Technology and social change

In the 1940s, sociologists attempted to secure a place in the emerging field of technological change. They tried to appropriate technological change as a term, embodying the term in a totally different framework. To sociologists, technological change has a broader meaning than the economic sense of the term. Technological change refers to a large range of effects of technology on society, which they call social change due to technology. The vocabulary used to discuss technological change reflects this interest: social impacts, social implications and social consequences, and, to a lesser extent, human problems and human relations. Over the years, technological change as a term and a research tradition faded from the narratives of historians of “Science, Technology and Society†(STS). Accounts of the history of STS generally start in the mid- 1960s, that is, upon the institutionalization of STS in university programs (for example, Cutcliffe, 1989, 1990; Jasanoff, 2010), while other narratives start in the 1980s, with authors like Donald Mackenzie, Wiebe Bijker and Michel Callon. Meanwhile, the history of technological change was left unstudied.