ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some key issues and assumptions about the relationship between technology and social science. The discussion of regulating technology requires such a conceptual setting to do justice to its complexity, its importance for contemporary life, and the power struggles between interested groups implicit in technological processes. Terms used in the debates about regulating technology show the workings of struggle and conflict. Conflict at the level of basic social values are part of the political context of regulating technology at the national level. Some examples of regulating technology on the international level illustrate such an approach. An important consequence for the widespread recognition of the political nature of regulating technology at the international level is the partisan, or interested, nature of the regulation process. A similar recognition at the national level of the political nature of technology policy-making and regulating technology would dramatically improve the quality of those debates.
