Review of: Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; London, UK, 1996
Claiming that scientific research on homosexuality is politically neutral would apparently exclude the belief that it has consequences for policy-making but Simon LeVay is trying to have it both ways. His book is a plea for “objective” scientific studies of homosexuality because he thinks that US policy regarding gay and lesbian rights will become more accepting if science gets involved. This contradiction haunts not only the book’s story line but also the logic of argumentation.
The story revolves around presenting and reviewing scientific understandings of homosexuality and linking them to the political situation of homosexual men and lesbian women. LeVay is an apt populariser of science who vividly describes and explains the history of scientific research on homosexuality in a manner that clarifies the scientific thinking in the studies carried out in various disciplines. However, LeVay’s subject position as brain scientist (neuroanatomist) and gay activist does not always agree with the healthy scepticism that a story re-telling so many of the strangest episodes in science would need. Read from the position of STS scholarship with an interest in feminist poststructuralism and a strong engagement for lesbian and gay rights advocacy, LeVay’s book stands out as a symptom more than an analysis.
As a symptom the book belongs in a lineage whose genealogy it presents by tracing the roots both of research on homosexuality and of the struggle for homosexual rights back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Turn-of-the-century political and scientific activists like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld argued for the civil rights of homosexual men and women by trying to prove that homosexuality was a biological trait. Although opposed by Eugene Steinach who believed homosexuality had biological causes but that it could be cured and Adolf Brandþs movement that fought for civil rights but rejected scientific explanations, the trope has survived to this day.[1]
…about men, women and inappropriate desire…
One of the images looming large in LeVay’s book is what Judith Butler has called “the heterosexual matrix”.[2] This is a thought-figure, with deep roots in Western culture and history, which links gender and sexual desire in a circular gridlock. According to the heterosexual matrix an intrinsic feature of being a woman is to sexually desire men and vice versa. The implication is that a women who sexually desires women must in some way be masculine and men who desire other men feminine. Alas, lesbians and gay men are gender deviants by default.
As a reader one is first led to believe that LeVay attempts to distance his thinking from this image when he expresses doubts about the 19th century theories of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld that set homosexuals apart as a “third sex”, but it is the scientific quality of their work he disagrees with. That gender characteristics and sexual desire is intrinsically linked in a way which implies feminine traits in gay men and masculine traits in lesbians is a presupposition not to be questioned.
The arguments of the book should have been gained by questioning the heterosexual matrix since it seems to blur LeVayþs thinking. An example is when he recounts the history of research on sexuality and hormones from the 1920s, a decade marking a new era in endocrinology with the techniques to produce synthetic hormones. The discourse on sex hormones has invited scientists to conduct numerous studies and experiments on both animals and humans. LeVay presents several research projects, for instance studies done since the 1970s of females with CAH, a genetic disorder in which the afflicted have been subjected to extremely high doses of androgens (male sex hormones) during gestation in the uterus. These hormonal influence are strong enough to “virilize” the female genitalia so that surgery is sometimes performed after birth.
LeVay says that
Studies of girls with CAH have shown several significant differences from other girls (such as their unaffected sisters). During childhood, these girls have an unusual interest in playing with toys such as trucks that boys typically play with. Conversely, they are less interested in traditional girls’ toys such as dolls and kitchen implements. These differences are not merely anecdotal but have been established in rigorously controlled observations of the childrenþs behavior. They also score better than their sisters on tests of spatial ability in which boys typically outperform girls. CAH girls also typically express less interest in becoming mothers than unaffected girls. (p121)
I will not comment on this view of gender conduct but continue to quote a passage further down.
It should be emphasized that not all CAH girls become lesbian women; in fact the majority do not. This could be for a variety of reasons: the androgen levels may not have been high enough, the timing of the increased androgen levels may not have coincided with the critical period for partner preference, the women might not have been followed long enough to allow their homosexual feelings to become apparent, or (and this is surely at least part of the explanation) prenatal hormones may not be the sole determinants of adult sexual orientation. But the results strongly supports the belief that hormones do play a significant role. (p123)
To me the conclusion seems strange to say the least. If women with CAH severe enough to affect their behaviour and morphology do not become lesbians one would think that this would cast some doubt on the causative influence of prenatal exposure to male hormones on the direction of womenþs desire.[3]
LeVay also uses the heterosexual matrix as the baseline against which scientific quality is measured. For example, the behaviourists following J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner are evaluated according to it. These researchers invented numerous stimuli-response framed “cures” for homosexuality. Besides describing the horrendous “therapies” LeVay takes the chance to evaluate the “scientific validity” of the claims put forth. He concludes that Richard Green and George Rekers who both presented (different) explicit theories of the causes of homosexuality at least achieved scientific reasoning by linking it to the development of gender identity.
As retold by LeVay the entire enterprise of biological research into homosexuality provides a pedagogical example of the functioning of heterosexual matrix for those who find Butlerþs theory difficult to grasp due to its abstract character.
