The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book draw on a wide array of case studies from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th­century Portugal to today's AI labs - to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions.

Wiebe E. Bijker teaches in the Department of General Sciences at the University of Limburg in The Netherlands; Thomas P. Hughes is Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Trevor Pinch is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of York in England

Volume II is every bit as excellent as A-C, and as thought provoking. It's sad to have lost words like faunch (to rant, rage, or fret). The words form a picture of the country a century back, when folks stored their stuff in a hide-nasty (closet), and when they hifered (loitered) and someone asked what they were up to, they might say "Oh, I'm just helping Andy" (doing nothing). The lesson: If I faunch less and just put projects away in the hide-nasty, I can hifer more and take up the art of helping Andy.

With some two million practitioners, engineers form one of America's largest professional groups; indeed, it is the single largest occupation of American males today. The rise of this profession and its place in American society provide the focus for this anthology. 

Spanning two centuries and the various subdisciplines of the field, these essays demonstrate the paradoxical role engineers have played in building (although usually not controlling) the infrastructure on which America's prosperity is based. This collection of seventeen essays traces the rise of the engineering profession and its evolving contribution to the development of America's material and economic success. Topics addressed include: 

*American engineering's birth from European traditions 

*Impact of science on engineering practice 

*Changing relationship between engineers and bureaucratic organizations 

*Growth of engineering professional institutions 

Thoughtfully organized and unique in its scope, this volume will be a welcome overview for both students and scholars of the history of technology. 

These essays were originally published in the journal Technology and Culture.

More than simply a cookbook, The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookerycombines unpretentious, delectable recipes with the wit and wisdom of those who have prepared and eaten such foods for generations. Drawn from the wealth of material gathered by Foxfire students, this engaging volume evokes the foodways of a southern Appalachian community.

Illustrated with photographs of the kitchens, people, and foods of Appalachia, this captivating collection contains more than 500 recipes. A sampling of favorites includes rhubarb cobbler, sassafras tea, fried quail, Brunswick stew, angel flake biscuits, seven-day cole slaw, and lime pickles. The book also explains traditional methods of preparing and preserving food, including directions for making homemade yeast, curing pork, 'gritting' corn, canning foods, cooking with a wood stove or fireplace, and preparing wild game.

Originally published in 1984, the cookbook earned high praise from both food editors and folklorists. It returns with its bounty of practical information and personal recollections as an outstanding record of a folk heritage.

These thirteen essays explore a crucial historical question that has been notoriously hard to pin down: To what extent, and by what means, does a society's technology determine its political, social, economic, and cultural forms?

Karl Marx launched the modern debate on determinism with his provocative remark that "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist," and a classic article by Robert Heilbroner (reprinted here) renewed the debate within the context of the history of technology. This book clarifies the debate and carries it forward.

Marx's position has become embedded in our culture, in the form of constant reminders as to how our fast-changing technologies will alter our lives. Yet historians who have looked closely at where technologies really come from generally support the proposition that technologies are not autonomous but are social products, susceptible to democratic controls. The issue is crucial for democratic theory. These essays tackle it head-on, offering a deep look at all the shadings of determinism and assessing determinist models in a wide variety of historical contexts.

Contributors: Bruce Bimber. Richard W. Bulliet. Robert L. Heilbroner. Thomas P. Hughes. Leo Marx. Thomas J. Misa. Peter C. Perdue. Philip Scranton. Merritt Roe Smith. Michael L. Smith. John M. Staudenmaier. Rosalind Williams.

Representationùthe production of meaning through language, discourse, and imageùoccupies a central place in current studies on culture. This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language, and discourse work as "systems of representation." The chapters explain a variety of approaches to representation, bringing to bear concepts from semiotic, discursive, psychoanalytic, anthropological, sociological, feminist, art-historical, and Foucauldian models of representation. The editors explore representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites, including the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; the poetics and politics of exhibiting other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized other in popular media, film, and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas. Representation analyzes contested and critical questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, and power in representation, and the relations between representation, pleasure, and fantasy. Accessible but not simplified, the book offers a unique perspective for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields

The Goffman Reader aims to bring the most complete collection of Erving Goffman's (1922-1982) writing and thinking as a sociologist. Among the most inventive, unique and individualistic of thinkers in American sociology, his works first appeared in the early 1950's at a time when a more formal, traditional sociology dominated the scene. In this collection, Goffman's work is arranged into four categories: the production of self, the confined self, the nature of social life, and the framing of experience. Through this arrangement, readers will not only be presented with Goffman's thinking in chronological order, but also with a framework of analysis that clearly introduces the social theoretical ideas by which Goffman shaped the direction of sociological thought through the late twentieth century.

This is the proceedings of the TC13 flagship conference, held biannially. It reflects the state-of-the-art in HCI in 1997. It covers a broad range of the most important developments in HCI, focusing on international issues in: theory, interface tools and architecture, HCI applications and HCI development issues.

Reviews of the 1st Edition:

"....This book is a welcome addition to the sociology of technology, a field whose importance is increasingly recognised."- Sociology

"....sets a remarkably high standard in breadth of coverage, in scholarship, and in readability and can be recommended to the general reader and to the specialist alike."- Science and Society

"....This remarkably readable and well-edited anthology focuses, in a wide variety of concrete examples, not on the impacts of technologies on societies but in the reverse: how different social contexts shaped the emergence of particular technologies."- Technology and Culture How does social context affect the development of technology?What is the relationship between technology and genderIs production technology shaped by efficiency or by social control?

Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic - something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production; domestic and reproductive technology; and military technology.

The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise - though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all - the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons.

The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology and society. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives.

The emergence of network facilities and the increased availability of personal computer systems over the last decade has seen a growing interest in the use of computers to support cooperative work. This volume contains the proceedings of the sixth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), a multi-disciplinary area which embraces both the development of new technologies and an understanding of the relationship between technology and society. These proceedings present a collection of papers that encompass activities in the field, treating such subjects as virtual environments, uses of the Internet, studies of cooperative work and emerging models, studies of groupware systems in use in real-world settings, and theories and techniques to support the development of cooperative applications. The articles feature emerging technologies alongside new methods and approaches to the expansion of this important class of applications. Audience: This work reflects the best of the current research and practice within CSCW. It will appeal to both researchers and practitioners whose work involves computer and information science, human-computer interaction, information systems, hypermedia, organisational/social informatics and social studies of science and technology.