Pergamon
Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 361-371, 1997
Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/97 $17.00+ .00
PII S0277-5395(97)00020-4
DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES: CINDERELLA AND THE ENGINEERS
Cynthia Cockburn Department of Sociology, City University, Northampton Square, St. John Street, London ECIV OHB, UK
Synopsis — Domestic technologies are seldom accorded their true significance either by engineers or sociologists, partly due to an undervaluing of the feminine and the private sphere. Drawing on recent feminist research the article examines the failure of designers and manufacturers to understand and respond to user needs. It shows how in neither Eastern nor Western Europe has domestic equipment been designed thoughtfully within appropriate technological systems, as a sensitive interface between household, community and environment. The sociology of technology too is shown to have neglected the technologies of everyday life, which should be the starting point of a technology policy. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
INTRODUCTION
A house, a household, housework and home life: this is not the scenario that is spontaneously evoked by the word technology. It is possible to watch one television programme after another devoted to "the new technologies," or 'our technological society', and to read articles predicting our "technological future," without being offered much insight into the technology of the domestic indoors. "Technology" is popularly represented, rather, as environmental nemesis or salvation. It is microchip and Internet. It is transport and mobility — interplanetary and intercity. If home is mentioned at all in technological scenarios it is most likely to be in connection with the penetration of the business world into the home, as in "homeworking" by computer-link to the office. Technology is anything but housework.
This article is developed from a lecture given at the Department of Technology and Social Change, University of Linkoping, Sweden, in June 1995 on the occasion of their granting me an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I would like to thank colleagues there not only for this honour and for permission to reproduce the text, but also for the many stimulating discussions in which these thoughts evolved.
In this paper I suggest that the household and housework do in fact constitute a sphere of technology, and that this is the case regardless of the degree of mechanization or automation of the tasks involved. Cooking with a wooden spoon or a microwave, sweeping with a broom or a vacuum cleaner, it is all doing, making, and producing. And that is what technology is: that which pertains to the "practical and industrial arts" (Oxford Shorter English Dictionary),
The social construction of home and household as relatively nontechnological is implicated in a wider pattern of meanings involving a relative devaluation of the domestic sphere. "Technology" is something ascribed high significance and relative importance. It is visible in, and confers visibility on, the spheres of production and destruction. As relatively "unimportant," the sphere of daily reproduction is sometimes hidden from view partly because it is seen as nontechnological, and its relative unimportance in turn renders its particular technologies relatively invisible.
Parallel to the technology/nontechnology dichotomy exists that of the public/private, in which the terms are likewise ascribed unequal importance. What did Cinderella, sweeping the ashes and washing the pans, have to do to catch the eye and turn the head of the Prince-
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Engineer? Take off her apron, leave the home and stage an arrival in the public sphere.
Mapped onto both of the above is a third hierarchized dichotomy: masculine/feminine. Cinderella was a woman, of course, and the Prince-Engineer a man. The household is preeminently the domain of women, womanliness, and affect. This feminine identification contributes to the household's subaltern status. In other words, the phenomenon we are talking about here, the discrepant relation between the domestic and the technological, is a product of, among other things, the asymmetrical relation of gender.
The feminine, the private, and the domestic have an affinity within the meanings we usually ascribe to them. But it is important to clarify that they are not, in fact, coterminous. Women move continually between the private and public spheres. The public sphere (as law enforcement, public services, etc.) impinges on domestic spaces and domestic relations. And there is, of course, a domestic within the public. It includes, for instance, catering, prostitution, and public toilets. But my focus in this article is the domestic in the context of the household, and among domestic technologies it is those involving labour or responsibility, rather than entertainment, with which I am concerned.
It may help to define the household and the field of household technology. The household I take to be a socio-material unit comprising at least four components. First: a building (usually a flat or house). Second: people (household members related to each other in varying ways — by blood, marriage, employment etc.). Third: activity, which must by definition include eating and resting and may encompass many other things, from childbirth to laying out the dead. And finally: equipment: textiles, kitchen utensils, music systems, central heating. Though a household is essentially home to someone, it may also house the activities of income generation, including paid employment.