…about natural politics…
A prevailing feature of this book is the idea that homosexuality can be constituted as a “natural kind” through research into human biology. It is argued that if homosexuals can be proven to be a “natural kind” with a behaviour possibly to be attributed to biological factors the religious right will accept gay men and lesbians and pay us the same respect as they give straight people. I think LeVay is heading for a major disappointment. It does not matter if he could trace homosexuality to a specific biochemical cause, fundamentalist religion with anti-gay beliefs would not grant gay men and lesbians the same status as straight people. Religion is not susceptible to scientific argument nor does it have to be; it operates on other premises.
Even if LeVay at face level expresses some doubts in the clear trajectory between biological causation and social acceptance the link between them is strengthened in the way psychoanalysis, behaviourism and other psychological understandings of homosexuality are narrated. LeVay reads Freud as being ambivalent towards homosexuality, sometimes declaring it to be a normal variation and at other times explaining it with disturbances in childhood psychosexual development. According to LeVay the American Analysts following Freud showed no ambivalence but were singularly negative. This analysis is echoed in the discussion of the ways in which homosexuality has been considered a disease, especially by psychiatric discourse. The rhetoric implies that psychoanalysis, behaviourism and psychiatry have legitimated negative attitudes and “curing” attempts because of a rejection of biological explanations.
The link between science establishing homosexuality as a natural kind and a judicial system granting homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals is made explicit in chapter twelve which turns on the legal situation of gays in the US. One learns that US law categorises people in different classes where some are “suspect”, meaning that it is likely that social prejudices are at work when individuals from these groups are treated disadvantageously in courts of law. Race and national origin are two examples of “suspect” classes. “Quasi-suspect” classes also get protected from discriminating laws unless the laws are substantially related to a legitimate governmental objective. Sex is a “quasi-suspect” class. “Non-suspect” classes can be discriminated against as long as it is on a rational basis. If homosexuality could be “objectively” defined by natural scientists, homosexuals could become a suspect class and discriminating laws could be overturned, according to LeVay.
One could argue that the relationship of science and law is not that easy or that there is a long specific history behind countering discrimination in this way which makes the area quite unpredictable.[4] I know very little about anti-discrimination legislation in the US, but I do know that the example given by the Scandinavian countries disproves the belief that gay and lesbian rights have to be based on a “natural kind” argument. In Sweden, for example, gay and lesbian rights have been consistently argued from a human rights perspective since 1951. So far this has resulted in the right for same sex couples to legally formalise their relationships, an anti-discrimination clause is on its way and lesbian and gay parenting is explored by a government commission.
Establishing homosexuality as a “natural kind” is a project fraught with epistemic and political problems that LeVay does not manage to solve. The kind of sociobiology propagated by LeVay does not allow for social diversity and flexibility but requires “social kinds” distinct, immutable and internally coherent to be mapped in a one-to-one manner to the “natural kinds”.
The second chapter is an attempt to establish “the nature and prevalence of homosexuality”. This is the title of the chapter but it is also a description of its direction since the reader is not only told about how Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey, Kurt Freund, Dean Hamer and other scientists over the years have worked to define homosexuality in a way that would make the category become “based on an objective segregation of the phenomena being considered” (p44) but is also told that this is a worthwhile pursuit.
As others before him LeVay also attempts to establish the essence of homosexuality by turning to studies of animals.[5] “Nature” as a model for human affairs is problematic (to say the least) as LeVay points out but this does not dissuade him from venturing into this area to re-tell of “discoveries” of homosexuality in seagulls as solid truths. A funny turn is his conclusion that if we look at animal behaviour homophobia seems to be entirely lacking, suggesting to the reader that it might be considered “unnatural” according to the same logic claiming human behaviour “natural” if it can be over-layered by animal studies. Eventually the definition of homosexuality turns out to be an insurmountable difficulty in this book which also ends up in great trouble with bisexuality which is solved by pinning it to anecdotes about the different behaviour of women who the author knows.
Politics is present at many levels in this text besides the explicit aims of gay and lesbian rights. For instance, in the image of the relationship between gay men and lesbians. LeVay has read enough feminist critique to know better than to let gay menþs experiences, or biology, stand in for that of lesbians. Consequently he points out that studies and results concerning gay men are not necessarily applicable to lesbians. Unfortunately this makes me wonder if the political struggle for equal rights should differ for lesbians and gay men. An issue that introduces itself when the question of political rights is tied up to being a “natural kind”.
In the end of the book LeVay sums up the commitment of his story in two sentences: “It will also become clearer that gay people live in a fashion that is appropriate to their kind. Thus it is likely that their perceived worth, both in a practical and a moral sense, will increase, science or no science.” (p295)
Feminism, with a history of struggle against women being expected to live in a “fashion appropriate to their kind”, provides us with reasons to be suspicious of any attempt to naturalise social divisions among humans. Especially when the objective is to find appreciation from a society in which the “heterosexual white middle-class male” is the preferred kind. Letting this figures mirror image the “homosexual white middle-class male” become the essence of queerness may not be in the best interest of us other others.
