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The Limits of Technical Rationality TECHNOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY A great deal of 20th century social thought has been based on a pessimistic view of modernity that achieved its classic expression in Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. According to Weber, modernity is characterized by the increasing role of calculation and control in social life, a trend leading to what he called the “iron cage” of bureaucracy (Weber, 1958: 181-182). This notion of enslavement by a rational order inspires pessimistic philosophies of technology according to which human beings have become mere cogs in the social machinery, objects of technical control in much the same way as raw materials and the natural environment. While this view is overdrawn, it is true that as more and more of social life is structured by technically mediated organizations such as corporations, state agencies, prisons, and medical institutions, the technical hierarchy merges with the social and political hierarchy. The idea and (for some) ideal of technocracy grows out of this new situation. Technocracy represents a generalization to society as a whole of the type of “neutral” instrumental rationality supposed to characterize the technical sphere. It assumes the existence of technological imperatives that need only be recognized to guide management of society as a system. Whether technocracy is welcomed or abhorred, these deterministic premises leave no room for democracy. The title of this part of this book implies a provocative reversal of Weber’s conclusions. “Democratic” rationalization is a contradiction in Weberian terms. On those terms, once tradition has been defeated by modernity, radical struggle for freedom and individuality degenerates into an affirmation of irrational life forces against the routine and drab predictability of a bureaucratic order. This is not a democratic program but a romantic anti-dystopian one, the sort of thing that is already fore-shadowed in Dostoievsky’s Notes from Underground and various back to nature ideologies. The new left and all its works have been condemned repeatedly on these grounds. No doubt the new left is rightly criticized for the excesses of its romanticism, 76 Questioning Technology but the two preceding chapters of this book show that this is not the whole story. Modern societies experienced real crises in the late 1960s that marked a turning point in the willingness of the public to leave its affairs in the hands of experts. Out of that period came not just regressive fantasies but a new and more democratic conception of progress. I have attempted in several previous books to articulate that conception in a third position that is neither technocratic nor romantic. The crux of the argument is the claim that technology is ambivalent, that there is no unique correlation between technological advance and the distribution of social power. The ambivalence of technology can be summarized in the following two principles. 1. Conservation of hierarchy: social hierarchy can generally be preserved and reproduced as new technology is introduced. This principle explains the extraordinary continuity of power in advanced capitalist societies over the last several generations, made possible by technocratic strategies of modernization despite enormous technical changes.1 2. Democratic rationalization: new technology can also be used to undermine the existing social hierarchy or to force it to meet needs it has ignored. This principle explains the technical initiatives that often accompany the structural reforms pursued by union, environmental, and other social movements. This second principle implies that there will generally be ways of rationalizing society that democratize rather than centralize control. We need not go underground or native to escape the iron cage. In this chapter and the next I will show that this is in fact the meaning of the emerging social movements to change technology in a variety of areas such as computers, medicine, and the environment. But does it make sense to call the changes these movements advocate rationalizations? Are they not irrational precisely to the extent that they involve citizens in the affairs of experts? The strongest objections to democratizing technology come from those experts, who fear the loss of their hard-won freedom from lay interference. Can we reconcile public participation with the autonomy of professional technical work? Perhaps, as advocates of technocracy argue, we should strive not to politicize technology but to technicize politics in order to overcome the irrationality of public life. The counter-argument in favor of democratization must establish the rationality of informal public involvement in technical change. 1 This principle explains why there can be no technical “fix” to fundamental social and political injustices. For examples, see Rybczynski (1991: chap. 5). The Limits of Technical Rationality 77 FROM DETERMINISM TO CONSTRUCTIVISM Determinism Defined Faith in progress has been supported for generations by two widely held deterministic beliefs: that technical necessity dictates the path of development, and that that path is discovered through the pursuit of efficiency.2 So persuasive are these beliefs that even critics of progress such as Heidegger and Ellul share them. I will argue here that both beliefs are false, and that, furthermore, they have anti-democratic implications. Determinism claims that technologies have an autonomous functional logic that can be explained without reference to society. Technology is presumably social only through the purpose it serves, and purposes are in the