Technological Change

1The Human and Social Sciences in the Face of Technological Change

Discourses on technological change are numerous and do not owe everything to social scientists. Engineers as well as merchants, philanthropists as well as intellectuals, have a point of view on the subject. Crossed by multiple conceptions, these discourses sometimes intersect and merge.

In order to disentangle this and to reflect the diversity of approaches, this chapter focuses firstly (section 1.1) on their summative presentation, concluding with the presentation of the anthropotechnical perspective, which shows the interdependence between technical and social factors. Inspired by this perspective, the second section examines the long history of technological change and its most recent developments (section 1.2).

1.1. Approaches to technological change

We will approach our subject according to the postulated relationship between technology and society. Technical historians have wondered whether inventions are inevitable, whether the machine makes history. But economists, on the other hand, have wondered whether it was not rather social demand that led to innovation. Sociologists have also questioned the relationship between technical innovation and social transformations. Philosophers have often been critical, but sometimes also adopted the cause of technophiles.

Following Vinck (1995), it should be noted that technology and society have generally been thought of as two distinct spheres, one of which influences ...