…about science…
In this story there prevails a tendency to gloss over the critique against present day scientific studies of homosexuality concerning hypotheses and methods. Such critique abounds and needs to be dealt with seriously in a story aiming to tell about this research in an appreciative manner. The move into LeVayþs own scientific territory, research on the brain, does not improve the quality of the argument or of the science told about. The style may be lucid and accessible, this time aided with graphs, but gender non-conformity is still equalled with homosexuality, criticism of research is glossed over and odd conclusions are drawn from studies that are inconclusive and contradict each other. The wording slips rapidly from “tentative conclusions” to “strong evidence” in several places. This pattern of reasoning prevails in recapitulations of research on mental traits, stress and genes, all as correlating with or causative of homosexuality. I can not help to wonder if it is LeVay’s presentation of the research or the research in itself that makes this look much more like “bad” science (according to scientists’ own criteria) than “queer” science. There may be research that can only lose by being clearly explained. For instance, it is vividly demonstrated (quite contrary to the author’s intent I believe) why research on rats to explain human sexual behaviour has to fail.
Perhaps lesbians and gay men have nothing to fear from science, as LeVay argues, but it seems like science has a lot to fear in terms of quality from the research presented in this book.
…but there are good reasons not to follow his lead.
That gay men and lesbian women should be granted equal rights because science can prove that homosexuals belong to a natural kind is not convincing to a reader coming from present day STS with its more sceptical attitude to scientific claims. Nor does the political project of gaining acceptance for homosexuality because gay white middle-class men are as valuable to society as straight white middle- class men appear as an appealing endeavour for a feminist poststructuralist. From the perspective of Swedish lesbian and gay rights activism it also seems utterly odd to commit to link purportedly universal science to specific US legislation.
LeVay’s book appears to be a symptom of the dissatisfaction of the otherwise well adjusted professional who feels like he is missing out on the goods that society owes him because of a minor variation in sexual preference. He moves way beyond his area of expertise to legitimate his claim for inclusion. Would he be included this would have very little effect on the rest of the queer community who may not be so well adjusted or appreciative of existing social order but it would signify a dangerous new alliance between science and human rights.
Notes
Another well known scientist/activist following this trajectory is Dean Hamer.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
To assume that the effect of hormones was in some way not enough to make all these women become lesbians is also to assume that heterosexuality is a default state. Working with one possible trajectory as the default from which another is set off by triggering extraordinary events is a very dubious logic as shown by Anne Fausto-Sterling in her 1996 article How to Build a Man in Rosario, Vernon (ed.) Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 219-225.
Since I lack knowledge about US legal discourse I refer, for a critical evaluation of this argument, to Jennifer Terryþs 1996 article The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity in Rosario, Vernon (ed.) Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 271-295.
The problems with taking animal studies as the base-line truth about human nature are treated in detail by Donna Haraway in her 1989 book Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
author’s address: vetcl@hum.gu.se
There is an ever widening gap between rhetoric and reality in the quest for a more þsustainableþ socio-economic development. In the Nordic countries, where the concept of sustainable development was more or less invented by Gro Harlem Brundtland and her henchmen, this gap is especially noticeable, perhaps because the rhetoric has been so pronounced. But throughout the world, while many governments and politicians have come to acknowledge - in words - the need to take more regard to environmental concerns, the actual practice of policy making, from formulation to implementation to evaluation, continues to follow business as usual. The precepts of þderegulationþ and privatization that were put firmly on the policy agenda in the 1980s continue to reign supreme.
At the doctrinal level, there remains the same overriding emphasis on furthering economic growth and þinternational competitiveness.þ The formulation of policies and the making of policy priorities continues to be determined by the monetary rationality and acquisitive logic of the ever present Market. The quest for sustainable development has been translated into the language of business, via the concepts of environmental management, cleaner production and ecological consumption. In terms of implementation, there is the same fundamental focus on economic efficiency, by which policy making is largely reduced to cost-accounting and rationalization. The trend to shift responsibility to the private sector has continued, and, in the quest for sustainable development, this has meant a number of new managerial and administrative procedures that attempt to incorporate environmental concern into normal business practices, to make “pollution prevention pay.” When it comes to considering the results or consequences of public policies, there is the same underlying instrumental bias and orientation, by which meaning is transformed into measurement, and the effects of policy measures are interpreted almost exclusively in statistical and monetary terms, i.e., in relation to the proverbial bottom line. And over the whole range of policy making, there remains in place the same dominant belief in the wonders of scientific-technological progress, the same reliance on þtechnical fixesþ- in short, the same technocratic rationality. Thus, even though the so-called policy discourse has changed to a certain extent, in that the rhetoric has tended to get greener, the way in which government policy making throughout Europe is actually carried out has not changed very much.
It has been especially in the Nordic countries that the calls for stronger environmental measures and even for an þecological readjustmentþ of society have become recurrent themes in the policy discourse, and, in recent years, they have often been combined with phrases about more active public participation. At least since the Brundtland report of 1987 (from the World Commission on Environment and Development) proclaimed the need for a sustainable development - an ambitious historical project of integrating environmental concern into all areas of socio-economic life - many policy makers have talked of the desirability of greater public involvement, and for greater access to, and accountability of, decision-makers in regard to their constituencies. In the meantime, however, in both Sweden, Denmark and Norway, there have been noticeable shifts in environmental policy toward decentralization and privatization (and, of course, to a greater dependence on decisions taken at the European, primarily EU, policy level).