mind of the beholder. Technology would thus resemble science and mathematics by its intrinsic independence of the social world. Yet unlike science and mathematics, technology has immediate and powerful social impacts. Society’s fate seems to be at least partially dependent on a nonsocial factor which influences it without suffering a reciprocal influence. Determinism is based on two premises which I will call unilinear progress and determination by the base. 1) Technical progress appears to follow a unilinear course, a fixed track, from less to more advanced configurations. Each stage of technological development enables the next, and there are no branches off the main line. Societies may advance slowly or quickly, but the direction and definition of progress is not in question. Although this conclusion seems obvious from a backward glance at the history of any familiar technical object, in fact it is based on two claims of unequal plausibility: first, that technical progress proceeds from lower to higher levels of development; and second, that that development follows a single sequence of necessary stages. As we will see, the first claim is independent of the second and not necessarily deterministic. 2) Technological determinism also affirms that social institutions must adapt to the “imperatives” of the technological base. This view, which no doubt has its source in a certain reading of Marx, is long since the common sense of the social sciences. Adopting a technology necessarily constrains one to adopt certain practices that are connected with its employment. Railroads require scheduled travel. Once they are introduced people who formerly could live with rather 2 For an interesting recent collection of articles on determinism, see Smith and Marx (1994). The contribution of Philip Scranton seems closest in spirit to the theory presented here. 78 Questioning Technology approximate notions of time—the day marked out by church bells and the sun—need watches. So the imperative consequence of railroads is a new organization of social time. Similarly factories are hierarchical institutions and set the tone for social hierarchy throughout modern societies. Again, there is something plausible about this view, namely that devices and practices are congruent, but the stream of influence is not unidirectional. These two theses of technological determinism present decontextualized, self-generating technology as the foundation of modern life. And since we in the advanced countries stand at the peak of technological development, the rest of the world can only follow our example. Determinism thus implies that our technology and its corresponding institutional structures are universal, indeed, planetary in scope. There may be many forms of tribal society, many feudalisms, even many forms of early capitalism, but there is only one modernity and it is exemplified in our society for good or ill. Late developers take note: as Marx once said, calling the attention of his backward German compatriots to British advances: “De te fabula narratur”— of you the tale is told (Marx, 1906: 13). Underdetermination The implications of determinism appear so obvious that it is surprising to discover that neither of its two premises withstand close scrutiny. Yet contemporary sociology undermines the idea of unilinear progress while historical precedents are unkind to determination by the base. Recent constructivist sociology of technology grows out of the new social studies of science. The “strong program” in sociology of knowledge challenges the exemption of scientific theories from the sort of sociological examination to which we submit nonscientific beliefs. The “principle of symmetry” holds that all contending beliefs are subject to the same type of social explanation regardless of their truth or falsity. This view derives from the thesis of underdetermination, the so-called Duhem-Quine principle in philosophy of science, which refers to the inevitable lack of logically compelling reasons for preferring one competing scientific theory to another (Bloor, 1991). Rationality, in other words, does not constitute a separate and self-sufficient domain of human activity. A similar approach to the study of technology denies that a purely rational criterion such as technical effectiveness suffices to account for the success of The Limits of Technical Rationality 79 some innovations and the failure of others. Of course it remains true that some things really work and others do not: successful design respects technical principles. But there are often several possible designs with which to achieve similar objectives and no decisive technical reason to prefer one to the others. Here, underdetermination means that technical principles alone are insufficient to determine the design of actual devices. What then does decide the issue? A commonplace reply is “economic efficiency.” But the problem is trickier than it seems at first. Before the efficiency of a process can be measured, both the type and quality of output have to be fixed. Thus economic choices are necessarily secondary to clear definitions of both the problems to which technology is addressed and the solutions it provides. But clarity on these matters is often the outcome rather than the presupposition of technical development. For example, MS DOS lost the competition with the Windows graphical interface, but not before the very nature of computing was transformed by a change in the user base and in the types of tasks to which computers were dedicated. A system that was more efficient for programming and accounting tasks proved less than ideal for secretaries and hobbyists interested in ease of use. Thus economics cannot explain but