Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Technological determinism refers to the thesis that the path of social change is directly influenced by technological developments. As such the thesis ascribes agency to an inert object, namely technology, in human affairs and their development. It is common to distinguish between hard and soft versions of the thesis. The hard version views technology as the sole determinant of social development, whereas the soft version depicts it as one among several other factors and as greatly implicated in the social circumstances out of which it arises. The soft version thus moderates the anti-determinist's dislike of the ascription of agency to a thing and of the marginalizing of human intervention. Nowadays, technological determinism is considered a discredited thesis about the nature of society. Few social scientists today would describe themselves as technological determinists without qualifying the description considerably. A lingering technological determinism can sometimes be discerned in approaches that seek to depict technology as both cause and effect (e.g., Hughes 1994 ). Technological determinism was particularly influential in sociological studies of work and organizations. In the 1950s and 1960s, studies of work contexts like the automobile assembly line frequently construed the largely negative work attitudes of workers as directly produced by the technology with which they ... log in or subscribe to read full text