In relation to the Agenda 21, adopted at the Rio þEarth Summitþ in 1992, a certain reallocation of public funds has taken place in all three countries, particularly to activities at the local level and within þnon-governmentalþ organizations, in order to encourage sustainable development. But in many cases, the new resources have been given to programs that have little to do with the environment, and which relate to sustainable development in name only: for example, normal infrastructural and construction projects. In other cases, the projects have served mainly to keep people employed for temporary periods, and have had difficulty establishing themselves as permanent programs. It has also been observed that while certain pilot projects are indeed based on ideas about sustainable development, the dominant economic and sectorial policies (in, e.g. transportation, energy, agriculture) continue to foster less sustainable paths to development. Thus, while the talk has changed, the real world of policy making has, it seems, been only marginally affected.
This disparity between rhetoric and reality, between the þtheoryþ and þpracticeþof sustainable development, has provided the point of departure for our research project, Public Participation and Environmental Science and Technology Policy Options (PESTO), which has been funded by the Nordic Environmental Research Program during 1996 and 1997 and continues through 1998 as part of the European Unionþs program in Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER). Research teams in Denmark, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden have been partners in both projects, while the European project has also included partners in Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, and Iceland has only participated in the Nordic project.
Our aim in PESTO has been to explore the relations between sustainable development and public participation - the cultural politics of sustainable development. With disciplinary backgrounds in sociology, history and the theory of science, we have examined science and technology policy-making through what might be termed a cultural lens. Rather than assess policy options on the basis of their managerial effectiveness or their technical efficiency, we have sought to bring in the þactorsþ and see what is actually going on in the name of sustainable development. In other words, we have tried to elucidate the cultural dimensions of science and technology policy: the human tensions and conflicts that are central to the making of policy, but which are rarely examined explicitly.
Throughout the PESTO project, we have made use of an analytical framework, derived from cultural sociology and the theory of science, by which the relations between relevant groups involved in policy making are conceptualized in terms of ideal typical categories of “policy cultures”, or policy domains. These policy cultures - which we label the bureaucratic, the economic, the academic, and the civic - are seen to have their own particular ideals, or aims, of policy making, as well as their own particularly favored measures and programs. Each culture also has its own ethos, its own characteristic way of life, or norm system, which affects how programs are implemented and how particular projects are performed. What we have tried to understand are the ways in which the interactions among the policy cultures differ from country to country to form distinctive national policy styles and characteristic patterns of political debate, and to understand the effects that these cultural differences have in the quest for sustainable development, that is, how they affect the actual formulation and implementation of environmental science and technology policy.
Our research strategy has involved three main thematic components, or “work packages”, as the EU likes to call them, as we have tried to investigate these cultural tensions in environmental science and technology policy, or what we have come to think of as the cultural politics of sustainable development: 1) national experiences, 2) the public/policy interface, and 3) networks and brokers. In the following, I will briefly present some of the highlights of our research results. Interested readers can find our research described in detail in our two volumes of PESTO Papers, published by Aalborg University Press.
National Experiences
Our first step was to trace the relations between sustainable development and public participation as they have developed over time. In a first volume of PESTO papers, published in 1997, we described the historical experiences of seven of the eight countries (Italy’s national experience is presented in our second set of papers). The idea was to show the cultural roots of the new policies, how they were grounded in distinct national policy styles, but also how, in each country, the Particularly important in shaping contemporary constrain the recent efforts to reconstitute environmental science and technology policy.
The “dilemmas” of polarization, as we call them, are very much alive in the current debates about sustainable development, roughly dividing Sweden into two antagonistic camps, one that remains firmly committed to large-scale, environmentally problematic industrial development, and the other promulgating more ecological paths to socio-economic development. In our terms, these camps consist, in large measure, of alliances between representatives of the economic and academic policy cultures, on the one hand - the new entrepreneurs in business and management - and between bureaucrats and representatives of civil society, on the other - what might be termed the “left-overs” of the Swedish model in the social democratic party and public interest organizations. The result is a curious combination of government-sponsored activism and corporate-sponsored resistance.
Denmark (and, in a similar vein, the Netherlands) have developed very different kinds of cultural tensions around sustainable development. The “consensual mode” of policy making, and stronger civic traditions, have led to a greater public acceptance of sustainable development programs in both countries, and a more active combination of economic and environmental policies. The problem for these front- running countries is in finding market niches for the new cleaner and greener products, that their industries are starting to produce, while, at the same time, not neglecting the older, more traditional concerns of environmental protection, particularly in relation to agriculture. The so-called greening of industry, which has been particularly influential in Denmark and the Netherlands, has also led to tensions between the emerging green experts and the more activist, and participatory wings of the civil society.
In Iceland and Lithuania (and Great Britain), the quest for sustainable development has been less pronounced, due both to other policy priorities being higher on the political agenda, as well as to stronger forces of resistance and inertia. In Iceland, the powerful fishing industry has often seen environmental concern as a constraint on its further development, while in Great Britain, the dominance of the traditional industrial branches (and traditional modes of governance) has been marked. The Lithuanian experience, which has formed an important reference point of our project, is especially interesting, in that the environmental issue emerged as part of a struggle for national independence, and, when that struggle was won, other economic priorities have been seen as more pressing and urgent. An emergent economic culture has been relatively weak, and the previously strong alliance between the civic and academic cultures, which was a constituent part of the independence movement, has been diminished as new, external, actors - from NGOs, international organizations, and transnational firms - have entered the country in a more active way.
