Social Constructivism in Science and Technology Studies

Berger and Luckmann’s concept of “social construction” has been widely adopted in many fields of the humanities and social sciences in the half-century since they wrote The Social Construction of Reality. One field in which constructivism was especially provocative was in Science and Technology Studies (STS), where it was expanded beyond the social domain to encompass the practices and contents of contemporary natural science. This essay discusses the relationship between social construction in STS and Berger and Luckmann’s original conception of it, and identifies problems that arose from indiscriminate uses of constructivism.