rather follows the trajectory of development. Constructivism argues, I think correctly, that the choice between alternatives ultimately depends neither on technical nor economic efficiency, but on the “fit” between devices and the interests and beliefs of the various social groups that influence the design process. What singles out an artifact is its relationship to the social environment, not some intrinsic property. Pinch and Bijker illustrate this approach with the early evolution of the bicycle (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). In the late 19th Century, before the present form of the bicycle was fixed, design was pulled in several different directions. The object we take to be a self-evident “black box” actually started out as two very different devices, a sportsman’s racer and a means of transportation. Some customers perceived bicycling as a competitive sport, while others had an essentially utilitarian interest in getting from here to there. Designs corresponding to the first definition had high front wheels that were rejected as unsafe by riders of the second type, who preferred designs with two equal-sized low wheels. The large diameter front wheel of the sportsman’s racer was faster, but it was unstable. Equal-sized wheels made for a safer but less exciting ride. These two designs met different needs and were in fact different technologies with 80 Questioning Technology many shared elements. Pinch and Bijker call this original ambiguity of the object designated as a “bicycle,” “interpretative flexibility.” Eventually the “safety” design won out, and it benefited from all the subsequent advances in the field. The entire later history of the bicycle down to the present day stems from that line of technical development. In retrospect, it seems as though the high wheelers were a clumsy and less efficient stage in a progressive development leading through the old “safety” bicycle to current designs. In fact the high wheeler and the safety shared the field for years and neither was a stage in the other’s development. The high wheeler represented a possible alternative path of bicycle development that addressed different problems. The bicycle example is reassuringly innocent as are, no doubt, the majority of technical decisions. But what if the various technical solutions to a problem have different effects on the distribution of power and wealth? Then the choice between them is political and the political implications of that choice will be embodied in some sense in the technology. Of course the discovery of this connection did not await constructivism. Langdon Winner offers a particularly telling example of it (Winner, 1986: 22-23). Robert Moses’ plans for an early New York expressway included overpasses that were a little too low for city buses. Poor people from Manhattan, who depended on bus transportation, were thereby discouraged from visiting the beaches on Long Island. In this case a simple design specification contained a racial and class bias. We could show something similar with many other technologies, the assembly line for example, which exemplifies capitalist notions of control of the work force. Reversing these biases would not return us to pure, neutral technology, but would simply alter its valuative content in a direction more in accord with our own preferences and therefore less visible to us. Determinism ignores these complications and works with decontextualized temporal cross-sections in the life of its objects. It claims implausibly to be able to get from one such momentary configuration of the object to the next on purely technical terms. But in the real world all sorts of attitudes and desires crystallize around technical objects and influence their development. Differences in the way social groups interpret and use the objects are not merely extrinsic but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. Technology cannot be determining because the “different interpretations by social groups of the content of artefacts lead via different chains of problems and solutions to different further developments” (Pinch and Bijker, 1987: 42). What the object is for the groups that ultimately decide its fate determines what it becomes The Limits of Technical Rationality 81 as it is modified. If this is true, then technological development is a social process and can only be understood as such. Determinism is a species of Whig history which makes it seem as though the end of the story were inevitable from the very beginning. It projects the abstract technical logic of the finished object back into its origins as a cause of development, confounding our understanding of the past and stifling the imagination of a different future. Constructivism can open up that future, Chart 2: How Artifacts Have Politics Artifacts 1-4 share certain effects but each also has its own unique effects which distinguish it from the others. Effects in this sense include uses, contextual requirements that must be met to employ the artifacts, and their unintended consequences. Criteria 1-4 all select the shared effects of the artifacts and each also valorizes one or another of the unique effects. Where different unique effects have different political consequences, competing groups will have preferred criteria corresponding to the fit between their goals and the various artifacts. The criteria can also be combined in the course of the evolution of the artifacts through design changes that adapt one of them to also delivering the unique effects of one or several others. In a political context such combinations correspond to alliances. 