All the four components above are, or may be, "technological." Household technologies, like other technologies, comprise peoples' knowledge and know-how; they are artifactual, taking shape in tools, machines, and materials; and they involve process or activity (Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1985). We can see all these characteristics in those technologies that are specially important in the household context: technologies of food preparation, and cooking; of
washing and cleaning; technologies of physical and mental care of self and others; technologies of repose and sleep; technologies of material repair and maintenance; technologies of gardening and growing; technologies of communication; technologies of entertainment, sport and recreation.
Between 1988 and 1992, a number of us carried out a research project involving eight European countries. Its purpose was to analyse the relationship between changing domestic technologies and changing gender relations (Cockburn & Furst-Dilid, 1994). In this research we uncovered a mutual shaping process. Existing unequal relations between women and men, the feminine and masculine, was shaping technologies as they emerged. Technological innovations were, in turn, playing a part in affirming or reformulating unequal gender relations. In addition to our own research, this paper is informed by what is by now an extensive field of feminist analysis of domestic technology (for example, Bose et al., 1984; Cowan, 1983; Ny-berg, 1989; Ravetz, 1965; Thrall, 1970; Vanek, 1978; Wajcman, 1991).
My article is not a Cinderella's lament. Although there is a women's liberation case to be made, that is not the aim. My social purpose here is rather to deploy a feminist analysis of technology in criticism of the priorities that govern economic and technological planning and development. (The two things of course, women's liberation and general societal change, are not unconnected.)
After our European study we found ourselves wishing to argue that the household has more importance than is commonly ascribed to it. It should not be an afterthought on the part of economic and technological policy makers. It deserves better than to be a resource for the industrial world to exploit and a dump in which spill-over technologies search out a consumer market. Everyday life is the starting place from which the design of technological futures should begin. In this paper I pursue the question of the ascription of relatively low significance to the domestic through observation of three levels of activity. First I look at the relation between designer and user of domestic equipment. Second, I comment on the treatment of the household in economic planning and technological development in both the Western capitalist countries and the former communist countries of East/Central Europe. Third, I turn to the
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sphere in which knowledge about the social relations of household technology is produced. Here, in the sociology of technology, the low status of the domestic is often reaffirmed.
DESIGNER AND USER: AN IMBALANCE OF INITIATIVE
Our research included several instances of product design and of these I will draw here on the case of the microwave oven (the UK and Japan) and an improved food processor (France). We found product design and product marketing to be involved in a close and interactive relationship with each other. On the other hand, the relation between the designer/marketer and the user was much more tenuous — problematic and problematised.
In what follows I select for discussion two phenomena that we uncovered. First the ascription of relatively low significance by design/ marketing (and indeed by sales staff) to housework technologies, where other apparently more exciting technologies were available to compare them with. Second, the indirect nature of knowledge about the user (normally envisaged as female) and her remote manipulation by designers/marketers.
The "Domestic Work-Horse" lacks glamour
In the course of a study we made of the social relations involved in microwave cooking technology, we came to understand that product engineers in a company designing both entertainment and housework equipment ascribed unequal worth and importance to these (Cock-burn & Ormrod, 1993).
In the UK, the term brown goods is used to designate television, video, hi-fi, and camera equipment. This is considered "state of the art" technology, challenging to the engineer. Housework machines such as cookers, washing machines, refrigerators, and freezers are termed white goods. Engineers, we found, think them simple, uninteresting technology. It is a gendered phenomenon. White goods are equated with family consumption and hence a female user, and this is what in part confers low value.
A product manager (male) for instance said in interview: "I think because the industry is very much a male-dominated type industry, the female buyers' products . . . don't get the due
reverence that they need, really. I think it's a very macho sort of environment that we're working in, in the electronics industry, and the high tech brown goods side of it tends to get all the glamour . . . Everyone talks about that side, and that tends to be where 'the leading edge' always comes in" (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993, p. 81).