The range of experiences has indicated how important cultural traditions and historical contingencies are in the making of public policies, and have helped raise particular questions and direct our further research in particular directions.
The Public/policy Interface Our second theme was examined by means of a selective case study methodology through which we investigated particular types of involvement by the “public” in environmental science and technology policy. The idea was to contrast similar types of participation in different countries, and as we wrote the material up for publication in PESTO papers 2, we singled out five main categories of participation for particular attention.
On the one hand, we focused on the process of policy entrepreneurship, the ways in which particular people in different countries operated between the policy cultures, serving both as translators of ideas from one culture, or domain, to another, but also as social innovators, creating new contexts for interaction among different social groups. The concept of policy entrepreneur was formulated in order to capture some of the particular functions that are carried out in the process of policy making: establishing credibility for new ideas, legitimating new policy measures among different publics, communicating and publicizing programs and policies, and, perhaps most importantly, institutionalizing new kinds of expertise.
A second focus was the new kind of role being played by environmental movement organizations in the reconstitution of environmental science and technology policy. In many countries, there has been a professionalization of movement activity and even the emergence of new kinds of consultant firms that are, as it were, belonging to the civic, economic and academic cultures at one and the same time. The opportunities for these new kinds of organizational roles differ greatly from country to country; and there is also a great variety in the kind of people who get involved in these new “movement business” activities. There is also, in many places, a new kind of grass-roots activism that has emerged in opposition to the professionalizing tendencies in the environmental movement.
This activism is especially noticeable in the debates about sustainable transport, where many of the new infrastructural projects that are being carried out throughout Europe - bridges, highways, airport and harbor expansion, etc - have been criticized by environmentalists. In Britain and Sweden, there have developed more militant groups, that have opposed the projects with direct action methods, while in other countries, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, there have been attempts to include public representatives in the design of the new projects. By focusing on public involvement in infrastructure projects, we have attempted to explain where some of these differences come from - among other places, in the relative openness or closedness of the political culture to public influence.
A fourth type of participation that we have investigated is local Agenda 21 activity. In the PESTO project, we conducted case studies in several communities, interviewing participants and local administrators, and trying to understand the factors that are at work in these newly evolving experiments in local democracy. One of the key elements that our research has disclosed has been the importance of national coordination, either by governmental or non-governmental organizations. Also, the key role of political support, in financial as well as cultural terms, has been important. Most crucially, however, has been the centrality of the activity in relation to other local political activity; is local Agenda 21 a marginal thing for a few, already environmentally conscious, citizens, or is it a central part of an effort to reinvent local democracy? Our attempt to “find the public” in local Agenda 21 activities across Europe opened a fascinating set of questions, which also have to do with the way the public is conceived by policy makers - as a consumer of programs and measures or as an active producer of the activity.
A final set of cases addressed the relation between the quest for sustainable development to the “rest” of science and technology policy. Are the experiences with public participation in the environmental field only of sectorial interest, or are they of broader significance for the future options available in the making of science and technology policy? These studies focused on the Danish cleaner technology programs, and the evolution of the concept of cleaner technology from a narrow, limited environmental focus, to a more all-encompassing aspect of technology policy in general. There was also a study of the debates about biotechnology, to see both the similarities and differences in the forms of public engagement. One of our partners discussed the concept of constructive technology assessment as a generic term to capture a shift in technology policy into more participatory directions.
The material from the project has been presented both to specialists and policy makers in the environmental field, as well as to colleagues in other areas of science and technology studies. Since our studies have been exploratory in nature, our ambition has been as much to present ideas and concepts, as to encourage our colleagues to join us in studying and problematizing the practice of public participation. Both in Denmark, where several of us who have worked in PESTO are now active in the Center for Environmental Social Science, as part of the Strategic Environmental Research program, as well as in other countries, where the PESTO partners have developed new projects and university courses, PESTO has marked the beginning of a new research orientation or approach that can be expected to grow in importance in the future.
Networks and Brokers
In our final work package, the emphasis shifted from public participation as such, to the new types of innovative activity that are being carried out in the different countries in the quest for sustainable development. Our research questions were thus turned on their head, as we asked where was the public in the new networks that were being established? How was a public concern being taken into account in the new business and engineering networks? What driving interests or values are at work among the green innovators? We have thus tried to investigate, again selectively and impressionistically, who is actually involved in environmental science and technology policy, broadly conceived, the interests they represent, and, most importantly, their attitudes, values and practices.
Based on the snow-balling method of interviewing, by which one interviewee leads to another, and the network being studied is thus created, or constructed, in the process of investigation, our research has disclosed a number of emerging linkages both within countries and economic branches, as well as across Europe and internationally. The key factors that have been identified include the different management cultures that exist in different branches, i.e., the kinds of personal competence, educational background, and international connections that particular innovators have; the various “levels” of sophistication in production, which includes both the type of production carried out as well as the comparative size and market share. Often, smaller companies were much more willing to adopt green measures than larger ones, while changes in management routines were often easier for larger firms to adopt. Another important issue was, of course, the relation between the economic and bureaucratic policy cultures, and, not least, the degree of internationalization of the particular industry.
