Abstract
Science and technology studies and management scholarship have long demonstrated that technology and society co-evolve. However, scholarship studying technology-mediated social innovation often reduces technology into a savior/destroyer binary, leaving little room for nuance, deliberation, or reasoned critique. In this essay, drawing from scholarship about television in postwar American higher education, I show how this binary stems from a point of view that (re)constructs historically contingent social problems as ahistorical and technical, thus rendering the problems solvable. I argue that technology-mediated social innovation cannot end the problems it purports to solve. Rather, it transforms and reconstructs “wicked problems” within particular social, cultural, and material contexts. This perspective is currently missing in the social innovation literature, which analytically transforms complex and historically contingent wicked problems into tractable, technical, and ahistorical “grand challenges.” I offer an epistemological and methodological perspective that re-historicizes the study of social innovation and engages with the complexity and contingency of social problems without envisioning an end to history.