In this electronics manufacturing firm we found all the design engineers were men. The marketing manager was also male. But he was responsible for a team of female home economists to advise the designers of microwave ovens on cooking. The women complained that, for their qualifications, they were underpaid in comparison with the engineers. They also believed their contribution was not taken seriously by their male colleagues. They were explicit about feeling that this was a gender effect: women and women's skills, which are characteristically domestic skills, are accorded less value than men and men's skills, especially engineering. In this case the difference in worth could be measured in money.
We found these unequally valued images current also in two chains of retail stores, which we called "Bunnett's" and "Arrow," seeking to operate in these differentiated markets, the one selling white goods, the other brown goods. A sales manager said: "Bunnett's is a service site. So it's, like, the family-home-shopping . . . Whereas Arrow is high technology, the latest kick. That's the two messages" (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993, p. 101). Implicit in distinction was a dichotomy between desires and needs, between pleasure and chores. Arrow was gimmicks and gizmos, Bunnett's was where you buy the necessaries.
But of course it is relative. White goods do make money for the manufacturer and retailer. And even gimmicks and gizmos, the glamorous TVs and hi-fis, are sometimes represented as lightweight in comparison with the really serious technology of computers or weaponry. An engineer is often drawn away from firms manufacturing hum-drum domestic products by the opportunity to work on more exciting developments.
This phenomenon of the inferiorization of the domestic work-horse technologies is not limited to microwaves, nor to production and sales. It is widespread in the way we assess, order and represent technologies. Consider for instance this quotation from Museums Journal.
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Many museums of science and technology focus on the front end of research and innovation: the workplace is the laboratory, not the factory, warehouse or household. They downplay production and distribution; they neglect consumption, use and reproduction, which are for social history museums . . . When these museums collect and interpret domestic technologies, they tend to be the hard technologies of buildings and appliances, rather than the soft technologies of soap and cleaning materials, food and drink, textiles and furnishings. (Porter, 1993)
Configuring and addressing the user
Even if women think today that housework "should be" shared between women and men, design engineers and marketers do not on the whole believe that it is happening. They are prepared to consider that perhaps the woman user is now a busy person with a paid job. But they do not hesitate to believe she comes home and takes on the second shift, and will continue to do so.
An advertiser we interviewed felt: "It would be folly to present a commercial . . . where, if the woman was present, she was not the one doing the work in the kitchen . . . it just wouldn't be credible, because, you know, it's an area of excellence which they are meant to understand" (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993, p. 170). Men are believed to have some sway over large items of family expenditure, and they are seen as experimentalists in household contexts. Appealing to them may open the way to innovation among women. But men are not regarded by designers/marketers as being engaged in sustained use of housework equipment.
It is significant, however, that throughout our European study we encountered only male white goods design engineers. How then do these men visualize the user and her alien, gendered use of the equipment they design? And how do they govern her use of their machine? Danielle Chabaud Rychter painstakingly observed the design process of a new food processor. All those concerned with the preparation of this new product were men. They were aware they needed information about its potential user, visualized as a woman. (A food processor is for complex food preparation processes, and, though men cook professionally, statistically few engage in "real cooking" in the home.)
The development team analysed market research, they tested the aesthetic reaction to advance designs, they performed usability trials on prototypes and production models, they conducted consumer satisfaction surveys among women who had owned the product for a while. "Thus an entire armoury of formalized methods for collecting and processing data is deployed to capture the practices and opinions of women users" (Chabaud Rychter, 1994, p. 81).
Chabaud Rychter observes that:
the designing of household appliances is a hybrid activity mingling domestic practical experience and industrial formalization. To accomplish their work, the innovators bring the domestic world into the company. However, it is only in a reconstructed form, rendering them relevant to the company that domestic actors and practices are brought in. (Chabaud Rychter, 1995)
Real women, therefore, remain elusive. Often the male designers "imagine themselves in the woman's place" or enlist a convenient population of women in their own vicinity — secretaries or wives — on whom to try out prototypes. Ultimately they use their own judgment, for they are possessive about what they term their baby and "in this intimate relationship between the designer and his product there is no place left for the user" (Chabaud Rychter, 1994, p. 87). Ian Miles and colleagues wrote that "consumer feedback is given little weight in early stages of product development, the map of consumer opinion is a total and absolute blank" (Miles, Cawson, & Haddon, 1992). We found it not so much blank as distorted by gender constructions and misconstructions.
