Review of D. MacKenzie’s Knowing Machines, MIT Press, 1996
Donald MacKenzie has produced under the title ‘Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change’ a wide-ranging collection of his (most recent) previously published work. Not only in terms of topics discussed in the collection, is the book diverse, but also in the nature of the approaches that he has decided to adopt. It is clear that MacKenzie finds the various moves in recent sociology of technology towards ever greater symmetries debilitating. This is reflected in his overall approach, where he is at once a relativist ‘questioning the underlying knowledge/assumptions’ of the building of nuclear weapons (chapter ten -‘Tacit Knowledge and Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons’), and at the same, he is a realist ‘making knowledge claims’ about the prevalence of computer related accidents (chapter nine ‘Computer-Related Accidental Death’). This analytical ‘skirting around’ between approaches provides for a fascinating example of the difficulties of describing just what do we mean when we are talking about the ‘sociology of technology’. If this is a recipe for how to do sociology of technology studies, then it is certainly a heterogeneous one. One possible reading (which I think warrants a mention), while implicit in many of the chapters, but more obvious in others, is MacKenzie’s view of a sociology of technology which informs design.
We need little reminder of the influence of his early work, and of the sway of the social shaping framework. Straight away in the first chapter, ‘Marx and the Machine’, he begins to set out his politics. Here he recounts how Marx’s work on technology has most often been interpreted as an argument for technological determinism. Many Labour Process studies having fed of such accounts, deployed endless descriptions of the power of machines to displace and deskill labour. In arguing against this well held belief, MacKenzie reminds us of the sophistication of those pictures of the early disciplining of workers through technology, an account that shows just how the machine was able to make stable and durable the conditions of work. Nor was Marx arguing that technology was determinant at one remove, in that it solely embodied the ‘interests’ of capital. In MacKenzie’s hands, Marx appears to be arguing that while technology was shaped by the needs of capital, it remained essentially neutral:
It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments (Marx, quoted in MacKenzie, p44).
If Marx confined his studies to how a neutral technology was later ‘shaped’, then we can rightly ask, ‘what relevance does his work have for a sociology of technology which is attempting to inform design?’ MacKenzie is clear that this approach ‘has relevance’ in looking at, what he calls, the ‘contingency of design’, or, in other words, how the design of technology could have be done ‘differently’. He points to examples from Langdon Winner’s account of the ‘politics’ of bridge building, and to David Noble’s description of the managerial assumptions embedded in machine tools, as landmark studies of identifying these types of contingencies. Once such contingency is identified, MacKenzie argues, there then exists a need to explain ‘why’ certain choices were made. And here Marx’s work is relevant: “…because it does suggest where to look for such an explanation…(p45)”. This is a nice chapter, but, in terms of the sociology of technology, I think that there is little new here. The chapter serves its purpose, which was to correct earlier straightforward technological deterministic interpretations of Marx’s, and at the same time, to remind us of the elegance of his writings. Further, although it does sit fairly uncomfortably among the other papers, it might be said to act as some sort of an introduction to MacKenzie’s own brand of social ‘shaping’ studies of technology. The use of ‘shaping’ as opposed to the ‘construction’ of technology delineates a (sometimes not recognised) difference in the history of the sociology of technology. This can also be characterised by a use of the ‘social’ to explain technical change. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to detract from the sophistication of the approach, and MacKenzie himself is not unproblematic in his use of the social: “This ‘social shaping of technology’… should not be thought of simply as unchanging social relationships causing changes to technology, for heterogeneous engineering involves changes to social relations too.” (p14)
In the next chapter, ‘Economic and Sociological Explanations of Technological Change’, MacKenzie attempts to discover some ‘common ground’ between social studies and economic studies of technology. Amongst other things, he picks up on the notion of ‘natural trajectory’ or ‘technical trajectory’ of technology. The notion, often used by evolutionary economists to explain persistent patterns of technological change, MacKenzie problematises, for the way ‘natural’ seems to resonate with the idea of the mechanical metaphor of ‘trajectory’: “The notion of ‘technological trajectory’ can thus very easily be taken to mean that once technological change is initially set on a given path…its development is then determined by technical forces.” (p55) In referencing studies from the social history of technology (shot) and actor network approaches (ant), he asserts that such studies have shown that while technological change does possess a momentum, it is “never momentum of its own (p55)”. While I agree with his criticism of the notion of trajectory, one of the problems of this kind of ‘outsider looking in’ analysis of evolutionary economics, is that the strawman that MacKenzie sets up (the technological trajectory), is one that does not exist unproblematically in evolutionary economics itself (see Van Lente (1993) for a more elaborate criticism). That said, we are shown the real strength of the collection (and of the potential for crossover) in his discussion of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. In economics, such a notion comes under the guise of ‘expectations’. For example, MacKenzie quotes from the economist Paul David’s work on the universal adoption of the QWERTY keyboard: “A particular system could triumph over rivals merely because the purchasers of the software (and/or the hardware) expected that it would do so” (David, 1986 cited in MacKenzie, p57). In a similar way, he uses the notion of self-fulfilling prophecy to add an aspect to the notion of technological trajectory. Namely, that: “[p]ersistent patterns of technological change are persistent in part because technologists and others believe they will be persistent” (p56). In drawing on material form one of the other chapters in the collection, ‘Nuclear Weapons Laboratories and the Development of Supercomputing’, he points to how designers of supercomputers, having estimated the possible future increases in speed of their rivals computers, would aim to build their machine to match or better the estimated speed of their rivals. Therefore, a continued increase in the speed of supercomputers, resulted (partly) from a belief among designers that faster speeds were possible: “The prophecy of a specific rate of increase has thus been self-fulfilling. It has clearly served as an incentive to technological ambition; it has also…served to limit such ambition” (p56). His use of self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) is, I think, the most intriguing aspect of the collection of papers, and is not something that has been made much of in the sociology of technology. He carries this theme into several of the other papers, but makes most use of it in the chapter on ‘Tacit Knowledge and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons’.
