ABSTRACT
How can one give an account of the interaction between people and technical objects without falling into the symmetrical traps of "technologism" and "sociologism"? The former position involves considering technological development as being above all determined by the existence of technical resources and constraints, whose interaction is sufficient to explain the form taken over time by various technical objects. Accordingly, there are two possibilities: either technology succeeds in spreading and proves capable of imposing a form of social order,1 or it runs up against non-technical (social, cultural, economic, etc.) obstacles to its diffusion and there is no other way of getting round these than by reforming people, by freeing them from their prejudices and taboos.2 Although it is the diametrical inverse of this position, "sociologism" merely repeats the distinction between technology and society that "technologism" depends on, while inverting its "sign." Thus it is considered that a given technology can only spread successfully if it satisfies the exigencies of the immutable social order.3 Further, the form taken by technical objects is directly linked to the social conditions which gave rise to them.4 The case of developing countries, which are characterized by a maximal distance between the context in which the technology supply is developed (since technologies are in general conceived in industrialized countries) and the context of the demand, permits us to see the limitations of these two approaches. Anyone who has traveled in these countries cannot fail to have been struck by the astonishing heterogeneity of the technologies used. In a single village, even within a single family, there can be found the most rudimentary technologies, in particular in agricultural and domestic implements, side by side with sophisticated industrial technology (radio, generator, mobylette, etc.). How, then, can we explain from the "technologist" perspective the fact that the same villager who is completely indifferent to technological progress in the form, for example, of photovoltaic cells to drive a pump, is open to buying an electrical generator allowing him to run that same pump? Inversely, if we take the "sociologistic" point of view, how
can we account for the use of industrial technologies in developing countries. That is to say, how can we account for the miraculous matching of a technology designed by and for one particular social organization to a radically different society?
