New rules of sociological method: Rethinking technology studies

Social constructivism is strong in the deconstruction of technological or economic determinism and in the reconstruction of practice, talk and translation between actors. However, it fails to account for institutionalized selective structures and to consider path dependencies and other conditions of global stabilization. On the basis of my theoretical reading and empirical research in the field of technology studies twelve rules are extracted to summarize the state-of-the-art These rules will enable us to overcome the deficiencies of action-oriented approaches on the one side and of structuralist approaches on the other side. Inspired by Giddens's new rules of sociological method, a constructivist explanation of technology generation on the local level is combined with a social evolutionary approach of structural selection on the global level.