feenberg
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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