This chapter hinges on the argument that the development of nuclear weapons requires both explicit and tacit knowledge for successful construction, and he (tentatively) points to a situation where, in the future, the tacit skills needed to build such weapons may disappear. In his conclusion, he attempts to show how future efforts to build these weapons will be so great (without the tacit skills of the earlier generation of scientists) that it won’t be a simple case of re-building from previous designs but a ‘re-invention’ will be required. And the effort to re-invent, he argues, may be more than most countries are willing to sacrifice. This of course raises an interesting question: could the difficulties of re-invention be such that countries are sufficiently deterred from taking this route? MacKenzie, in a way, dismisses his own conclusions when he invokes the following argument “[i]t is hard to imagine belief in the feasibility of atomic or thermonuclear weapons now disappearing, and that fact alone increases the probability of their reinvention” (p249). For MacKenzie, one of the reasons why it has continued is because opponents think its continuation is inevitable and therefore “[t]heir consequent failure to oppose it has been one factor making it possible” (p57). By positing the idea of the “uninvention” of nuclear weapons, through a loss of tacit knowledge is MacKenzie’s way of countering this pessimism. In taking his argument further, that we can see a time when these weapons might not exist, may enable us to look beyond what now seems inevitable.
If I were to make a criticism here, it would be this: MacKenzie makes recourse to the notion of SFP to explain the durability of nuclear weapons, without really elaborating on the term. The recent trend in the sociology of technology of unpacking reifications, warns us against using such blanket terms, however interesting or useful they appear to be. But of course, recall the introduction and the point about MacKenzie’s aversion to symmetries. Yet I think, his unwillingness to expand on the expression misses out on much of the interesting aspects of what is self-fulfilling about technical change. I am tempted to say that I think he intends a performative use of SFP, rather than the more cognitive (but it is difficult to make this separation without tending towards a dualism). Performative in the sense, that he’s interested in how SFP acts to enrol others. For instance, in the chapter ‘From the Luminiferous Ether to the Boeing’, we hear how firms have to decide whether there is going to be a technological revolution in laser gyroscopes. The risk of being left behind (they believe) is too great not to switch technologies. Therefore many invested heavily, helping the laser gyroscope revolution to become a reality. In the example of nuclear weapons, he might have emphasised just how such SFP’s are constructed and maintained. This could be a description of what “interests” or actors had to be brought together under the same roof to effect such a feeling of inevitability. In a way, it is an obvious point, but I think if we’re to really make use of the notion of SFP, there is maybe a danger in pretending that this is a characteristic of all technologies. When in actuality, such a notion is better thought of as an achievement, rather than as a property of technologies themselves, and in turn, (to be symmetrical) such effects need to be thoroughly described. For example, I like the way MacKenzie starts to outline the possibility of the uninvention of nuclear weapons. Importantly, he begins to describe the initial crumbling of just ‘what’ makes the notion of proliferation inevitable: “The military situation has changed, budgetary constraints have tightened, and parts of the nuclear weapons production infrastructure in both the United States and the former Soviet Union are now, either closed or in physically dangerous condition. Add to this a possible ban on testing and it is far from clear that the governments of the major nuclear states will commission new types of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future” (p257).
