Wiebe E Bijker
Biographic Data
| ID | 165244 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wiebe E Bijker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wiebe E |
| FAMILY NAME | Bijker |
| SIGNATURE | BIJKER W E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7307-8330 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 905 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Chapter 3: The Vulnerability of Technological Culture
All We Want, Is to Get Rid of the Straw”: How Biofuel Policies Need to Be Multiple
Second-generation (2G) biofuels are promoted worldwide as remedy to sustainable-energy challenges in the transport sector and as response to the criticism of first-generation biofuels. By utilizing agriculture and forest residues, 2G biofuels claim to support agricultural livelihoods and boost rural economies. Quantitative estimates exist of the availability of “waste” or “unused” or “surplus” biomass that could be fed into producing bioenergy. M…
Responsible Research and Innovation in the Global South: Agriculture, Renewable Energy and the Pursuit of Symmetry
Responsible innovation as empowering ways of knowing
In pursuit of responsible research and innovation (RRI), emphasis has been on various forms of inclusion in the governance of science, technology and innovation. Given that much of the ideas on inclusion in fact refer to discursive inclusion, it is surprising that little attention has hitherto been paid to what seems foundational to any discursive space: ontologies (theories of being) and epistemologies (theories of knowing), and notably how thes…
Ways of Knowing and Doing STS: Niki Vermeulen Talks with Wiebe Bijker
It is a special moment in the history of STS. With the young discipline transitioning into a not so-young-field-anymore, there is plenty of reason for celebrations: defining groups are celebrating remarkable anniversaries and individual careers are celebrated when founding figures retire. These celebrations are also excellent moments for reflections on pasts, presents and futures of STS and the place of STS in the wider world. In this conversatio…
Innovation in Indian Handloom Weaving
Handloom weaving is the second most important livelihood in rural India after farming. Improving handloom technologies and practices thus will directly affect the lives of millions of Indians, and this is similar for many other communities in the global South and East. By analyzing hand-loom weaving as a socio-technology, we will show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets, and social organization-o…
Models of Innovation: The History of an Idea
Benoît Godin is a Professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montreal. Models abound in science, technology, and society (STS) studies and in science, technology, and innovation (STI) studies. They are continually being invented, with one author developing many versions of the same model over time. At the same time, models are regularly criticized. Such is the case with the most influential model in STS-STI: the linear model…
Constructing Worlds: Reflections on Science, Technology and Democracy (and a Plea for Bold Modesty)
Can STS offer a response to “alternative facts” without falling back into naive positivism? Can STS help to make science accountable to society and make it work—make it function in our democracies and let it produce scientific knowledge? In his valedictory lecture, Wiebe Bijker looks back upon three decades of STS research in general, and upon engaging STS with questions of democratization and development in particular. He starts from the questio…
Constructing a City: The Cerda Plan for the Extension of Barcelona
Controlled human malaria infection trials: How tandems of trust and control construct scientific knowledge
Controlled human malaria infections are clinical trials in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with malaria under controlled conditions. Controlled human malaria infections are complex clinical trials: many different groups and institutions are involved, and several complex technologies are required to function together. This functioning together of technologies, people, and institutions is under special pressure because of potenti…
Technology, Social Construction of
Waves and Forms: Electronic Music Devices and Computer Encodings in China
An examination of the relationship between technical objects and culture in contemporary China, drawing on concepts from science and technology studies. Technical objects constrain what users do with them. They are not neutral entities but embody information, choices, values, assumptions, or even mistakes embedded by designers. What happens when a technology is designed in one culture and used in another? What happens, for example, when a Chinese…
Vulnerability in Technological Cultures: New Directions in Research and Governance
Analysis and case studies explore the concept of vulnerability, offering a novel and broader approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology. Novel technologies and scientific advancements offer not only opportunities but risks. Technological systems are vulnerable to human error and technical malfunctioning that have far-reaching consequences: one flipped switch can cause a cascading power failure across a networked el…
Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses
Wiebe Bijker, in his plenary lecture on the occasion of receiving SHOT's 2012 Leonardo da Vinci Medal, traces the history of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and interweaves this with observations on the development of the history of technology during the last three decades and with some biographical reflections. His collaborations with Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch figure prominently. He concludes with two examples from his curre…
Sociohistorical Technology Studies
Do we live in water cultures? A methodological commentary
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (review)
Reviewed by: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Wiebe E. Bijker (bio) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. By Harry Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+186. $32.50. This book serves as yet another argument why a scholarly journal in the history of technology should indeed be titled “technology and culture.” According to Harry Collins, most, if not all, machines work only because humans make up for the social failures of these machines…