If the user has so far remained effectively a foreigner to the design team, how can they be sure she will use the product properly? A great deal of team consultation and effort goes into designing the "affordances," what actions the machine can perform and the controls that activate them. They do their best to ensure that these are self-evident, "speak for themselves," encourage proper behaviour, make disobedience or error impossible. The men have to imagine for this purpose the most unintelligent and catastrophe-prone woman.
We found in our study of the microwave oven that the designers/marketers did not rely only on the way the controls themselves
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"speak" to the user, but also accompanied their product with two kinds of instruction manual (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993). One was a manual giving technical data such as voltage, with instructions for wiring and installation. This was directed to a male reader, supposedly husband or engineer. The other was a recipe book with tips for microwave cooking. This was addressed to an imagined woman. Some anxiety surrounded the adequacy of content and expression in these manuals — especially the second. The designers/marketers were concerned about their liability for safety. They also sought the users' appreciation of the many features offered by the product, which alone distinguished it from the competition.
The twin microwave manuals reflect the two languages involved, one the authoritative and definitive language of engineering, the other the colloquial and flexible language of everyday life. As Danielle Chabaud Rychter says:
... the hybrid work of the innovators, underscored by the use of the double language of practical experience and measurement, produces objects which are themselves hybrid and derive from two domains: the domain in which they are manufactured and the one in which they are used. (Chabaud Rychter, 1995)
Designers and marketers, therefore, sometimes have recourse to interpreters, to enable their message to be heard and understood by the woman user. The microwave manufacturer in our study, for example, employed a team of woman "consultants" to support the sales staff in the shops, interpreting the machine and its features into the kitchen language of the woman shopper.
This interpretive role is not new. Louise Walden describes how when the sewing machine first entered the home as a consumer item, marketing effort was needed to ease the technique into its new context and inform its user in the use of all its features. The sewing machine manufacturer's agent was "the interpreter between the factory world of men and the home world of women. He had the task of explaining the technical device for technically uninterested women" (Walden, 1990, English summary p. 262).
Perhaps because in the 19th century a woman was unlikely to be employed in a job
involving travelling, the interpretive role was filled by a man. The agent had, therefore, to learn to speak an everyday domestic language: "he was forced to learn to sew himself, in order to be credible in the eyes of the women" (Walden, 1990, English summary p. 262). Today's microwave consultant is a woman, however. Domestic language is seen as her mother tongue, something that comes naturally. Her task is instead to learn the foreign language of design engineering.
THE APPLIANCE AND THE HOUSEHOLD: A NEGLECT OF CONTEXT
The above discussion focused on the design of particular models of particular kinds of equipment. And this is no accident, for it is the case that almost always new household appliances are designed and marketed as stand-alone artifacts. They are not designed thoughtfully within re-conceptualized technological systems. The dishwashing and clothes washing appliances we are sold, and the detergents they are designed to use, do not relate unproblematically to the sewage system. Electrical appliances each have their own motor and are more costly than they need be to buy and to run. In the USA, for instance, it is estimated that residential appliances, including heating and cooling equipment, use about one third of the electricity generated today. Refrigerators alone use about 7% (Wajcman, 1991, p. 100).