82 Questioning Technology although its practitioners have hesitated so far to engage the larger social issues implied in their method. Indeterminism If the thesis of unilinear progress falls, the collapse of the notion of determination by the technological base cannot be far behind. Yet it is still frequently invoked in contemporary political debates. I shall return to these debates later in this chapter. For now, let us consider the remarkable anticipation of current conservative rhetoric in the struggle over the length of the workday and child labor in mid-19th Century England. Factory owners and economists denounced regulation as inflationary; industrial production supposedly required children and the long workday. One member of parliament declared that regulation is “a false principle of humanity, which in the end is certain to defeat itself.” The new rules were so radical, he concluded, as to constitute “in principle an argument to get rid of the whole system of factory labor” (Hansard’s Debates: 1844 (22 Feb-22 April), 1123, 1120). Similar protestations are heard today on behalf of industries threatened with what they call environmental “Luddism.” Yet what actually happened once limitations were imposed on the workday and children expelled from the factory? Did the violated imperatives of technology exact a price? Not at all. Regulation led to an intensification of factory labor that was incompatible with the earlier conditions in any case. Children ceased to be workers and were redefined socially as learners and consumers. Consequently, they entered the labor market with higher levels of skill and discipline that were soon pre-supposed by technological design and work organization. As a result no one is nostalgic for a return to the good old days when inflation was held down by child labor. That is simply not an option.3 This case shows the tremendous flexibility of technical systems. They are not rigidly constraining but on the contrary can adapt to a variety of social demands. The responsiveness of technology to social redefinition explains its adaptability. On this account technology is just another dependent social variable, albeit an 3 It is interesting (and distressing) to note the moral tensions around the use of child labor to manufacture imports such as sports shoes or circuit boards. In this as in so many other domains, globalization makes it possible to evade regulations that cannot be challenged on home territory. Predictably, political protests here against child labor abroad are weaker than would be resistance to reintroducing child labor at home. The Limits of Technical Rationality 83 increasingly important one, and not the key to the riddle of history. Determinism, I have argued, is characterized by the principles of unilinear progress and determination by the base; if determinism is wrong, then research must be guided by two contrary principles. In the first place, technological development is not unilinear but branches in many directions, and could reach generally higher levels along several different tracks. And, secondly, social development is not determined by technological development but depends on both technical and social factors. The political significance of this position should also be clear by now. In a society where determinism stands guard on the frontiers of democracy, indeterminism is political. If technology has many unexplored potentialities, no technological imperatives dictate the current social hierarchy. Rather, technology is a site of social struggle, in Latour’s phrase, a “parliament of things” on which political alternatives contend. CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM Technology Study The picture sketched so far requires a significant change in our definition of technology. It can no longer be considered as a collection of devices, nor, more generally, as the sum of rational means. These definitions imply that technology is essentially nonsocial. Perhaps the prevalence of such tendentious definitions explains why technology is not generally considered an appropriate field of humanistic study; we are assured that its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a hermeneutically interpretable meaning. At most, humanistic methods might illuminate extrinsic aspects of technology, such as packaging and advertising, or popular reactions to controversial innovations such as nuclear power or surrogate motherhood. Of course, if one ignores most of its connections to society, it is no wonder technology appears to be self-generating. Technological determinism draws its force from this attitude. The constructivist position has very different implications for the humanistic study of technology. They can be summarized in the following three points: 1. Technical design is not determined by a general criterion such as efficiency, but by a social process which differentiates technical alternatives according to a variety of case-specific criteria; 84 Questioning Technology 2. That social process is not about fulfilling “natural” human needs, but concerns the cultural definition of needs and therefore of the problems to which technology is addressed; 3. Competing definitions reflect conflicting visions of modern society realized in different technical choices. The first point widens the investigation of social alliances and conflicts to include technical issues which, typically, have been treated as the object of a unique consensus. The other two points imply that culture and ideology enter history as effective forces not only in politics, but also in the technical sphere. These three points thus establish the legitimacy of applying the same methods to technology that are employed to study social institutions, customs, beliefs, and art. With such a hermeneutic approach, the definition of