In much the same way that policy entrepreneurs were crucial in establishing meaningful interactions between the public and the policy makers, the coherence and effectiveness of networks was strongly dependent on brokers, who mediate between the different components of a network, serving both as information conduits as well as promoters and network-builders. The different forms of brokerage that are central to the construction of green networks are often based on personal histories of moving across and between cultural domains. What is at work is, to a large extent, a process of interpersonal relations, of system dynamics, by which linkages are put in place for the exchange of ideas, know-how and experiences. In the European project, PESTO also includes an investigation of particular transnational linkages that foster brokerage and network-building for sustainable development. This research continues during the fall and winter, and will be reported in more detail, along with the other material on networks and brokers, during 1999.
Conclusions
As this brief report hopefully indicates, PESTO has provided an opportunity to bring historians and sociologists together to consider some of the all too often neglected cultural dimensions of science and technology policy in the environmental field. Due to the nature of an exercise like this - and of cross-national social science research in general, with different university and research systems imposing different routines and rules on the research effort - a good deal of time has had to be devoted to administrative and communicative learning. But I do feel that, in all three thematic areas, the research has led to fruitful insights about the dynamics of policy making, and, in particular, has helped to clarify some of the fundamental differences that exist between, but also within, the Nordic and other European countries in regard to sustainable development. The gap between rhetoric and reality, between theory and practice, that served as our point of departure may be impossible to eliminate completely, but at least we have opened it up to study and perhaps even provided some tools and insights that can be useful in eventually bringing the reality a bit closer to the ambitious and often far-sighted rhetorical goals.
Note
The two volumes referred to in the report are Sustainable Development and Public Participation: Comparing European Experiences (PESTO papers 1, 1997), edited by Andrew Jamison and Per þstby, and Technology Policy Meets the Public (PESTO papers 2, 1998), edited by Andrew Jamison, both published by Aalborg University Press. Please contact Bente Vestergaard (bentev@i4.auc.dk) for ordering information.
(Report to the Nordic Environmental Research programme, August 1998).
author’s email: andy@i4.auc.dk
Policy-making is a modernist venture. One indicator is the strong “instrumentalist” push for robust methods that allow the policy maker to make a difference, to exert influence — in other words, act at a distance. The subtitle of Pressman and Wildavsky’s book, “How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland,” summarizes both the modernist thrust and its limitations.[1] The instrumentalist thrust may actually be counterproductive on its own terms, because its neglect of the complexities and the own dynamics of the world out there in Oakland, reduces the chance of achieving its objectives.
There is a strong presumption that the world is an obstacle to the necessary change toward a better world, and that action is required to realize this change. But if the world is non-linear, chaotic in the sense that multi-actor interactions determine what happens, such action, predicated on the modernist idea of an actor working to realize his goal, and achieving it because of his efforts, will by definition be unproductive.
I am not implying that individual policy makers are never sensitive to the perplexities, to the chaotic character of their domain and the limited scope of their action among a multitude of actions and interactions. The structure and culture of the policy environment forces a modernist approach upon them, whether they identify with it or not.
When science policy makers try to steer research and profit from knowledge production in a modernist way, their problems are exacerbated. They will treat knowledge as a commodity, and precisely for this reason, will not get what they want. The aimed-for commodity slips through their fingers, because it is the research practices which determine what is possible, not the stylized products that count as scientific facts.
In addition to the (insufficiently recognized) complexity of knowledge production, there are changes in knowledge production which require new responses. That there are such changes is now widely recognized, and has become an accepted topic of conversation with science policy makers. But responses are shaped more by policy bravura (“Let’s do something, and be seen to be doing it!”) than by real understanding.
Thus, it is important to understand what is happening with knowledge and knowledge production, and on that basis speculate about productive approaches. This is not (necessarily) an argument for post- modernism. It is “enlightened modernism” that we need, in the sense that policy is not seen as the once- for-all cause of aimed-at effects, but as one stimulus among others, and to be complemented by continual repair work.[2]
In very general terms, I would argue that one needs to relativize (ironize?) one’s modernism in order to achieve something. This is visible in the new philosophies of steering, and in the view of implementation as joint learning rather than forceful policy realization. Thus, also in science policy, modernist policy making is not necessary — but it difficult to avoid. For one thing, policy makers are accountable, and therefore need universalistic criteria (cf. allocation of funding to ptojects and programmes) and action that can be attributed to them (cf. policy bravura). This is exacerbated by the rationalistic image of science, and the predominance of scientists in policy making (as staff and as advisors).
In practice, one does see examples of entrepreneurial “steering”, which includes repair work, as in the orchestrating of science by programme directors or committees. The new philosophies of steering are sometimes taken up in practice, even if they cannot be argued officially for fear of seeming to be too laid-back and/or too Machiavellian.