The reason for this focus on "the appliance" is obvious enough in competitive, capitalist economies. In a profit-governed society there is no socially-responsible agent of technological planning. The latest model from the drawing board of a manufacturer is designed only to compete with that of his rivals for space in the actually-existing household. However, our collective European project showed that, even in the formerly centrally-planned economies, there was no systematic approach to the development of household technologies. Andjelka Milic reported that in Yugoslav rural communities:
... when the moment did at last come for the household to be equipped [with electrical appliances] ... it turned out that many of the infrastructural conditions for proper utilization of washing machines and dishwashers,
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flush toilets, freezers and electric food processors were missing. Power supplies were too often unreliable, electricity voltages too low, water supply and sewage inadequate, supportive services for repair and maintenance lacking. Besides, often the models of equipment available were unsuitable . . .. (Milid, 1994, p. 156)
Our eight-country study thus afforded us some insight into the positioning and treatment of the household in two contrasted kinds of economy. On the one hand, there was the USSR (as it then was) recently emerging from 70 years of state-controlled, centrally planned economy and an almost entire absence of market. And, as mentioned, there was Yugoslavia (before its breakup) where such an economy had been modified by self-management, but where the market was still relatively undeveloped. And finally there were the capitalist countries of Western Europe (France and the UK), Scandinavia (Norway and Finland) and Southern Europe (Spain and Greece).
Economic policy in the socialist countries — in the USSR since the 1920s, and in Yugoslavia since the Second World War — had been historically geared to military production and heavy industry. The manufacturing sector producing consumer goods of all kinds was technologically backward in the Soviet Union. Vi-talina Koval pointed out that military and heavy industry was frankly known as the male sector of production. The "light" branches of industry such as food and textiles, public and social services were considered of lesser importance. That they were both staffed by women, and produced goods and services mainly for women was not incidental (Koval, 1994).
Distribution policies too neglected the domestic sphere. Vitalina Koval wrote:
It frequently occurred that the state production monopolies produced inappropriate and poor quality goods that people had no wish to buy — yet there existed no mechanism, no feedback from the consumer, to staunch the flow of inappropriate production. Since there was no competition, there was no advertising. Stocks of unsold products simply accumulated . . .. (Koval, 1994, p. 112)
Before marketization, it had been all but impossible to buy household equipment at will. The
state involved the workplace in the distribution of goods. A worker would put her or his name on a list and wait patiently for their turn to come up to buy a television or a washing machine, costly or unobtainable in the state shops.
Andjelka Milic' reported similar effects in Yugoslavia. Quite technologically advanced, this country's investment had been nonetheless geared by the political elite to gigantism, to prestigious projects, and "technology was seen as row upon row of shiny new machines, quite divested of their potential for generating new social actors, roles and relations" (Milic', 1994, p. 151). Both authors concluded that production and distribution systems in these political economies had grossly underinvested in women and had resourced male domination.
In the West the household is provisioned quite differently, served (sometimes but not always better) by a "free market." Materials, processes and devices are developed for profit. Often they are brought into existence first in response to the large and wealthy markets of military or industrial production. Subsequently their developers seek to maximise sales by adapting them to domestic and individual consumption. Microwave cooking for instance was a serendipitous byproduct of radar. One of the engineers interviewed by Ian Miles and colleagues described the thought-process in technological development. The technological potential comes first, applications second. The designers say to themselves, "we know we have this technology that can do this: now where's the market for it?" (Miles, Cawson, & Haddon, 1992, p. 75) Often the market the technologists see as ripe for exploitation is the household.
Competition produces an appearance of great choice in the market economies: there are scores of models of each item available. Better-off households, especially their kitchens, are replete with equipment. But they are not always designed to answer user needs. Maria Carmen Alemany Gomez, in our study, showed how a new model of washing machine was introduced, not to serve the consumer market, but to ease production problems by bypassing troublesome unionized workers (Alemany Gomez, 1994).
There is resonance here with Michele Martin's account of the development of early telephone services by Bell in North America (Martin, 1991). The telephone, of course, eventually became one of the most valued of domestic technologies from the householder's point of
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view, besides being a huge market for telephone companies. But the managers of Bell were initially interested in the telephone only as a device to facilitate business contacts.
Women's activities were not seen as being of prime importance in the business world of the telephone entrepreneurs. Nor did these entrepreneurs see the utility of this new technology for working-class housewives, or for rural populations. (Martin, 1991, p. 140)
To extend the phone service to households through the development of telephone exchanges was seen by its designers and suppliers as "pedestrianizing" the technology (Martin, 1991).
