E.Maria Lohan Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Dublin
& Centre for Technology and Society, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.
Paper Presented to the: ‘Ireland in the European and Global ‘Information Society’ Conference, Dublin 24-25th April 1997.
Researching men and the domestic telephony means looking in places we don’t normally look: focusing on men but concentrating on their everyday lives; focusing on technology but on a de-technisised technology. Locating men as gendered beings turns the mirror on the male gaze into reflexivity on men’s lives.
In this paper, I take this empirical focus and trace my choice of a constructivist-oriented theoretical framework. This brings me from my starting point in Media Studies of the telephone to Feminist Media Studies, to Gender studies, particularly scholarship on men’s lives, and to Social Shaping Studies of Technology.
The theoretical framework I arrive at is a hybrid of this process: Feminist-constructivism and I outline my understanding of this and how it can provide directions for the exciting research of gender and technology.
1. Introduction
2. Empirical Focus
3. Theoretical Framework
4. Why this Theoretical Framework?
5. Movements towards Theoretical Framework
6. Arriving at Feminist-constructivism
7. Conclusion
The aim of this paper is to outline and explain my choice of theoretical framework for the study of gender and technology.
I will begin by introducing the empirical focus and briefly introducing the theoretical framework of my study. I shall then draw back from here to explain how, in exploring the techno-gender relation of men and domestic telephony, I moved through media studies feminist/gender studies and eventually towards a branch of what could be referred to as feminist-constructivism. This theoretical framework is firmly rooted within Social Shaping of Technology (SST) and Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theories and I outline its background within this field.
My conclusions draw on why I feel it was necessary to move to this theoretical framework for understanding the interrelationships between, and paradoxes of change and continuity within, both gender and technology. It is my hope that by outlining my understanding of feminist-constructivism that it will be of help to other researchers of technologies in society joining the field.
The main empirical focus of my work is on men, masculinity and the domestic telephone.
I think this focus is worthwhile in many ways but especially for the following three reasons:
Firstly, the telephone particularly the domestic phone, is rooted in everyday life: men's domestic lives. Clearly part of the small world, it is perhaps looking at men in largely hidden spaces. I have found exploring the construction and maintenance of men's links with friends and family a key starting point for studying their interaction with this technology and its role in their lives. For me it has become fascinating research material and a lot of fun.
I have chosen to look at gender because I believe it remains a pervasive part of our culture in the way we structure and organise our everyday lives, and because as I will explain later, earlier studies of telephony and cultural symbolism’s of the telephone taken from the media privileged sex differences (if not gender) in relation to the domestic phone.
This is not to suggest that class, age, national/regional differences or other unknown sociological categories are not relevant to the study of telephony, both in the structural and performative sense, but here gender and technology relations form the central focus and other sociological categories will be read through this techno-gender lens.
The second reason I believe this empirical focus to be worthwhile lies in the juxtaposition of gender and men. Though a growing field within sociology, gender in a man’s world remains uncomfortable and unknown for many men as well as women. Locating men as gendered beings turns the mirror before the male gaze and reflects reflexivity on men’s lives.
Thirdly, researchers of technology (for example Wajcman. 1991; Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993; Berg and Lie, 1994; Sørenson, 1992) have noted that men and technology are so often placed together that some of the defining characteristics of masculine culture are welded together with technology: male technological competence and know how, skill and interest/fetishness. Such images prevail in the everyday (for example, men and heavy machinery: bulldozers; men and sophisticated technology: computers).
Feminist research has also shown occupational and educational segregation in regard to men, women and technology and sought to explain women’s exclusion from these fields. Cockburn, (1985); Faulkner, Wendy and Arnold, Eric (eds.) (1985); Webster, J (1989).
However, here we have a technology, a domestic technology, which has arguably been feminised (Martin, 1991; Fischer, 1991; Frissen, 1994; Lohan, 1996). How do the boys react in this case? How might men be making/breaking the implicit relationship between masculinity and machine in regard to the domestic telephone?
The gendering of men’s relationship to the telephone and the gendering of the telephone in relation to men became the central question in my thesis.
The Theoretical framework which has been shaping my questioning and the analysis of my data on gender and technology has been the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) or a particular direction within this ‘broad church’ (Williams, R. and Edge, D. 1996) Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). Broadly speaking, a constructivist orientation towards understanding both gender and technology.
A constructivist approach to understanding gender means deconstructing essentialist ideas of what it means to be male or female or what it means to be masculine or feminine and instead concentrates on how gender identities are achieved through daily practices and discourses in specific contexts (for example, around the telephone).
