The Sociotechnical Constitution of Society
摘要
In close dialogue with Berger/Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality, chapter 4 uncovers this way of conceiving technology as a constitutive factor of sociation and a basic term of sociology. Against the exclusion of technology from many sociological approaches it is argued that, in their conception as a specific form of meaning making and institution-building, technical acts, processes of technization, and the resulting technological structures are on par with speech acts, pragmatics of sentence-building, and grammatical language structures. In consequence, any techno-related action (using, producing, delegating agency) can be seen as part of the lifeworld and as a special type of social action. On the basis of this extended interpretation of social constructivism, further research can be initiated on different degrees and genres of technization and also on types and mixtures of sociotechnical constellations.