The relative neglect of domestic technology in technological development in countries of both eastern and western Europe is paralleled by (and is a reflection of) the priority given to the economic over the social. Production and employment are prioritised over reproduction and services. Nowhere is this more visible than in the policies of the European Union since the Treaty of Rome in 1959.
Housing may stand as an example. The brick, concrete, and timber constructions that shelter and accommodate households must be seen as their primary technology. Both West and East during the 1980s saw an escalation of overcrowding in shoddy accommodation and, in the case of the big cities of the West, a resurgence of large-scale homelessness. In the USSR and Yugoslavia massive and inhuman housing blocks, with their inadequate apartments, small rooms and untended open space, were evidence of the state's attempt to house the masses in poor economies where public resources were directed by policy elsewhere — particularly to the military and space technology.
The production of household technologies, then, does not occur as part of a technology policy governed by social criteria. The household's economic function is to consume. Advertising appeals to "the household" or "family unit" each to own its own equipment with which to service itself. The household is constituted as an island. Just as its connection to the physical environment is problematic, so is its connection to its social environment. There is no provision for sharing or connection with other households and little sense of embedded-ness in a community. Tarja Cronberg, for exam-
ple, in her study of local telecommunication networks in Denmark, found an increased distance between home and local community to be a likely outcome of technological change. "The social impact will be increased isolation of not only the household in the dwelling, but also of the individual in his or her own room." It is unsurprising that Cronberg sees in our technological trajectories "the death of everyday life" (Cronberg, 1992).
THE SOCIOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY: AN AVERSION FROM THE MUNDANE
If housework technologies and the woman-at-home are Cinderella to the world of design engineering, domestic technology is also something of a poor relative in the sociology of technology.
This perception became sharper to those of us involved in the European study after we had embarked on the analysis of the social relations of our selected domestic technologies. In the case of the UK study of microwave cooking, Susan Ormrod and I found that a mention of our choice of subject seldom failed to raise a little smile in our hearers. At first we were disconcerted, could not help smiling too, wishing we were sociologists of nuclear power or military aircraft.
In our group meetings, however, our colleagues from other European countries said that they, too, often felt put down as a result of their choice of technology for study and suspected themselves of being "mere kitchen sociologists." We were falling into the trap of many women who undervalue their own perspective and contribution. Genevieve Cresson and Patri-zia Romito for instance have shown in an empirical study of women in the home how they tend to underestimate their own labour (Cresson & Romito, 1993).
If women often underestimate the worth of their concerns, men often place a high value on theirs. Masculine engineering (and indeed men as a sex) have now and then been taken to task by some women critics for their apparently entranced absorption with technical achievement for its own sake (Cockburn, 1985; Hacker, 1989). Sally Hacker wrote from experience of engineering undergraduates, "the discipline [of engineering] in a sense eroticized power relations — glory and status in pain given or taken,
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or pleasure withheld; the postures of superiority or dominance and submission; a fetishism with special equipment and technique" (Hacker, 1989, p. 49). Sociologists of technology, who are also in the main male, are similar to the engineers they study in their preference for case studies of "important" projects. In the oeuvre of the men who have made the greatest impact in the sociology of technology, case studies of missiles and motor vehicles are commoner than studies of contraceptives and detergents.
In a recent significant collection of essays on the social shaping of technology (in which only 1 out of 12 contributors is female) (Bijker & Law, 1992), we see a disarmingly honest account that exemplifies the tendency among mainstream technology analysts to overlook Cinderella. Wiebe Bijker refers to a study of the dissemination of the fluorescent lamp he carried out in the 1980s (Pinch & Bijker, 1990). He says, "I employed the fluorescent lamp as an 'obvious' example of a technical development where it would not be useful to consider a separate social group of women: neither for the actors, nor for me as an analyst, would that provide any further insight" (Bijker, 1992, p. 76).
