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Wiebe E. Bijker

Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor of Technology and Society at the University of Maastricht. He is the author of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press, 1997) and other books.

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Titles by This Author

The Paradox of Scientific Authority

The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies
By Wiebe E. Bijker, Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks

Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a paradox: how scientific advice can be influential in society even when the status of science and scientists seems to be at a low ebb.

Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs

Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change
By Wiebe E. Bijker


This book crystallizes and extends the important work Wiebe Bijker has done in the last decade to found a full-scale theory of sociotechnical change that describes where technologies come from and how societies deal with them. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs integrates detailed case studies with theoretical generalizations and political analyses to offer a fully rounded treatment both of the relations between technology and society and of the issues involved in sociotechnical change.

Titles by This Editor

The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Anniversary Edition

New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch

This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry--social construction of technology, or SCOT--that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems.

Shaping Technology / Building Society

Studies in Sociotechnical Change
Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law

Technology is everywhere, yet a theory of technology and its social dimension remains to be fully developed. Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a theory of technological development and implementation that is strongly grounded in both sociology and history. The 12 essays address the central question of how technologies become stabilized, how they attain a final form and use that is generally accepted.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems

New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology
Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch

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.