technology expands to embrace its social meaning and its cultural horizon. Function or Meaning The role of social meaning is clear in the case of the bicycle. The very definition of the object was at stake in a contest of interpretations: was it to be a sportsman’s toy or a means of transportation? It might be objected that this is merely a disagreement over function with no hermeneutic significance. Once a function is selected, the engineer has the last word on its implementation and the humanist interpreter is out of luck. This is the view of most engineers and managers; they are at home with “function” but have no place for “meaning.” In chapter 9 I will propose a very different model of the essence of technology based not on the distinction of the social and the technical, but crosscutting the customary boundaries between them. In this conception, technology’s essence is not an abstraction from the contingencies of function, a causal structure that remains the same through the endless uses to which devices are subjected in the various systems that incorporate them. Rather, the essence of technology is abstracted from a larger social context within which functionality plays a specific limited role. Technologies do of course have a causal aspect, but they also have a symbolic aspect that is determining for their use and evolution. From that standpoint, I would like to introduce Bruno Latour’s and Jean Baudrillard’s quite different but complementary proposals for what I will call a hermeneutics of technology. Latour argues that norms are not merely subjective human intentions but The Limits of Technical Rationality 85 that they are also realized in devices. This is an aspect of what he calls the symmetry of humans and nonhumans which he adds to the constructivist symmetry of true and false theories, successful and unsuccessful devices. According to Latour, technical devices embody norms that serve to enforce obligations. He presents the door closer as a simple example. A notice posted on a door can remind users to close it, or a mechanism can close it automatically. The door closer, in some sense, does the work of the notice but more efficiently. It materializes the moral obligation to close the door too easily ignored by passersby. That obligation is “delegated” to a device in Latour’s sense of the term. According to Latour, the “morality” in this case can be allocated either to persons—by a notice—or to things—by a spring (Latour, 1992). This Latourian equivalent of Hegelian Sittlichkeit opens the technical world to investigation not simply as a collection of functioning devices determined by causal principles but also as the objectification of social values, as a cultural system. Baudrillard suggests a useful approach to the study of the aesthetic and psychological dimensions of this “system of objects” (Baudrillard, 1968). He adapts the linguistic distinction between denotation and connotation to describe the difference between the functions of technical objects and their many other associations. For example, automobiles are means of transportation—a function; but they also signify the owner as more or less respectable, wealthy, and sexy— connotations. The engineer may think these connotations are extrinsic to the device he or she is working on, but they too belong to its social reality. Baudrillard’s approach opens technology to quasi-literary analysis. Indeed, technologies are subject to interpretation in much the same way as texts, works of art, and actions (Ricoeur, 1979).4 However, his model still remains caught in the functionalist paradigm insofar as it takes the distinction between denotation and connotation for granted. In reality, that distinction is a product not a premise of technical change. There is often no consensus on the precise function of new technologies. The personal computer is a case in point; it was launched on the market with infinite promise and no applications. The story of Chinese sea faring in the 15th century offers another marvelous example of prolonged suspense regarding function. The Chinese built the largest fleet composed of the biggest ships the world had ever seen, but could not agree on the purpose 4 Two interesting studies that illustrate this thesis around problems of lighting and electricity are Schivelbusch (1988) and Marvin (1988). 86 Questioning Technology of their own naval achievements. Astonishingly, they dismantled the fleet and retreated into their borders, paving the way for the European conquest of Asia (Levathes, 1994: 20). In the case of well established technologies, the distinction between function and connotation is usually fairly clear. There is a tendency to project this clarity back into the past and to imagine that the technical function of a device called it into being. However, as we have seen, technical functions are not pregiven but are discovered in the course of development and use. Gradually they are locked in by the evolution of the social and technical environment, as for example the transportation functions of the automobile have been institutionalized in lowdensity urban designs that create the demand for transportation automobiles satisfy. So long as no institutional lock-in ties it decisively to one of its several possible functions, these ambiguities in the definition of a new technology pose technical problems which must be resolved through interactions between designers, purchasers and users. Technological Hegemony Technical design responds not only to the social meaning of individual technical objects, but also incorporates broader assumptions about social values. The cultural horizon of technology therefore constitutes a second hermeneutic dimension. It is one of the