However, as Bijker confesses, one of the leading actors in his study, a Westinghouse senior executive, himself contradicted the sociologist, writing:
The widespread acceptance of fluorescent lighting in the home will depend directly upon the housewife, who is generally alert to new ideas that give comfort to her family and beautify her home, provided the cost does not exceed the family budget — and more important, provided she is made conscious of the advantages of the new equipment through national advertising and neighborly example. (Bijker, 1992, pp. 76-77)
While Bell Telephone neglected the woman/ housewife as potential customer, and a feminist historian built her analysis around the significance of that oversight (Martin, 1991), here a male sociologist must be reminded by the Westinghouse corporation that the household also counts.
Two linked but divergent schools of thought have developed within the sociology of technology over the last decade. They are sometimes known as the actor-network approach (pio-
neered by Bruno Latour, e.g., Latour, 1987), and the SCOT approach (the social construction of technology, see for instance Pinch & Bijker, 1990).
We have argued elsewhere (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993), from practical experience, that the actor-network approach is difficult for feminists to use effectively both because it focuses primarily on highly significant actors (among whom are few women and fewer women-users), and more importantly because it abstracts from class, gender, and other historically produced, widespread power relations on which a feminist analysis is predicated and with which it can scarcely dispense.
Recently an author working within the actor-network tradition has acknowledged a problem in what he calls its "heroic theory of agency." We tend, he admits, to choose to analyse the part in actor networks of "heroes, big men, important organizations, or major projects" and our analyses are "filled with active, manipulative, agents" (Law, 1991, pp. 11-13). Cinderella is not one of these.
In this tendency to hero-worship, the actor-network theorists simply reflect the tendency in the male-dominated world they study. We found in our analysis of the gender relations of the microwave oven that design office, factory, shop and home, all
. . . furnish circumstances and images in which men are more likely to identify themselves as having agency, and to be valued by others for that. Its women are more likely to find their sense of self in, and be seen as, subsidiary actors concerned with sustenance. Men's doing and making seems more important, effective and far-reaching; women's seems less important, repetitive, a matter of provisioning and maintaining. Men's lives seem a project, women's a cycle. (Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993, pp. 173-174)
If there are problems for Cinderella with the actor-network method, there are, however, also shortcomings in the SCOT approach. It is sympathetic and open in its less stringent formulation of who counts. SCOT exponents term them not actors but relevant social groups. This can include people who do not act very actively. While "following the actors," as advocated by Bruno Latour (1987), tends to lead us on the trail of the most influential shapers of any given
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technology, "relevant social groups" can bring to light a technology's (relatively) passive inheritors and users, beneficiaries, and victims. This permits the researcher from time to time to stumble over a woman. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker for example in their study of the development of the bicycle found the safety and convenience of skirt-wearing bikers not irrelevant to design decisions (Pinch & Bijker, 1990). More recently Kline and Pinch have adopted a gender perspective in their study of the development of the automobile in rural USA, noting how the adaptation of the motor by farmers as a source of power to drive farm equipment reinforced the image of the (male) farmer as technically-competent handyman (Kline & Pinch, 1994).
Another asset of the SCOT approach is its emphasis on "interpretive flexibility," the notion that innovations are not complete until they are in use, and that the technology of the originators may be subjected to many unforeseen adaptations. This renders the user a measure of importance, and, once again, potentially brings women and the household into view.
There is a problem here, however. "Interpretive flexibility" often overstates the real influence of the domestic user. When commodified artifacts, such as white goods and brown goods, are delivered from shop to home, feedback from user to designer is weak, ineffective, and late. Users are less empowered than disempowered as consumers: they are persuaded to pay for features they do not use and (in the case of the microwave) for entire ovens that often end up stashed beneath the stairs (Cockburn & Ormrod,
1993) . It is symptomatic that when one of our research group set out to look for interpretive flexibility in the use of the Minitel phone information system the kinds of possibilities open to the woman user emerged as trivial: inserting it creatively into the decor and using the directory to gain information about neighbours (Berg,
1994) .
Another influential mainstream study of household consumption of information technologies saw them as providing a means both for the "integration of the household into the consumer culture of modern society" and for the assertion of the individual's or household's self-identity. Nonetheless, the authors were obliged to acknowledge in their subtext that, though transformed through use, technologies were "in many cases rejected," and though the public
sphere was never totally determining of the private, nonetheless the relations were "unequal" (Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992, p. 26).