Complexities of knowledge production If in official policy repertoires as well as in practical action, the complexity of research, and knowledge production more generally, is insufficiently recognized, science policy addresses only part of its domain. And when the complexities then re-assert themselves, it has no “tools” for repair work other than the modernist assertion of (assumed) force. This is particularly true for top level science policy. At the intermediary level, there are stronger links with practices, and willingness to do repair work (even if goals and legitimations remain modernist, and the ‘illusion of agency’ remains strong). There are at least four dimensions of complexity:
Knowledge is not a commodity. Production of knowledge is not like production of a good. It is a search practice, and cannot be regularized completely.[3] When routine measurements dominate, as in medical-analytic laboratories, regularization is important. What remains is that, in economic terms, knowledge production is embedded in a service.
It is also difficult to put an economic value on knowledge. Special practices, or institutions like the patent system, have to evolve before there can be some (limited) valuation. Knowledge is not scarce, in the sense that it remains available after being consumed. And knowledge is embodied (in people, in artefacts) or when available in a text, requires special competence to be taken up.
Knowledge is never completely codified. Neither research, nor knowledge are “packaged” of their own accord. Packages are constructed when reporting to particular audiences. While this feature may be recognized in the abstract, it is neglected in the practice of policy makers and intermediary agencies. One example is how funding agencies (understandably) want to know what the impact has been of the projects they have funded. But there is the project fallacy; value and impact depends on the overall research activity over time, not on something that has been put up as a project to mobilize funding.
Research and knowledge are open-ended, and richer than the particular purpose they were created for.[4] In economics, this “richness” is discussed under the heading of “spillovers,” and an OECD study emphasizes the importance of “spillovers” from basic research, and the emergence of networks (of firms, sometimes including research institutes) to capture the added value.[5]
Eventual take-up of knowledge (“application”) is an activity by itself, not the effect of a knowledge push. And even more important, it is almost always indirect: knowledge products are delivereded into a knowledge reservoir, carried by what one might call an epistemic community, and knowledge users pick up their own new combinations from the reservoir. Note that the phrasing is sufficiently broad to encompass other knowledge than “traditional” scientific knowledge (i.e. knowledge as classical physics and chemistry are supposed to produce).
Clearly, these complexities are a challenge to the modernist approach. Conspicuous failures are few, though, for one thing because policy goals are redefined after the fact,[6] or forgotten. The other reason, as I have intimated a number of times already, is the repair work by actors, often at lower levels in the system, and thus less visible to the outside world.
New (and old) forms of knowledge production
While the Gibbons et al. diagnosis of a “Mode 2” of knowledge production does identify important changes, it is too sweeping, and posits the shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2 in too triumphant a way.[7] In addition, Mode 1 is itself a historically located phenomenon, and one might conceive of further modes (earlier as well as running in parallel).
One intriguing change is how simulation replaces direct experimentation (as controlled experimentation has replaced experience of complex reality — the “natural history” mode of knowledge production). Computational physics and chemistry are but one example, and while they owe their scope to the power of modern computers, the epistemological shift does not depend on computing capability as such. This point returns in the observation that computer models are used increasingly to find out “something” about the “real” world. The recent, and stronger, statement of the International Panel on Climate Change about effects of human activities on climate was not based on measurement, but on increased sophistication of the models. Computer models have become an esoteric mode of story telling.
A further thought: Software science and engineering live in a grey zone where research is done, learning occurs, findings are published and taken up — but findings about what? It is definitely unlike traditional “high” science, and it is not fully covered in R&D statistics. Its focus on programming (and the rules involved) may indicate a structural equivalence with social engineering, both traditional and modernistic, and the ways in which cumulative experience is distilled into knowledge.[8]
Knowledge is also produced in direct relation to professional and craft practices, rather than being transferred to them from the “high” science mode of knowledge production. This mode of knowledge production has, for historical and political reasons, been neglected in science policy. It is essential, though, to understand technical and engineering sciences, and to my mind, social sciences as well.[9]
There is overlap with knowledge produced in the form of (strategic) intelligence. Spying, in its various guises, need not be principally different from scientific observation and analysis, especially of the “natural history” kind. The acceptance of this mode of knowledge production has become even more important with the extent of human intervention. Tchernobyl fall-out (and the knowledge of Cumbrian sheep-farmers) and introduction of genetically modified organisms into the environment are dramatic examples.[10] To put it in Star Wars terms: the environment strikes back, and natural history — intelligence about the reactions of the environment — is re-instated, most easily in its late-20th-century format of computer modeling and relevant data collection.
These examples of modes of knowledge production imply that quality of knowledge and quality assurance cannot be defined in terms of universalism and a royal road to rationality. Instead of universalism, cosmopolitanism sustained by “circulation” is the criterion.[11] Instead of abstract rationality, relevance to the purpose at hand (a pragmatic criterion) becomes important. Quality assessment can then not be the prerogative of the “peers” anymore.
Postmodern science policy?
How to take complexities into account? To offer a masterplan here would be inconsistent with my argument. One element of enlightened science policy is patronage, in the sense of having discretion in allocating resources rather than following universalistic criteria. Universalistic criteria have becoming increasingly important since the 1960s, in particular for the allocation of funds; the whole debate on ‘fairness’ in peer review is predicated universalism as the standard. In contrast, charities and other big foundations can be enlightened patrons of science, and have been quite successful. Can funding agencies, linked to government bureaucracies, do this as well? There is the risk of getting captured in clientelist relationships. On the other hand, entrepreneurial individuals in agencies have been able to exert some discretion. This requires Zivilcourage, to take risks and accept failures.
