Quotes from Wiebe E. Bijker

My contention is that especially young, recently trained engineers are in a position to recognize and to react on a presumptive anomaly: They are trained within the technological frame but have low enough inclusion to question the basic assumptions of that frame.

Three situations were distinguished to characterize the developmental process of an artifact at some stage: no dominant technological frame, one technological frame, and several dominant technological frames. It is stressed that these situations should not be interpreted as forming a rigid scheme of phases through which an artifact successively has to pass. Rather, it is a heuristic device to simplify the description of the "seamless web" of history. In

Discussions about technology—its capacity, what it can and cannot do, what it should and should not do—are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans. Attempts

The term "pattern" is preferable to "model" because a pattern is a metaphor suggesting looseness and a tendency to become unraveled.

How brave, then, were the Vivaldi brothers and their men when they sailed their galleys past the pillars of Hercules and out of recorded history! We do not know in what form disaster finally struck. What we can guess, however, is that the galleys, emergent objects constituted by a heterogeneous engineer, were dissociated into their component parts. The

Successful system builders cannot work with a rigid demarcation between the system and the environment in which the system develops. They continuously seek to mold that environment so that the growth of the system is facilitated, often incorporating what was previously environment into the system, as happened when electrical supply companies came to control the regulative agencies set up to police them.

Actors create and maintain systems, and if they fail to do so, the systems in question cease to exist. The stability of systems is a frequently precarious achievement in the face of potentially hostile forces, both social and natural.

When the social groups involved in designing and using technology decide that a problem is solved, they stabilize the technology. The result is closure. Closure and stabilization, however, are not isolated events; they occur repeatedly during technological development. To

Technology/science," "pure/applied," "internal/external," and "technical/ social" are some of the dichotomies that were foreign to the integrating inventors, engineers, and managers of the system- and network-building era. To

Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The

a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress

Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion John Law

Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as