%0 Journal Article
%T Trevor Pinch’s legacy for media studies
%A Simone Tosoni
%D 2023
%V 
%N Autumn 2023
%K obituary
%K Trevor Pinch
%X It is well known that throughout his long and brilliant career Trevor Pinch was a leading scholar in at least three research fields. In the sociology of scientific knowledge he was one of the most influential contributors, both alone and in collaboration with his mentor Harry Collins (see in particular Collins and Pinch, 1982; and Pinch 1985, 1986). He co-founded and developed the sociology of technology and the field of science and technology studies for which, in 2018, he was awarded the prestigious John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Later in his career, he was a core player in the field of sound studies (see for example Pinch and Bijsterveld (eds), 2003, 2004, 2012), to which he was led by his work on the Moog synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco, 2002) and his passionate love for music.
However, the work of Trevor Pinch, and in particular the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach that he developed with Wiebe Bijker (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), has also been influential for many other neighbouring research fields to which he contributed only indirectly or episodically. This is the case for organisational studies, for example, or for studies of innovation. It is also the case for media studies. In what follows, as a media scholar, I represent the intellectual debt of my field to the work of Trevor Pinch. To do so, I will first clarify the role played by SCOT in the disciplinary tradition of media studies, in particular in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century. I will then move my focus to lesser-known works by Trevor Pinch on mediated communication, which he sporadically addressed as part of his broader research interests (related, for example, to the practice of selling). My attempt will be to retrace the tenets of Pinch’s own take on media as they emerge both from these too rare interventions and from the methodological reflection he has dedicated to the topic. In my final remarks, I will draw on the two preceding sections to highlight some other possible points of crosspollination between the current field of media studies and Trevor Pinch’s work, that remain to be explored in depth.
%Z From this point of view, it is certainly true that the concepts of material scripts and of accomplishments do not coincide with the concept of social practice that these approaches derive by and large from second generation practice theories (and in particular from the work of Theodor Schatzki (1996)). In fact, Pinch’s scripts are closer to Schatzki’s ‘tasks’ (aggregates of doing and saying that represent sub-constituents of a practice), even if scripts tend to have a more fixed and recurring form (while tasks can be accomplished in several different ways). On the other side of the spectrum, accomplishments bring to the forefront social actors’ improvisations and negotiations during breaches, while the concept of social practice refers to stabilised, and sometime routinised, courses of actions. Yet, at the light of a common decentring of the analytical focus from media activities to the overarching course of actions they are a part of, these discrepancies are more an invitation to a possibly fruitful crosspollination than the sign of irreducible differences.
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/trevor-pinchs-legacy-for-media-studies/
%J Science Museum Group Journal