1) " The object of the new sociology of technology is to explain how technology is socially shaped and, in that this goal is also professed by Russell, we have no serious quarrel with his general approach. Much of his paper concerns and exposition of Marxist ideas- and, in particular, labour process theory and suggestions for how technology could potentially be understood within such a framework. we much appreciate this contribution which is certainly far more detailed than that contained in our paper. We feel, however, that is rather unfair to chastise us for having 'skimmed' over this literature since our aim was to review empirical studies of Technology which treated the content of the technology seriously. Since, as Russell himself admits, the labour process (and other Marxist) work,' with its as yet represent a body of literature which shows how the content of Technology is socially shaped, we did not feel that such work merited an extensive review".
2) " In brief, our argument for treating science and technology within the framework stemmed from three considerations: (1) The unsatisfactory nature of the atoms to demarcate between science and technology. (2) The practical problems encountered by researchers investigating the science/ technology relationship, and, in particular, the difficulties of distinguishing the separate contributions made by science and technology to particular innovations; and (3) the concrete demonstration(with examples drawn from our own empirical work on science and technology) that problems and issues raised by the study of science are similar to those raised by the study of Technology".
3)" Many of Russell criticisms concern details of our approach. For instance, he raises the objection to our use of an evolutionary model in our description of how the developmental path of an artefact may be traced. Having rejected linear models of technological development, we found it useful to trace several different developmental paths, and to look at this process in terms of variation and selection- especially in relation to the particular problems posed by artefacts for social groups. Rusell's main objection here is that such an approach is overly constraining in that it does not consider possible variations which are never manifest. Although there are difficulties with the evolutionary approach, especially when that approach is followed to Mechanistically, we do not take this to be a fundamental criticism. our Evolutionary model can consider totally new departures in Technologies, provided there is a social group who define some particular problem which the technology addresses".
