ABSTRACT
Engineers and sociologists, when questioned or when given to think about it, would acknowledge that engineering design is both social and technical. However, disciplinary allegiances underplay the extent to which the social and the technical are interrelated or overplay the extent to which one or the other is important. These tendencies have been challenged by some sociologists and historians of technology who have been building a case for interweaving social, technoscientific, and economic analyses in a seamless web (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Gallon & Law, 1989; Hughes, 1987). Gallon (1987) took these analyses one step further arguing that engineers who participate in the design, development, or diffusion of technology constantly construct hypotheses and forms of argument that pull them into the field of sociological analysis, transforming them into engineering sociologists—that is, hybrids, who may nevertheless be sociologists par excellence. For Gallon, the realm of the engineering sociologist is the practice of engineering at the local level where particular design and development work is taking place and where the social technical divide is routinely crossed, blurring the distinction between what is social and what is technical.
