Technology Information
Technologies, particularly scientific instruments , simultaneously invoke and substantiate scales. There is the opening here for a ‘new serious about technology’ . We can still research the richness of ‘technology’ as an actors’ category whereas sharpening and pondering with ‘technology’ as an analytical class. Yet this was not an alliance of equals, and the ‘trouble with techne’ – that it had the potential to upset the social order – remained. Such an idea, built into a professional identity, positioned engineers within Kultur rather than Zivilisation, and therefore made them worthy of upper social status. This transfer in flip invited questions concerning the relationship between Technik and tradition. While it had been the German engineers that had articulated the broad concept of Technik, it was German social scientists who probed this issue further. Walter Sombart, for instance, in his 1911 paper ‘Technik und Kultur’, argued that the causal relationship was bidirectional. ‘In m