In a further chapter entitled, ‘The Charismatic Engineer’, MacKenzie returns the discussion to a subject more familiar to the sociology of technology. That is, in describing the work of Seymour Cray, the engineer whose name has become associated with the invention of the supercomputer, he seeks to delineate some of the heterogeneous work of one of the worlds most distinguished technologists. From Pasteur’s microbes, Bakelite’s plastic to Edison’s electric light, through to talk of charisma, brilliance, leadership, and of great inventors, others have taught us that such attributes are ‘effects’. Invention is the bringing together of many resources and building of heterogeneous networks. Brilliance, invention or great leadership is in placing oneself at the front of these networks. MacKenzie brings another angle to this in his discussion of Cray’s work. Cray, it seems, is a charismatic. He has something special. MacKenzie teaches us of his obsession with control, a fixation that won’t even allow him to transfer work to others, for fear that they won’t be able to deliver on their promises. We hear about his determination to succeed, to make his computers work, every time with more speed. Often his attempts to overcome problems seem so ludicrous, that nobody, not even his colleagues will take him seriously. After hearing one particular suggestion they ‘laughed’ and “rolled in the aisles” (151).
MacKenzie tells us of Cray’s continuous efforts to build the world’s fastest computer, to continually attempt to improve on their speed and, in doing so, he, again and again, places himself at the intersection of what could be described as two contrasting networks. The first is a more stabilised result of previous efforts, where we see the customers of Cray’s machines demanding hardware modifications, software and end-user support, for their newly purchased machines. The second is a more perilous journey with much uncertainty, where to reach his goal of increased speed he continually has to rely on his attempts to enrol the technology and the support of his colleagues. Rather than take the safe route of providing services that his customers need, a route that would provide financial security for the company, he forsakes the security offered here and (again and again) pushes for the second route. In envoking the work of Weber, MacKenzie captures just what is different about Cray:
Just as revelation and the sword were the two extraordinary powers, so were they the two typical innovators. In typical fashion, however, both succumbed to routinization as soon as their work was done…[R]ules in some form always come to govern…The ruler’s disciples, apostles, and followers became priests, feudal vassals and, above all, officials… (Weber cited in MacKenzie, p134).
In the hands of MacKenzie, Cray, at every turn, sees his work, his genius, becoming “routinised” for the needs of capital (to gain a return on investment), for the firm (to build market share), for the customers (to receive increased customer support). In building networks, forming alliances and placing oneself at the front of this network, and when the network begins to stabilise, when there is routinisation, or there is little room for movement, the charismatic engineer can play a “…different role in the new network…” (157). Or, as in the case of Cray, he can “…cut loose from it and begin afresh” (157). This is what is different about Cray. At every turn, he tries to shake of the constraints that might hinder his search for an even faster computer. Cray is not a charismatic, but a single minded engineer, who in searching for that ever faster computer, both built and destroyed an empire.
In concluding, this book has much to offer science and technology studies. MacKenzie shows that there is no such thing as a recipe for doing sociology of technology (something hinted at in other recent collections (Bijker, 1995)). For MacKenzie there are only tools to be used for particular jobs. The critique, often directed at the sociology of technology, that our studies tend towards a political and moral indifference is directly challenged in this collection. Though, where I agree with MacKenzie that the absence of some groups, manual workers or women for example, from the design of technologies is an important, often not discussed issue, I feel a little uneasy about the direction in which he takes some of his analysis. For example, while his argues that a loss of tacit knowledge serves to describe the possibility of a nuclear weapons reduction on two levels, a decline in those who are able physically to make such weapons, and as fuel for his SFP argument, there is also the possibility that his own thesis can be taken up in different ways. In other words, and he notes the point himself, those who wish to continue down the weapons proliferation road may enrol such arguments, as evidence for increased investment in weapons building and testing. The problem of intervening in technology design is an important, and not easily resolved, issue for the sociology of technology. See, for example, the May (1996) edition of the journal ‘Social Studies of Science’ which features a special edition on the ‘politics of SSK’. In the collection, MacKenzie does not deal with the problems that such an intervention might bring, an aspect which is slightly disappointing, given that this theme runs implicitly throughout many of the papers.
Bibliography:
Bijker, W E, (1995), Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press.
Van Lente, H, (1993), Promising Technology: the dynamics of expectations in technological developments, WMW-Publikatie 17, Universiteit Twente, Enschede, Netherlands.
author’s address: N.Pollock@Lancaster.ac.uk
At some point in the mid-1980s, the environmental movement ceased to exist as a living source of collective identity for a relatively small number of people and became instead a source of collective inspiration for society as a whole. What had previously been a wide ranging critique of industrial society and its waste and artificiality became a much more delimited and disembodied set of symbols, ideas, slogans and practices that have since been working their way into the the world of science and technology policy. What had earlier been seen by the power elite primarily as a subversive threat to the further expansion of the industrial state has come instead to be seen, by many influential actors in both business and government, as an important contributor to economic recovery and rejuvenation.