Another element is to include knowledge policy in science policy. Harry Collins advocated knowledge policy in the late eighties (also in the EASST Newsletter). To have a productive knowledge policy, key aspects of knowledge and knowledge production have to be taken into account. One aspects is that the transformation of local experience into cosmopolitan knowledge is not limited to high-science approaches, but does require “circulation” to be robust. Another aspect is the function of knowledge reservoirs (also within science) and how these are structured — perhaps more important than the production of new knowledge. Thirdly, packaging into knowledge products is important for transfer, but does not by itself guarantee quality and relevance. “Usable ignorance,” Jerry Ravetz’s intriguing phrase, if recognised for what it is, may be more important than “the facts.”
These approaches avoid the paradoxes of modernism at the side of knowledge production, because they focus on process rather than product. They can still fall victim to modernism at the policy side: the need to show agency. This particular aspect of modernism may well be impossible to overcome.
Post-modernism appears to undermine reasons and motives for agency, and modernism is attractive in the sense that it does push towards action. It is the combination of this push for action with negation of complexity by seeing it as a barrier to be overcome, which creates the problems.[12] As I have emphasized, repair work and other routes towards productivity are not taken up.
I proposed alternative science policy approaches, including a plea for patronage, with its discretion (and the risk of arbitrariness). This is one example of allowing for local variation, for heterogeneity, which can be seen as characteristic for the post-modern. National research systems can be more or less supportive of heterogeneity, and bottom-up dynamics in aggregation into agendas and policies. When we mapped national research systems on this dimension and a “steering” dimension, we identified the Japanese and the Dutch systems as scoring high on aggregation and low on steering.[13] Over the last years, the systems seem to move toward stronger top-down dynamics — modernism winning out?
Notes and references
Jeffrey L. Pressman & Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation. How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland; Or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes, 3rd ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
It is another paradox that modernism, linked up with the Enlightenment, has become “blind”, and needs to become “enlightened” itself.
Arie Rip, ‘New Combinations,’ European Review 3(1) (1995) 83-92.
In Arie Rip and Anton J. Nederhof, ‘Between Dirigism and Laissrr Faire: Effects of Implementing the Science Policy Priority for Biotechnology in the Netherlands,’ Research Policy 15 (1986) 253-268, we give an example of a microbiological project which figured first in the National Coal Research Programme, and then in the Biotechnology Programme. Relabeling of research (to attract further resources) is therefore not necessarily swindling new sponsors out of money. And even if it starts out as a swindle, it can turn into a new and fruitful venture — provided the researchers are pushed to do something related to the label. This would be an example of what I have called “repair work.”
OECD, Technology and the Economy, Paris: OECD, 1992.
A striking example is the Alvey Programme in the UK in the 1980s. The goal was to improve UK competitiveness in information and communication technologies. This was not achieved, but the means, collaboration between industries and between industry and academia, had created a collaborative culture. The latter was eventually quoted as the important goal to be achieved in such programmes.
M. Gibbons, C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman, P. Scott, and M.Trow, The New Production of Kowledge, London: Sage, 1994.
When I presented these ideas in a paper for the EASST/4S Conference in Bielefeld, 13-16 October 1996, David Turnbull offered an interesting example, drawn from Stephen Lansing’s book, Priests and Programmes. A “modern” water management system was introduced in Bali (Indonesia), bypassing the traditional management system centred on the priests in their temples (for example, deciding upon letting certain fields dry out for a time, which — as it turned out later — killed the weeds and the pests). The “modern” system led to great problems, and a software engineer and an anthropologist collaborated in the repair work: the antropologist reconstructing traditional system and its rationale, the software engineer putting the rules of these practices in a computer programme. Jakarta could accept the new programmes as rational and modern (because computerized), and the priests went along because it were their rules which were programmed.
In C. Disco, A. Rip and B.J.R. van der Meulen, ‘Technical Innovation and the Universities’, Social Science Information 31 (1992) 465-507, we showed how knowledge production proceeded through aggregation within the frame of a technical model' and the further elaboration of suchtechnical models.’ Similarly, whole areas of social and behavioural science appear to work with `social models’, e.g. the organisation as a machine, producing outputs, and being overseen by a manager.
Cf. W. Krohn and J. Weyer, ‘Society as a Laboratory,’ Science and Public Policy 21 (1994), 173-183.
This is argued in more detail in Arie Rip, ‘A Cognitive Approach to Relevance of Science,’ Social Science Information 36(4) (1997) 615-640.
This can become a phobia: “The claim of contingency must be rejected, because the alternative is the abyss.” Richard C. Lewontin, þ la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Essay Review (of Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition and Himmelfarb, On looking into the Abyss), Configurations 3 (1995) 257-265, at p. 263.
Arie Rip and Barend J.R. van der Meulen, ‘The Post-Modern Research System,’ Science and Public Policy 23 (Dec. 1996) 343-352.
author’s address: a.rip@wmw.utwente.nl