Likewise a constructivist approach to understanding technology inquires not merely into what the technology is but rather what it becomes and how, for example, what the telephone means to different people in different contexts. In this way, technology much like gender is not only complexly designed but also cannot be ‘closed off’ at the design stage. Rather it enters ‘careers’ in the consumption phases (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992).
A constructivist approach to both gender and technology means understanding how both the gender and the technology are mutually shaped in relation to one another. ‘Neither solely a gender lens nor a technological lens but rather how gender and technology are interwoven together in the practices of everyday life’ (Berg, 1996).
The purpose of this introduction was to locate my study empirically and theoretically. It will come as no surprise to many of you that this is not where I began. It is a display, I’m afraid, of the messy business of research (Sørenson, 1997) in which I will trace three movements through branches of media studies of the telephone, Gender studies and theories of the social shaping of technology. I swim to the top at the end of this article with a kind of feminist-constructivism.
My starting point within studies of telephony developed through the ‘Uses and Gratification’s Approach’ of Media Studies of Telephony. In particular, a collection of studies was assembled by the Telephone Research Group at the Free University of Berlin which brought together much of the literature available on the telephone together with some recent empirical studies about how people used the telephone in their homes (Lange et al (eds.)1989).
These and other studies suggest that the domestic telephone, in terms of usage, has become a feminised medium of communication in that women use the telephone to a greater extent than men (Perin, 1994; Schabedoth et al 1989; Lange, 1993; Dordick and La Rose 1992). A French study reported that women use the telephone up to twice as much as men (Claisse, 1989) whilst Lange concluded that the telephone was emphatically ‘feminine’ (Lange, 1993:210). Other studies have spoken of a ‘pervasive feminine culture of the telephone’ (Moyal, 1989).
Furthermore, particular types of telephony are regarded as more feminine than others. Recent studies have classified calls in terms of their purpose into categories such as: Instrumental vs. intrinsic (Ball, 1968; Moyal, 1989; Noble, 1987a); person oriented vs. object oriented (Claisse, 1989); or functional vs. socio-affective/relational (Perin, 1994): broadly speaking into calls which are person-oriented or task-oriented. In common with traditional functionalist ideology, women have become to be associated with expressive person-oriented calls and men with instrumental or business calls and this in turn is borne out as an experiential reality in the data: women making and receiving more of these types of calls although the majority of calls for both men and women remain instrumental (Perin, 1994; Schabedoth et al 1989, Lange, 1993; Dordick and La Rose 1992, Lohan, 1997). In fact sex remains the most significant variable in distinguishing consumers or users both in terms of numbers of calls and types of calls. I use the word sex and not gender, here deliberately since most of the above studies are based on inserting the variable ‘m’ or ‘f’ to distinguish the results.
Explanations of sex differences are sought in concepts of sex roles, though where women take on men’s roles or men take on women’s, the sex differences are not largely rolled over (Schabedoth et al, 1989).
It has been argued elsewhere too that the hard data of telephony studies may be softer than we think, given that respondents/interviewees might exaggerate/lie about their calls (Haddon, 1992; Noble, 1987). Arguably the richness of this methodology in seeking out people’s assessment of how they use the telephone presents a problem for the researcher. Post-assessments of calls are likely to be subject to people reproducing class, age and gender assumptions extant in society within those responses.
Lange touches on this within his research but it is not integrated in to the analysis largely because the uses and gratification’s model starts and finishes with the individual.
‘Men appear to have a different concept of communication. In the Berlin study we can already prove that men judge their last call differently to women. In contrast to women, they give an "objective reason" for the "usefulness" of their call. Men maintain that they mainly arrange appointments, exchange short snippets of news or information and discuss defined questions or problems. Women admit to calling "for the sake of it", to speak with one another and to exchange general news. The shorter duration of men's calls seems to be connected with their different understanding of communication and its embodiment in the telephone’(Lange, 1993:213, author’s translation).
This is arguably the first source of sex-differences; the first gendering process which in turn we must integrate as a reflexive process within our research.
In some senses, I am interested in this not in finding the real truth the ‘real’ behaviour of people on the telephone but rather looking for sameness and variation in the way reports of calls or talk about telephone talk is constructed and what it reveals about how the technology is perceived.
In particular I feel to understand the gendered usage of the technologies, we need to take into account how gender is constructed within the process of the way in which men and women use language to describe their usage and attitude to technologies. This is in order to explore how gender might be created in the way we describe ourselves in relation to the technology or the way we constitute the functions of the technology in relation to our genders.
