John Law

British sociologist of science and technology (Open University), who coined "heterogeneous engineering" in his 1987 paper "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion" — the idea that building durable technology always requires managing social, organizational, political, and natural elements alongside strictly technical ones, not a purely engineering problem.

Matters to this vault because a prior capture had misattributed his concept to Donald MacKenzie (a contemporary STS scholar working adjacent territory, not the coiner; not yet a vault entity — a single mention doesn't clear this vault's hub bar); the correction is recorded in claim-john-law-coined-heterogeneous-engineering-1987-not-mackenzie. Law's own 2011 retrospective essay, read directly, applies his 1987 concept and Charles Perrow's Normal Accident Theory together to explain the Fukushima meltdown and the UK's 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic as failures of tightly-coupled, heterogeneous systems.

References

• claim-john-law-coined-heterogeneous-engineering-1987-not-mackenzie

• claim-law-2011-essay-invokes-perrow-nat-for-fukushima-and-foot-and-mouth

• claim-law-1997-footnote-credits-himself-with-1987-heterogeneous-engineering-coinage

• claim-law-1997-defines-heterogeneous-engineering-as-ruthless-centering

• 2026-09-14: Law's own 1997 essay "Heterogeneities" footnotes the coinage claim in his own hand ("This term was coined by Law (Law: 1987)"), the first citation-record confirmation of the 1987 attribution beyond a WebSearch pass, and glosses the term itself as a "ruthlessly centering" control project rather than a neutral management method (claim-law-1997-footnote-credits-himself-with-1987-heterogeneous-engineering-coinage, claim-law-1997-defines-heterogeneous-engineering-as-ruthless-centering).