Consigning Technology Acceptance to History. Introduction

The idea of "technology acceptance" exerts a continuing appeal in pub lic debates, policy advice, and social scientific research on issues such as infrastructure projects, NIMBY-ism, participatory planning, the role of prosumers in socio-technological transitions, or in more general assess ments of public attitudes towards innovation.Thus, in recent years, press ing issues such as the expansion of energy infrastructure in the transition towards a CO-neutral energy system (especially power lines, wind and solar farms), or various aspects of digitalization such as autonomous vehi cles, smart homes, or the introduction of large language models, have been discussed in terms of the "acceptance" of these technologies."Acceptance" has thus appeared as a factor required in successfully mastering the Grand Challenges of our time-and corresponding governance subfields such as "acceptance management" have emerged (cf.for instance Bgel et al. ).The appeal of "technology acceptance" persists despite a long-stand ing critique, which reaches back as far as the earliest formulations of the concept.In the s and s, the conflicts and controversies especially around nuclear energy, but also around genetic engineering, pollution, or new information technologies made clear that public acceptance of tech nology could no longer be taken for granted in industrial societies.It is at precisely this point that explicit concepts of "technology acceptance, " the "public acceptance of technology, " or the "social acceptance of technology" were first formulated by social scientists, and widely debated in the public and political spheres of Western democracies.Already in these early debates, the concept of "technology acceptance" was criticized mainly on two grounds.The first of them was the vague ness of the term "technology, " which can refer to wildly different objects and thereby makes "technology acceptance" too blunt for an analytically K