My first movement then was provoked by a lack of theorising of gender in mainstream studies of the telephone. Rakow’s feminist study of the telephone opened up the door for me to viewing gender at least as something which is not ready-made but rather as something actively constructed on an on-going basis. She grasps gender as something which is tentative, something which needs to be accomplished. Gender is work a set of beliefs and practices derived from the gender order. Telephony is therefore gender work and gendered work (Rakow, 1992: 58).
A further feminist study that has been important to framing my research has been Moyal’s study of women and the telephone in Australia (Moyal, 1989). Moyal’s study is important from a methodological perspective, in that it moves away from studies which essentially look for difference in men and women’s telephony. In this study, women speak about their communication in ways which are important to them and located in the context of their very varied lives, however private or removed from the world of Telecoms profit. This study moves away from the presumption of woman as different, man as norm, which can stigmatise those who are labelled different (Fox-Genovese, 1994: 233).
Both studies contextualise women’s usage of the telephone within their overall communication culture. Both. however, are lacking in their attention to masculinity as a relational construction and in fact retreat to quasi-essentialist claims on the ways men relate to the telephone as a technology.
5.2 2nd Movement Feminist/Gender studies
In seeking a better understanding of the construction of masculinity, I turned to Gender studies and especially the more recent Men's Studies. Within this field of scholarship, I found a rich source of empirical studies of men in everyday life but also a critique of the manner in which life spaces are gendered. In particular, it was here I found a fuller critique of the use of sex roles which had remained unproblematised in mainstream media studies of the telephone. Kimmel usefully brings together criticisms of this popular way of explaining sameness and difference amongst men and women in our society. Sex roles, he claims are firstly overly static or do not allow sufficiently for change. They are secondly normative, often being what people should do rather than reflecting actual behaviour and thirdly, minimalist on power or ignore the implicit asymmetry between male and female roles or masculinity and femininity (Kimmel, 1987:12). Roles women and men play don’t explain society any more than the jobs men and women have explain economy (Lorber 1994: 2).
The newer Men’s Studies favoured a more constructivist approach to gender in ways similar to what was happening in technology. Here I found efforts to critique essentialist notions of masculinity and which analysed possibilities of masculinities as being relative within and between cultures but nonetheless subject to a form of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987).
Within this body of studies, there was also a call for research which could lead to a better understanding of the contextual bases of masculinities and to further study how masculinities are constructed in relation to constructions of femininities (Britain, 1989).
From here it was an easy move for me into studies which looked at the construction of gender in a particular context- technology and explored how gender and technology were constructed in relation to one another. Such an approach, though, not only owes its origin to feminist social theory but also to the newer studies of science and technology. Below is (roughly) how the story of science and technology studies is told:
What is different about a constructivist approach to technology?
A social shaping or constructivist approach to technology means locating technology as being thoroughly social, a product of social interaction. This differs substantially from mainstream understanding of technology which perceives technology as being distinct from social life, but which can radically change our lives in a eutopian or dystopian manner and which remain a powerful and prevalent way of thinking about technologies. Essentially according to this (technological determinist) view, the potential for change lies in the invention of the technology, the technical breakthrough.
This view of technology has predominated in academic research too. Technology was seen to determine or even cause the development of social structures. According to Winner (1977) and Sørenson (1994), the Frankfurt school of technology and the diverse philosophies of Mumford, Gehlen and Elull all produced pessimistic views of technology and in so doing lost some of the ambiguity of technology which Marx had earlier outlined. This Marxian ambiguity was rooted in the short-term use of technology by the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers but which, through its appropriation by the working classes, would, in the long term, be progressive (Sørenson, 1994; Lie and Sørenson 1996).
A social shaping perspective, by contrast, radically turns the mind set of deterministic technological forces around to say that technologies are embedded in the social. 'By stressing how technology is shaped by social forces such as economics and gender an attempt was made to ground the technical in the social. Thus technology was to be thought of through and through as a social phenomenon’ (Button, 1993:1) and secondly, according to Button, the social shaping perspective sought to develop an interest in the organisation of the technology itself. This movement was influenced (especially in the UK) by the Labour Process Theorists and Feminisms from which it developed and is generally identified with the publication of The Social Shaping of Technology, Mackenzie and Wajcman (1985) (Robins and Edge, 1996). One of the criticisms of this approach though, is that it replaced one kind of determinism (technological) with another (social) (Button, 1993; Grint and Woolgar, 1995).