There is a conflict here for feminist analysis. We might prefer to see the woman-in-the-home as an actor, not a victim. But, realistically, research shows her to be distinctly lacking in agency in relation to the technologies on offer to her. Sometimes it seems old-fashioned technology "impact studies" (e.g., Winner, 1985) may have something to recommend them.
AND IF CINDERELLA WERE AN ENGINEER?
If Cinderella had been an engineer, would she have produced technologies more adjusted to the varied needs of those doing her old tasks in the home? Well yes, perhaps. Without being essentialist or naive we can observe that recently a few Cinderellas among the sociologists of technology have made a gender-wise contribution to this field, and some thoughtful men are beginning to respond with a new awareness of their own gender identity and that of the actors they follow round the technology circuits (e.g., Kline & Pinch, 1993; Noble, 1992). In the same way a better proportion of women among the design-engineers might give the fictional woman introduced into the design office a greater semblance of reality.
Technological trajectories are partly given their direction by the masculinity of engineering. It is a culture that routinely diminishes the domestic. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex presents a view of men and their project that is chilling — though she herself appears to admire it. She says "it's because man is a being of transcendence and ambition that he projects new urgencies through every new tool" (de Beauvoir, 1972, p. 88). Men's mutual projects, says de Beauvoir, serve as vehicles of transcendence, they reach for the sky. "Man's design is not to repeat himself in time; it is to take control of the instant and mould the future .... This activity has prevailed over the confused forces of life; it has subdued Nature and Woman" (de Beauvoir, 1972, p. 97). Homemakers of course do repeat themselves in time. Housework is cyclical. For men, women's closeness to the domestic and reproduction represents an immanence they must not allow to trammel and muddy their development projects.
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Cynthia Cockburn
The questions addressed in this paper may seem trivial — I am vulnerable to that feeling even as I write. But I remind myself that we feel that way because of a pervasive error in the things we habitually accord value. It is a costly error for all of us, because it has the effect of profoundly misshaping our technologies and even of threatening our futures. Technological development is driven by the thrust for profit and/or for political and military control. At the same time, the technologies we know we most need, the ones that support domestic functions in both public and private spheres — nourishment, health, shelter, care — get a fraction of the investment received by those others.
The reason for putting Cinderella centre stage in technology policy and design is not to give her better pay and make her feel more equal, although that is needed. It is because she, and those others who share her experience and knowledge (who can in fact be women or men), might shift our social priorities. They might place development more at the service of the domestic sphere.
To argue for a higher priority for domestic technology is neither to take a position opposed to modern technology altogether, nor to see salvation in "high technology." What is needed is rather appropriate technology. Just as a movement has emerged for the development of appropriate technologies for the less — developed countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, so in Europe, technologies are required that are appropriate to the sustainable and healthy reproduction of everyday life. Technology could foster a socially-sound relationship between the activities of the home and a wider society: for example, between the health care that goes on in the household and that which is continued in clinic, hospital, retirement home, and hospice. It could provide for an environmentally-sound relationship between the materials that enter and the wastes and effluents that exit from the household. In short, technological systems should be designed as sensitive interfaces between households and their social and physical environment.
What is the scope for intervention? There is little in contemporary Europe in the way of conscious "technology policy." Most technology development is socially ungoverned, unconscious, and even escapist. Very little actual technology assessment is carried out before investment is committed, and the little that is done
is seldom allowed to have effect in curbing decisions. The criteria for evaluation are selected mainly by men, and as Janine Morgall has said "the questions which are specific to women's lives are never asked" (Morgall, 1991).
But change could be initiated at a number of levels. Breaking down the sexual division of labour in employment and in the household would assist a cross-fertilization of engineering and domestic skills. Municipal and other local authorities are ideally placed to research, promote, manage, and fund the innovatory technologies that interface between community and household. Finally, despite the directional thrust exerted on technological development by capital and state, oppositional space does exist for critical professionals — engineers, sociologists and others — to challenge, question, and propose new directions for technology.
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