In Chapter 1, the main approaches to the relations between science, technology and society were discussed. These viewpoints sketched the broad ways in which the interplay between society and technoscientific progress can be conceptualized. In this chapter, the discussion focuses on the major theoretical strands in science and technology studies (STS)— a sociological sub- field that was born in the late 1930s and remains as one of the discipline's “marginal specialties” (Shapin 1995, 289). Two things should be clarified about the nature of this chapter. First, the review offered is certainly not exhaustive of the field, but rather highlights the most germane approaches in STS. Second, it is targeted to a critical discussion— to the fullest extent possible— of each approach's theoretical, ontological and methodological premises. The reason for this lies not only in the aim of this book, that is to build gradually an informed holistic framework in STS, but also rests on the fact that all too often an overview of the literature tends to yield toward the philosophical rather than the sociological foundations of each approach; often giving the impression that this sub- field of sociology remains uninformed of certain developments in contemporary sociological theory and ignorant of key writings of the past.

There is a general consensus that the first substantial work in the sociology of science and technology appeared in 1938 (Knorr- Cetina 1991). Merton's classic monograph, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth- Century England, heralded a new era in the field of sociology as it pried open the gates of the fields of science and technology and invited sociologists to appraise a domain that up to then was accessible only to natural scientists. Since then, the sociological study of science and technology has evolved to such an extent that many subbranches have emerged. The study of scientific knowledge (SSK) and, more recently, science and technology studies, and Actor- Network Theory (ANT) form some of the broad main avenues in this sociological enterprise. STS has become an intellectually influential interdisciplinary field which, besides academics, attracts the interest of activists, scientists, decision- makers (from the political and economic spheres), doctors and so forth (Hackett, Amsterdamska and Lynch 2008, 1). As is the case with other fields of sociology, in this area too there is little consensus among scientists regarding the way its dynamics can be grasped.