foundations of modern forms of social hegemony. As I will use the term, hegemony is domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to those it dominates. One might also define it as that aspect of the distribution of social power which has the force of culture behind it. The term “horizon” refers to culturally general assumptions that form the unquestioned background to every aspect of life. Some of these support the prevailing hegemony. For example, in feudal societies, the “chain of being” established hierarchy in the fabric of God’s universe and protected the caste relations of the society from challenge. Under this horizon, peasants revolted in the name of the King, the only imaginable source of power. Technocratic rationalization plays an equivalent role today, and technological design is the key to its cultural power. Technological development is constrained by cultural norms originating in economics, ideology, religion, and tradition. I discussed earlier how assumptions about the age composition of the labor force entered into the design of 19th century production technology. Such assumptions seem so natural and obvious The Limits of Technical Rationality 87 they often lie below the threshold of conscious awareness. When one looks at old photos of child factory workers, one is struck by the adaptation of machines to their height (Newhall, 1964: 140). The images disturb us, but were no doubt taken for granted until child labor became controversial. Design specifications simply incorporated the sociological fact of child labor into the structure of devices. The impress of social relations can be traced in the technology. The assembly line offers another telling instance (Braverman, 1974). Its technologically enforced labor discipline increases productivity and profits by increasing control through deskilling and pacing work. However, the assembly line only appears as technical progress in a specific social context. It would not look like an advance in an economy based on workers’ councils in which labor discipline was largely self-imposed by the work group rather than imposed from above by management. In such a society engineers would seek different ways of increasing productivity. Here again design mirrors back the social order (Noble, 1984). Thus what Marcuse called “technological rationality” and Foucault the “regime of truth” is not merely a belief, an ideology, but is effectively incorporated into the machines themselves. Technologies are selected by the dominant interests from among many possible configurations. Guiding the selection process are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define the horizon under which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of that cultural horizon. Apparently neutral technological rationality is enlisted in support of a hegemony through the bias it acquires in the process of technical development. The more technology society employs, the more significant is this support. The legitimating effectiveness of technology depends on unconsciousness of the cultural-political horizon under which it was designed. A critical theory of technology can uncover that horizon, demystify the illusion of technical necessity, and expose the relativity of the prevailing technical choices. Technical Regimes and Codes Disputes over the definition of technologies are settled by privileging one among many possible configurations. This process, called closure, yields an “exemplar” for further development in its field (van den Belt and Rip, 1990: 140). The exemplar reacts back on the technical discipline from which it originated by establishing standard ways of looking at problems and solutions. 88 Questioning Technology These are variously described by social scientists as “technological frames” or “technological regimes” or “paradigms” (Bijker, 1987: 168; Nelson and Winter, 1982: 258-259; Dosi, 1982). Rip and Kemp, for example, define a regime as: The whole complex of scientific knowledge, engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, and institutions and infrastructures that make up the totality of a technology. A technological regime is thus the technology-specific context of a technology which prestructures the kind of problem-solving activities that engineers are likely to do, a structure that both enables and constrains certain changes (Rip and Kemp, 1998: 340). Such regimes incorporate many social factors expressed by technologists in purely technical language and practices. I call those aspects of technological regimes which can best be interpreted as direct reflections of significant social values the “technical code” of the technology. Technical codes define the object in strictly technical terms in accordance with the social meaning it has acquired. These codes are usually invisible because, like culture itself, they appear self-evident. For example, if tools and workplaces are designed today for adult hands and heights, that is only because children were expelled from industry long ago with design consequences we now take for granted. Technological regimes reflect this social decision unthinkingly, as is normal, and only social scientific investigation can uncover the source of the standards in which it is embodied. Technical codes include important aspects of the basic definition of many technical objects insofar as these too become universal culturally accepted features of daily life. The telephone, the automobile, the refrigerator and a hundred other everyday devices have clear and unambiguous definitions in the dominant culture: we know exactly what they are insofar as we are acculturated members of our society. Each new instance of these standard technologies must conform to