The sense and degree to which technology can be understood as social is a point of significant tension in the existing literature. It was argued in Chapter 2 that the term ‘technology’ came into being to describe the largely material results of engineers and others in transforming the physical world. Thus the term gained currency as part of a shift away from the (social) activities of inventors and innovators, to the tangible (material, physical) results of such activities. On the other hand, it is often argued that one of the main strengths of recent (especially constructivist) theories of technology is their demonstration of the irreducibly social nature of technology (Brey, 1997, Bijker et al., 1987, MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985b). In this context it is easy to see how the sense and degree to which technology is understood to be social has come to be something of a fault line in discussions of technology. This chapter is primarily intended to address these tensions.

Several points of clarification, however, are required from the start. First, the apparent tension here does not arise because of a distinction between technology and technological artefact; it is not that technology is an activity and so social, whereas technological artefacts are material and so not social. Rather it is the sociality of artefacts that is contested. Secondly, the statement that technological artefacts are irreducibly social may appear rather obvious. Artefacts are made by people and so, in a sense, must be social. The more contested question, however, is whether or not, or in what ways, artefacts can be thought of as social in a more ongoing way, once they have been made. In other words, is there something about the ongoing mode of existence of artefacts that also depends upon the actions and interactions of human beings? This question has generated heated debate in recent years (Margolis and Laurence, 2007, Franssen et al., 2014) and I shall draw upon some of this debate where appropriate. In particular, the main points of contention are set out by focusing upon issues of identification, function and practice, before suggesting some advantages of couching the discussion of artefacts, and their sociality, in terms of a conception of positioning as discussed in Chapter 3.