The role of scientific advisory bodies in precaution‐based risk governance illustrated with the issue of uncertain health effects of electromagnetic fields
Recently, the Health Council of the Netherlands (HCN) published a report on the precautionary principle. The key message was that rather than as a decision rule, the principle should be regarded as a strategy for dealing with uncertainty carefully. We applied these views of HCN to the issue of potential health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs), which is characterised by considerable uncertainty. HCN has published several reports on this is…
The Paradox of Scientific Authority: The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies
Assessing the influence of scientific advice in societies that increasingly question scientific authority and expertise. Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a para…
How is technology made?--That is the question
This article reviews constructivist technology studies, and especially the social construction of technology (SCOT). To investigate how these constructivist studies regard the ontology of technology, I will trace their historical development in units of analysis, methodological approaches and research questions. Constructivist technology studies are relativistic in only one sense: methodological. They are agnostic with respect to the ontology of …
Globalization and Vulnerability: Challenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary
Globalization and VulnerabilityChallenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary Wiebe E. Bijker (bio) Fifty years ago, SHOT was designed and created—one could say, engineered— in a careful and strategic way.1 During the subsequent fifty years, SHOT developed into the leading international scholarly society in the history of technology. The maturing of the society and its journal, Technology and Culture, went hand-in-hand with…
Dutch Dealings with the Delta
This article shows how Dutch technological culture has historically dealt with and developed around vulnerability with respect to flooding and indicates recent developments in attitude towards the flood threat. The flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina temporarily made the Dutch public worry about the flood defense infrastructure in the Netherlands, exemplified by the Delta Works. Could this happen in the Netherlands? After the…
American and Dutch Coastal Engineering: Differences in Risk Conception and Differences in Technological Culture
How is it possible that the USA failed to keep New Orleans dry, when large parts of the Netherlands can exist below sea level? This question, with all its implicit rhetoric about the big and mighty Americans and the small and weak Dutch, generated a flock of American expeditions to the Netherlands in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The big US television networks, channels such as National Geogr…
Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics
Things are thick with politics. This essay illustrates the point by focusing on a variety of technologies that help to manage water: anicuts and tanks in India, dikes and a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, and levees in New Orleans. Technologies are not only shaped by political forces; they also exert political force themselves: on social stratification in Indian villages or on government stability in the Netherlands. We should recognize, …
Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other
The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of …
The Social construction of technological systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change
This book crystallizes and extends the important work Wiebe Bijker has done in the last decade to found a full-scale theory of sociotechnical change that describes where technologies come from and how societies deal with them. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs integrates detailed case studies with theoretical generalizations and political analyses to offer a fully rounded treatment both of the relations between technology and society and of the i…
Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics
Things are thick with politics. This essay illustrates the point by focusing on a variety of technologies that help to manage water: anicuts and tanks in India, dikes and a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, and levees in New Orleans. Technologies are not only shaped by political forces; they also exert political force themselves: on social stratification in Indian villages or on government stability in the Netherlands. We should recognize, …
Do Not Despair: There Is Life after Constructivism
This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed-relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second poi…
Constructing a City: The Cerdà Plan for the Extension of Barcelona
This article applies a constructivist perspective to the analysis of a town-planning innovation. The so-called Cerdà Plan for the extension of Barcelona was launched in the 1860s and gave this city one of its most characteristic present features. For different reasons it can be considered an extraordinary case in town-planing history, though almost unknown to international scholars. The authors analyze the intense controversy that developed aroun…
Science, Relativism and the New Sociology of Technology: Reply to Russell
We welcome Stewart Russell's paper, 'The Social Construction of Artefacts: A Response to Pinch and Bijker',1 not only because the author fully supports our objective of 'developing an explanation of the content of technology', but also because the points he raises give us an opportunity to comment further upon the exciting developments in this new field of science studies. Since writing our earlier paper advocating a new sociology of technology, …
American and Dutch Coastal Engineering: Differences in Risk Conception and Differences in Technological Culture
How is it possible that the USA failed to keep New Orleans dry, when large parts of the Netherlands can exist below sea level? This question, with all its implicit rhetoric about the big and mighty Americans and the small and weak Dutch, generated a flock of American expeditions to the Netherlands in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The big US television networks, channels such as National Geogr…
Ways of Going On: An Analysis of Skill Applied to Medical Practice