This challenge has been taken on more substantively by SCOT or the Social Construction of Technology model forwarded by Bijker and Pinch (1987) and later expanded upon by Bijker and Law (eds.) (1992). This model of social theory was an outgrowth of the empirical programme of relativism in the study of scientific knowledge.
According to Sørenson, both approaches see controversies and conflicts as central but for the labour process theorists, conflict was a natural force in industrial relations whereas constructivism based on SSK emphasised controversy as a methodology - a means of analysing the hidden social construction of the anatomy of science and technology (Sørenson 1997: 12).
'Technological change is contingent and should be understood in non-reductionist terms. There is no internal logic that can explain how technologies develop but that cannot be done by reference to any simple external logic either. Technology, the social world and of course the history should be analysed as rather messy contingencies' (Sørenson 1997: 2)
Earlier studies within the SCOT tradition concentrated on innovation and design often located in the laboratories but with the intention of interrupting the taken for granted linear line drawn from research to design to product. SCOT studies have also more recently shown how technologies are actively created/recreated in the diffusion and consumption stages opening up analytical tools of ‘interpretative flexibility’ of technologies and their unintended consequences (Pinch and Bijker, 1987; Cowan, 1987; Bijker, 1992).
This brings SCOT closer to Cultural and Consumer Studies, and is in part due to a response from criticisms from these schools (see MacKay and Gillespie, 1992) which were also studying less what media does to people but more how consumers/people actively appropriate, and thereby change, products and services through their kinds of integration in daily life.
Theories of semiological encoding and decoding (Hall, 1980 and Morley 1980) and theories of domestication therefore, especially those of the Sussex school (Silverstone and Hirsch (eds.) (1992), can be combined with SCOT, as has been the recent research orientation of the Centre for Technology and Society at Trondheim (see for example Berg, 1996, Sørenson, Aune and Hatling, 1996; Lie and Sørenson, 1996).
As researchers, with the resource of the above constructivist approaches, we are equipped with a way of studying both society and technology together and as mutually shaping forces. Such a theoretical framework directs us in our data collection towards asking questions about the technology and about the complex and varied use to which technologies are put- in sum about ‘sociotechnical ensembles’ (Bijker, 1995).
Contemporary studies of gender and technology therefore have a breathtaking expanse of social theory from Gender studies and Social Shaping Studies of Technology on which they might draw. The challenge of intersecting these formerly mutually exclusive field of research has been taken up (for example, by Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993; Cockburn, and Fürst-Dilic, 1994; Berg and Lie, 1994; Berg, 1996) and has been most successfully anchored I feel by the concept of mutual shaping or co-construction of gender and technology as defined in section three of this paper.
For me, three broad principles unite feminism and constructivism into a firm theoretical framework from which we can study gender and technology.
1. Feminist-constructivism inherits from other constructivist studies of technology a passion for on-the-ground thick descriptions of the phenomena, in this case of both gender and technology. Thick descriptions of gender for me means looking closely at the way sameness and difference emerges between men and women and within the sexes. It also means from within in seeking out men and women’s own conceptions of what social change such as Feminisms, New Men’s Movements or generational differences means in their daily lives. Gender is not simply a sociological category and I have found that men’s reflexivity on what it means to be a man in everyday life a rich source in connecting the material and symbolic levels of gender.
Thick descriptions of technology is in my case largely analysed within the consuming of the technology and here a constructivist analysis demands a thorough insight into the nuances of uses and non uses of the technology. In my case, I have investigated the role and meaning the telephone takes on especially in regard to men’s construction and maintenance of links to their friends and families.
2. Secondly within feminist-constructivism, there is a focus on how both gender and technology can be shaped and re-shaped in new and unpredictable ways. This is linked to the last point. One could say the telephone is an instrument which in terms of usage is open to a wide degree of ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Pinch and Bijker, 1987) and indeed the expanse of usage is enormous. Yet we can only talk about this interpretative flexibility in relation to the (sometime elusive) prescribed usages of the technology.
Of particular relevance to me, is the historical symbolic relationship of women chatting on the phone (Martin, 1991; Fischer, 1991, Frissen, 1994) and the less researched but implied stereotypical male reticence on the phone. More recently, the BT advertising campaign on British television channels (also widely viewed in Ireland) entitled It’s Good to Talk was aimed at men and acknowledges this message, whilst at the same time trying to subvert it.
Thus when researching gender and telephony one keeps an eye on how there are extant ‘scripts’ (Akrich, 1992) within cultures and users reactions to these kind of messages.
Likewise, when we talk about the way gender is shaped and being re-shaped in our daily lives it means looking for the processes through which gender is achieved. Perhaps you could describe it as being more sensitive to change rather than continuity (Cockburn, 1992) and sometimes it results in new stories of gender.
