Also, just to be clear, there can be social science fields which inquire into aspects of the engineering field of Computer Science, but that doesn’t effect the underlying character of the field.
Also, also, I would strenuously argue against the proposition that mathematics is in any way ‘human independent.’ But that argument is not entirely relevant.
If you read how architects justify their designs, they're full of references to culture, philosophy, and occasionally - too rarely - practical research into how people move through and live/work in spaces.
It's a social activity in that architects design for other architects. Clients are secondary.
CS is actually no different, it's just far less culturally self-aware. There's nothing objective about CS. It grew out of a specific philosophical current, and it could easily have gone in other directions, emphasising other kinds of entity relationships - e.g. less atomised and sequential, more contextual and associative. That in turn would have influenced the design of the hardware.
I’m assuming that by architecture you’re referring to system/enterprise architecture and not eg CPU architecture. For a given system, the viable solution space is massive, and the decision on which approach to use is a mixture of science (analyzing and meeting numerically-defined requirements), art (meeting soft requirements), politics (making everyone happy about the unquantifiable choices), and taste (choosing between different similar solutions when no other constraints makes one better than the other). Two organizations facing the exact same problem can come up with two vastly different solutions that both effectively solve the same problem.
How those decisions get made is, I believe, an extraordinarily interesting social sciences question!
There are huge seats of computer science that do, to me, fall under the umbrella of “hard science”, but not all of it. Philosophy, taste, and social dynamics play a huge role in “industrial computer engineering”, and to try to pretend that’s not the case is setting ourselves up for failure.
This is not true. The software field side also falls under computer science. Computer engineering is understood to mean the engineering of computers. Someone with a degree in computer engineering will have a strong electrical engineering background as well as digital circuit design, plus the lower-level side of software (operating systems, device drivers, general systems).
That said, I think the article mentions science being "social" in the context of how we weight scientific research depending on the authors standing and expression, not the absolute truth behind it. Which actually is probably quite a shame.