Science and technology studies is a social-science field, not a branch of philosophy of science. It asks how knowledge and technical systems actually get made — in laboratories, standards committees and public controversies — rather than how they ought to be justified. Read in the wrong order it looks like a series of provocations; read in this order it looks like an evidence-driven research programme with a real internal argument.
The specific trap here is starting with Bruno Latour's theory rather than his fieldwork. Nearly everyone who finds STS unreadable met the general claims before seeing what the ethnographers observed. This sequence puts a survey first, the fieldwork second, and the grand theory near the end, where it is a generalisation rather than an assertion.
The question, and the vocabulary
An introduction to science and technology studies is the one genuinely field-wide survey written to be a first book. Sergio Sismondo maps the schools, names the disagreements between them, and tells you which primary texts are worth your time. Around 216 pages and worth all of them.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the book everything downstream reacts to, including by rejecting it — paradigms, normal science, incommensurability. Thomas Kuhn is a historian and philosopher rather than an STS practitioner, and the field spent decades arguing with the reading of him you will pick up here. One honest note about our catalogue: the record for this one carries a nonsense year and an odd co-author credit; the work is Kuhn's 1962 monograph.
The golem is Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch retelling seven famous experiments — relativity, cold fusion, the solar neutrino problem — to show how much interpretive work sits between an apparatus and a fact. It is short, concrete, and the clearest demonstration anywhere of the experimenter's regress. Our record lists Collins under three different forms of his name; it is one author, and the book is co-written with Pinch.
Go and watch them work
Laboratory life is Latour and Steve Woolgar's fieldwork at the Salk Institute, the founding text of laboratory ethnography. Read it before anything else of Latour's. Science in action then converts that fieldwork into a method you can apply: follow scientists and engineers through society, treat black boxes as things that were once open, read a citation as an alliance.
Beamtimes and lifetimes is the control case Latour's single-lab study lacks. Sharon Traweek is an anthropologist inside high-energy physics in the United States and Japan — same physics, two incompatible cultures of doing it — and she is also proof that this kind of ethnography need not be hostile to its subjects. Epistemic Cultures closes the stage: Karin Knorr Cetina compares molecular biology with particle physics and finds they organise evidence, authorship and machinery in ways that cannot be reduced to one scientific method.
History, technology, and the fight
Leviathan and the air-pump is where the field is strongest evidentially. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer show that Boyle's experimental method was once a contested political settlement about who may witness a fact, against a real opponent in Hobbes. It is the most cited work in the field and the best answer to the charge that STS trades in assertion. A Social History of Truth is the follow-on argument about trust and gentlemanly testimony; it presumes the air-pump book.
For technology: The Social construction of technological systems is an edited collection, so read it as position papers rather than one argument — the bicycle chapter is the standard teaching case. The whale and the reactor is Langdon Winner's dissent, that describing how a design was negotiated ducks the question of who it was settled against. Sorting Things Out takes the method somewhere neither lab nor machine: Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star on disease codes and apartheid race categories as infrastructure that quietly decides what counts.
Finish with the two books that fight. We Have Never Been Modern is Latour at his most ambitious and most contested. Higher superstition is Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's attack from the working-scientist side, the book that set off the science wars — polemical, frequently unfair to particular authors, and worth reading after the primary texts rather than instead of them.
The ordered STS path carries the stage goals and a study plan for each group.