Humans do two types of actions, polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. The ability to carry out polimorphic actions cannot be mastered outside of socialization. Mimeomorphic actions, however, can be learned in other ways; sometimes, they can be learned away from the context of practice. Polimorphic actions cannot be mimicked by machines, but some mimeomorphic actions can. Other mimeomorphic actions are too complex to mechanize. Actions tha…
The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS
In this address to the president's plenary at the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author reflected on then recent international events and their possible implications for the research and teaching agendas of the social studies of science, technology, and medicine. He proposed the political engagement of science, technology, and society (STS) institutions and individual STS research…
The Oosterschelde Storm Surge Barrier: A Test Case for Dutch Water Technology, Management, and Politics
"God created the world, and the Dutch created the Netherlands." The old adage summarizes—albeit in an immodest, not to say blasphemous, way—the popular Dutch view of their relationship to water. There is some truth in it: about half the country is below sea level and would be flooded without the dikes that hold back the waters of the rivers and the sea. But the relationship is not as straightforward—humans dominating nature—as the phrase suggests…
Do we live in water cultures? A methodological commentary
Women Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy, and Gender Identity
"Every house plan I will continue to see as a VAC woman: walking through a plan, in my mind slamming doors and placing cupboards, figuring out where and how I would sleep, wash, cook, relax, and play with children in this situation." So wrote the outgoing chairwoman of one of the Netherlands' Vrouwen Adviescommissies voor de Woningbouw (Women's Advisory Committees on Housing, VACs) in her farewell statement. 1 The quotation captures many ideas th…
The role of scientific advisory bodies in precaution‐based risk governance illustrated with the issue of uncertain health effects of electromagnetic fields
Recently, the Health Council of the Netherlands (HCN) published a report on the precautionary principle. The key message was that rather than as a decision rule, the principle should be regarded as a strategy for dealing with uncertainty carefully. We applied these views of HCN to the issue of potential health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs), which is characterised by considerable uncertainty. HCN has published several reports on this is…
Globalization and Vulnerability: Challenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary
Globalization and VulnerabilityChallenges and Opportunities for SHOT around Its Fiftieth Anniversary Wiebe E. Bijker (bio) Fifty years ago, SHOT was designed and created—one could say, engineered— in a careful and strategic way.1 During the subsequent fifty years, SHOT developed into the leading international scholarly society in the history of technology. The maturing of the society and its journal, Technology and Culture, went hand-in-hand with…
Innovation in Indian Handloom Weaving
Handloom weaving is the second most important livelihood in rural India after farming. Improving handloom technologies and practices thus will directly affect the lives of millions of Indians, and this is similar for many other communities in the global South and East. By analyzing hand-loom weaving as a socio-technology, we will show how weaving communities are constantly innovating their technologies, designs, markets, and social organization-o…
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
Controlled human malaria infection trials: How tandems of trust and control construct scientific knowledge
Controlled human malaria infections are clinical trials in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with malaria under controlled conditions. Controlled human malaria infections are complex clinical trials: many different groups and institutions are involved, and several complex technologies are required to function together. This functioning together of technologies, people, and institutions is under special pressure because of potenti…
Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses
Wiebe Bijker, in his plenary lecture on the occasion of receiving SHOT's 2012 Leonardo da Vinci Medal, traces the history of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and interweaves this with observations on the development of the history of technology during the last three decades and with some biographical reflections. His collaborations with Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch figure prominently. He concludes with two examples from his curre…
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other
The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of …
Science, Relativism and the New Sociology of Technology: Reply to Russell
We welcome Stewart Russell's paper, 'The Social Construction of Artefacts: A Response to Pinch and Bijker',1 not only because the author fully supports our objective of 'developing an explanation of the content of technology', but also because the points he raises give us an opportunity to comment further upon the exciting developments in this new field of science studies. Since writing our earlier paper advocating a new sociology of technology, …
The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society by Bruno Latour
982 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. By Bruno Latour. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. viii + 274; figures, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $25.00. Bruno Latour takes his entry “through the back door of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (p. 4) and reports compellingly on scientists and engi…
The Social construction of technological systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
Shaping technology/building society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change
Do Not Despair: There Is Life after Constructivism
This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed-relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second poi…
Reply to Richard Hull
Democratisering van de technologische cultuur
Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change