3. Finally, the third aspect of feminist-constructivism for me means not looking for a reductionist view of gender or technology in a specific cause either internal (e.g. biological/technical) or external (e.g. capitalism/patriarchy).
This is to avoid what Ormrod (1995) might call ‘a flattening of the plot’ where ‘gender relations are always seen to be reproduced.... (and) male use of technology communicates power and control’(Gill and Grint, 1995:19). This is not to dismiss the relevance of identified gendered patterns. Paradoxically, 'this view of gender relations being maintained by a limited number of already familiar practices may actually lead to underestimate the significance and persuasiveness of gender as a relation of dominance (ibid).
Most recently studies of gender and technology using a constructivist framework have turned to Harding (1986) to encompass some of the intricate interconnectedness of gender. For example Berg in her varied studies of gender and technology
‘searched for analytical conceptions that keep variations in meanings and framings in sight yet hold onto a core of stability. This means conceptions of gender that do not close off for the study of change but allow for conceptualising gender as dualistic and simultaneously challenge the gender dichotomy when it is not relevant’(Berg, 1996: 27).
She turns to Harding (1986) for her concept of gender as relative (non-essentialist) in the sense that the contingent content of gender may vary according to cultural context and relational in the sense that the socially constructed patterns of dualism between man/woman and masculine/feminine is defined in terms of one another (ibid).
I have taken these two concepts in my project, to explore men's relationship to the telephone Within my data, men’s relationship to the telephone becomes relative through the deconstruction of the stereotypical male instrumental and reticent use of the telephone into a multiplicity of uses and user-types.
In addition, the relational construction of masculinity has been a useful concept. Again with my data I have found evidence to suggest that though men’s description of their usage is quite similar to that of women’s, they construct their usage as being nonetheless different to women’s. Their usage is clearly constructed in relation to a known other- women. Furthermore, men construct their usage of the telephone as being different in relation to other technologies.
According to Berg, Harding (1986) combines the concepts of the relative and relational with a focus on where to look in the construction process. Harding ‘points to identifiable analytical places meaning the interdependent symbolic, structural and individual aspects of gender’ (Berg: 1996: 28). Cockburn and Ormrod have used this exploratory system too in relation to studies of gender and technology. They describe gender structure in terms of: ‘a gendered pattern of location but in the sense that 'structures are continually being remantled, reconstructed, adapted and renewed through individual and collective action’ (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993: 6).
They also further distinguish Harding's (1986) use of gender identity into projected identity and subjective identity. By projected identity they mean actual or desired identities as others perceive and portray them. This is similar to the concept of the script in Actor Network Theory (Akrich, 1992). By the subjective identity they mean, the sense of self, the identity created and experienced by the individual (ibid). This use of gender identity, projected and made subjective, I find helpful in tackling the structure/agency dilemma which role theory evades.
Finally in adopting the notion of gender symbolism, they develop it 'in terms of representations and meanings looking in particular for ways in which gender gains expression in technology relations and technology acquires its meaning in gender relations’ (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993:7).
These principles in integrating feminism and constructivism creates a feminist-constructivism which I have found useful in exploring and integrating the material and meaning of not only gender but technology as well.
The purpose of this paper has been to outline explain the process of my choosing a theoretical framework for studying gender and technology. Like some of you, I suspect I began by being fascinated by a particular technology and wondered about its potential, about how I and others used it and about who had access to it. In particular though, I was interested in why it was so commonly thought that men and women used the telephone so differently. How could this be considering men and women talk to each other via the telephone all the time?. As I have outlined above, I did not start answering these questions through a constructivist theoretical framework but graduated towards here as a means of explaining the more general relationships of gender and technology. I found that asking people about the usage of the technology revealed as many contradictions and so I gave up on the truth of real usage and it was explaining the contradictions which became my interest. I needed a theoretical framework which could make sense of people’s relationship to this technology whilst retaining these contradictions.
Feminist-constructivism blends streams of Gender Studies and Social Shaping Studies of Technology together and sees both technology and gender as being embedded in the processes of everyday life. It keeps its eye on how both gender and technology are constructed and re-constructed in the material of the everyday and especially in relation to each other. The more enduring symbolic aspects of gender and technology overhang this process but both the material and symbolic relations are open to change. In summary, this theoretical framework demands of research thick descriptions, areductionist thought and to be uncompromising in the search for ambiguities. The results of my engagement between my empirical data and feminist constructivism is another day’s work…….
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