its defining code to be recognizable and acceptable. But there is nothing obvious about this outcome from a historical point of view. Each of these objects was selected from a series of alternatives by a code reflecting specific social values. The bicycle reached this point in the 1890s. A technical code defining the bicycle as a safe means of transportation required a seat positioned well behind a small front wheel. The bicycle produced according to this code, known at the The Limits of Technical Rationality 89 time as a “safety,” became the forebear of all future designs. The safety connoted women and mature riders, trips to the store, and so on, rather than racing and sport. Eventually the safety was able to incorporate the racing connotations of the bicycle in specialized designs and the old high wheeler was laid to rest. Note that in this typical case the choice of the exemplary design reflected the privilege granted the specific code defining for it, i.e., designating objects as “safe” or “unsafe.” The high wheelers could only have won out by a similar privileging of “fast” and “slow.” Because technologies have such vast social implications, technical designs are often involved in disputes between ideological visions. The outcome of these disputes, a hegemonic order of some sort, brings technology into conformity with the dominant social forces, insuring the “isomorphism, the formal congruence between the technical logics of the apparatus and the social logics within which it is diffused” (Bidou, et al., 1988: 71). These hermeneutic congruencies offer a way to explain the impact of the larger sociocultural environment on the mechanisms of closure, a still relatively undeveloped field of technology studies. Kuhnian Perspectives on Technical Change This analysis leads to an obvious question: if all this is true, why aren’t we more aware of the public interventions that have shaped technology in the past? Why does it appear apolitical? It is the very success of these interventions that gives rise to this illusion. Success means that technical regimes change to reflect interests excluded at earlier stages in the design process. But the eventual internalization of these interests in design masks their source in public protest. The waves close over forgotten struggles and the technologists return to the comforting belief in their own autonomy which seems to be verified by the conditions of everyday technical work. The notion of the “neutrality” of technology is a standard defensive reaction on the part of professions and organizations confronted by public protest and attempting to protect their autonomy. But in reality technical professions are never autonomous; in defending their traditions, they actually defend the outcomes of earlier controversies rather than a supposedly pure technical rationality. Informal public intervention is thus already an implicit factor in design whatever technologists and managers may believe. Lay initiatives usually influence technical rationality without destroying it. 90 Questioning Technology In fact, public intervention may actually improve technology by addressing problems ignored by vested interests entrenched in the design process. If the technical professions can be described as autonomous, it is not because they are truly independent of politics but rather because they usually succeed in translating political demands into technically rational terms. With some modifications, Kuhn’s famous distinction between revolutionary and normal science can be reformulated to explain these aspects of the design process (Kuhn, 1962). The alternation of professional and public dominance in technical fields is one of several patterns that correspond roughly to the distinction between normal and revolutionary scientific change. There is, however, a significant difference between science and technology. Natural science eventually becomes far more independent of public opinion than technology. As a result, democratic interventions into scientific change are unusual, and revolutions explode around tensions within the disciplines. Of course even mature science is responsive to politics and culture, but their influence is usually felt indirectly through administrative decisions and changes in education. By contrast, ordinary people are constantly involved in technical activity, the more so as technology advances. It is true that they may be objects rather than subjects of the technologies that affect them, but in any case their closeness offers them a unique vantage point. Situated knowledges arising from that vantage point can become the basis for public interventions even in a mature technological system. These situated knowledges are usually viewed with skepticism by experts guided by the pursuit of efficiency within the framework of the established technical codes. But in Kuhnian terms, efficiency only applies within a paradigm; it cannot judge between paradigms. To the extent that technical cultures are based on efficiency, they constitute the equivalent of Kuhn’s normal science and as such they lack the categories with which to comprehend the paradigmatic changes that will transform them in the course of events. And since democratic interventions are often responsible for such changes, they too remain opaque to the dominant technical culture. Reflexive Design The subordination of technology to society is not merely a matter of assigning functions to devices, a self-evident form of dependency. It goes far beyond that to affect the very definition of the functions that ought to be fulfilled, and the quality of the environment associated with the devices that fulfill them, both

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