This book crystallizes and extends the important work Wiebe Bijker has done in the last decade to found a full-scale theory of sociotechnical change that describes where technologies come from and how societies deal with them. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs integrates detailed case studies with theoretical generalizations and political analyses to offer a fully rounded treatment both of the relations between technology and society and of the i…
Constructing a City: The Cerdà Plan for the Extension of Barcelona
This article applies a constructivist perspective to the analysis of a town-planning innovation. The so-called Cerdà Plan for the extension of Barcelona was launched in the 1860s and gave this city one of its most characteristic present features. For different reasons it can be considered an extraordinary case in town-planing history, though almost unknown to international scholars. The authors analyze the intense controversy that developed aroun…
Ways of Going On: An Analysis of Skill Applied to Medical Practice
Humans do two types of actions, polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. The ability to carry out polimorphic actions cannot be mastered outside of socialization. Mimeomorphic actions, however, can be learned in other ways; sometimes, they can be learned away from the context of practice. Polimorphic actions cannot be mimicked by machines, but some mimeomorphic actions can. Other mimeomorphic actions are too complex to mechanize. Actions tha…
Women Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy, and Gender Identity
"Every house plan I will continue to see as a VAC woman: walking through a plan, in my mind slamming doors and placing cupboards, figuring out where and how I would sleep, wash, cook, relax, and play with children in this situation." So wrote the outgoing chairwoman of one of the Netherlands' Vrouwen Adviescommissies voor de Woningbouw (Women's Advisory Committees on Housing, VACs) in her farewell statement. 1 The quotation captures many ideas th…
SCOT Answers, Other Questions: A Reply to Nick Clayton
We welcome the opportunity offered by the editor of T&C to engage in this debate. As well as addressing specific questions raised by Nick Clayton we hope to move the discussion forward by focusing in particular upon the role of theoretical concepts in the history of technology. Clayton criticizes our account of the history of the bicycle and concludes that overall SCOT does not answer. We will readily concede that Clayton, as a specialist histori…
The Oosterschelde Storm Surge Barrier: A Test Case for Dutch Water Technology, Management, and Politics
"God created the world, and the Dutch created the Netherlands." The old adage summarizes—albeit in an immodest, not to say blasphemous, way—the popular Dutch view of their relationship to water. There is some truth in it: about half the country is below sea level and would be flooded without the dikes that hold back the waters of the rivers and the sea. But the relationship is not as straightforward—humans dominating nature—as the phrase suggests…
The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS
In this address to the president's plenary at the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author reflected on then recent international events and their possible implications for the research and teaching agendas of the social studies of science, technology, and medicine. He proposed the political engagement of science, technology, and society (STS) institutions and individual STS research…
Sustainable policy? A public debate about nature development in the Netherlands
This article makes, first, a general argument for ‘sustainable policies.’ This argument will build on the observation that modern societies, of all political guise, find it difficult to cope with the challenges and opportunities posed by science and technology. Classical models of democracy do not seem to be sufficiently equipped to guide the political process in our highly developed societies. Second, this paper will discuss constructivist views…
Joel Mokyrs Sociale Constructie van Economische Groei
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
De geschenken van Pallas Athena. Discussiedossier over kenniseconomie en economische groei
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
In Memoriam: Robert K. Merton, Dorothy Nelkin, and David Edge
At the occasion of the annual banquet of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), the President commemorated Robert K. Merton, Dorothy Nelkin, and David Edge, who all died in 2003. The address highlights some of the contributions of these three scholars and past presidents to the development of the social studies of science, and to 4S
Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation
Dutch Dealings with the Delta
This article shows how Dutch technological culture has historically dealt with and developed around vulnerability with respect to flooding and indicates recent developments in attitude towards the flood threat. The flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina temporarily made the Dutch public worry about the flood defense infrastructure in the Netherlands, exemplified by the Delta Works. Could this happen in the Netherlands? After the…
American and Dutch Coastal Engineering: Differences in Risk Conception and Differences in Technological Culture
How is it possible that the USA failed to keep New Orleans dry, when large parts of the Netherlands can exist below sea level? This question, with all its implicit rhetoric about the big and mighty Americans and the small and weak Dutch, generated a flock of American expeditions to the Netherlands in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The big US television networks, channels such as National Geogr…
Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics
Things are thick with politics. This essay illustrates the point by focusing on a variety of technologies that help to manage water: anicuts and tanks in India, dikes and a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, and levees in New Orleans. Technologies are not only shaped by political forces; they also exert political force themselves: on social stratification in Indian villages or on government stability in the Netherlands. We should recognize, …
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (25 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Engineering (14 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · History (10 works)