Book Review

MACKENZIE, Donald & WAJCMAN, Judy (1999) The Social Shaping Of Technology, (2nd ed), Open University Press, Buckingham. 462pp. ISBN 0 335 19914 3 (hb) 0335 19913 5 (pb)

Reviewed by Myles Breen, Charles Sturt University

Donald Mackenzie’s and Judy Wajcman's Social Shaping of Technology reached its second edition in 1999. As an example of that endangered species, the purpose-driven anthology, today threatened by the photocopied assemblages by individual lecturers, this book has achieved admirable success. The thirty chapters are divided into four parts. The first is introductory and general. The second concerns the technology of production. The third concerns reproductive technology, and the fourth military technology.
This book would be welcome in any communication scholar's library, as the sociology of technology is a perennial topic. As to which specific courses would be most likely to adopt the text, all one can say is that the choice is wide. A group seminar where each student is required to participate seems to be the best fit, as the topics featuring the human-technological interface varying from contraception to infantry weapons covers a broad spectrum indeed.
This is a book for historians and abstract thinkers. The contribution on personal computing, for example, may evoke feelings of nostalgia in older readers, but it is no help in understanding the social effect of computers for any reader of current computer magazines. It is pretty much the standard, British Cultural Studies offering. It betrays its 1985 beginnings, and for teachers familiar with the companion Open University offering, Culture, Society and the Media anthology (Methuen, 1982) compiled by Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Wollacott, there will be few surprises.
The authors explain their purpose in the preface and introductory chapters. Essentially, theirs is an activist plea, asking the readers not to simply accept Technological Determinism without doing something about it. Yet their examples, indeed their method, overwhelms the reader with the opposite message. While Karl Marx was the Economic Determinist, these neo-Marxists have simply replaced “money” with “technology”.