to provide slightly different solutions to similar problems.
A particular design is only a single point in the large field of technical possibilities, reflecting the interpretations of certain relevant groups.
In 1993, Langdon Winner published a critique of SCOT entitled "Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology.
This distinction between knowledge that have not yet been invented and knowledge that is merely prevented from being used by commercial, bureaucratic or other socially constructed factors, which it is argued that SCOT overlooks, is argued to explain the archaeological evidence of rich technological cultures in the aftermath of the collapse of civilizations (such as early medieval technology in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, which was much richer than it is depicted as by the "Dark Medieval" stereotype) as a result of technology being remembered even when prevented from being used with the potential to being put into use when the artificial repression is no longer in place due to societal collapse.