A couple of responses:

1) Pragmatically: Yes, the definition of technology is a contested area. I’m hoping that we can at least settle on some set of “family resemblances” that cover a significant portion of the innovations we seek to address.

2) Conceptually: You are right to say it is important to grasp with actual history and practice. But I think it’s also good to try to get one’s theoretical presuppositions on the table, and exposed to critique from a group of scholars who think of themselves as trying to understand a common set of phenomena.

To give an example: I read a paper by a well-regarded scholar today that simply “took for granted” the legitimacy of an assumption that legal regulation is always inferior to tax as a way of addressing inequality. There are a couple of ways of dealing with this: one is to try to show the theoretical inconsistencies (or undesirable assumptions) in the normative vision of which this is a part, another is to show via the intricacies of some practice that ideal theory does not map very well onto the world. The enemy is bad theory, not theory per se.