From the paradigmatic notions of sustainable development and risk society to the pragmatic techniques of cleaner production and pollution prevention to the new marketing strategies of green consumption and environmental labelling, the political discourse of environmentalism has been reinvented over the past ten years as a policy discourse. What represented in the 1970s an alternative approach to modern science and technology has come to be reconstituted, from the mid 1980s onward, as a partner in a constructive program of science, technology and economic policy. And what were in the 1960s and 1970s protest movements of radical opposition have largely been emptied of their political content, while simultaneously giving rise to new branches of, and approaches to, science and technology. While the more radical, or oppositional, voices have lost much of their influence, the more pragmatic and scientific voices have been given a range of new opportunities. Of course, this is not to say that there is no longer a radical environmental opposition, but I would contend that radicals and reformists have increasingly drifted apart from one another, and in most countries now work in different organizations, with little sense of a common, oppositional movement identity.
There has been, in other words, a fragmentation of what was, for a relatively short time, a social movement into a number of disparate bits and pieces. In the 1970s, environmentalism, throughout the industrialized world, stood for an alternative set of “knowledge interests,” involving both a fundamental political critique of modern technoscience’s attitude to nature, as well as an alternative organizational ideal - a democratic, or participatory ideal - for the development of knowledge. There was also a distinct form of collective learning that took place in the study circles and information activities of environmental movements, and a kind of grass-roots, or, what Ivan Illich termed a “convivial” form of engineering that went under the name of appropriate, or radical technology. The point is that, as a social movement, environmentalism managed to combine different kinds of interests into a central core identity, what Ron Eyerman and I have termed cognitive praxis, with both cosmological, technological and organizational dimensions.
The cosmology was, to a large extent, the translation of a scientific paradigm into a socio-economic world-view. The holistic concepts of systems ecology were transformed into political philosophies of social ecology; in the writings of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, for example, ecology was linked to a utopian political tradition, represented by Charles Fourier, Henry David Thoreau, and William Morris to inspire a new kind of liberatory “ecology of freedom”. For Bookchin, and for Arne Naess in Norway, and for many other movement intellectuals, ecology was not to be reduced to an instrumental rationality, to a control apparatus. An emancipatory, or deep ecology would rather be one in which scientific knowledge production would be selectively restructured according to an organismic ethic, rather than a mechanical logic.
Technology was to be developed under the general perspective that “small is beautiful”, and that large scale, environmentally destructive projects were to be opposed and stopped. At the same time, new contexts for education and experimentation and the diffusion of research were created in the form of movement workshops and, in Holland, for example, in the form of science shops, allowing activist groups to gain access to the scientific expertise at the universities.
I have earlier suggested that one of the key processes at work in the 1980s, which served to decompose, or break apart this integrative movement cognitive praxis into a disparate cluster of organizations and individuals, was a process of professionalization. The knowledge interests of the environmental movement were transformed into various kinds of professional expertise, which made it possible to incorporate parts of the movement into the established political culture, and shift at least some of the members of the movement from outsider to insider status. Some of the alternative technical projects proved commercially viable - biological agriculture, wind energy plants, waste recycling.
Some of the alternative visions were taken up by professional philosophers and politicians (and even Murray Bookchin got a university post), while the alternative contexts for knowledge production and dissemination either cleaned up their act and developed more sophisticated communication and information strategies or they eventually ran out of steam. There were both internal and external reasons for this professionalization process. In the course of the energy debates of the 1970s, the environmental movement had generated within its own ranks a new range of expert competences in energy planning, energy policy, alternative energy production, and so forth. As the intensity of the public debate over energy futures waned in most of the industrialized countries during the early 1980s, either through over-exposure or some kind of definitive parliamentary decision, these counter-experts thus found themselves in need of new sponsors to support their work. Some became professional consultants, working either in private consulting firms or in relation to the government, and some found jobs at non-governmental organizations, like Greenpeace, or the older, more established conservation societies. Others carved out niches in the media and the universities, creating new professional identities as environmental journalists, environmental and energy researchers. Still others moved into governmental and intergovernmental agencies, like the World Bank and the European Commission, to develop programs in energy efficiency and sustainable technology development.
What began to be noticeable in the mid-1980s, to a significant degree as a result of these professional outgrowths, or spin-offs, from the environmental movement, was a new kind of environmental policy agenda, the so-called global environmental agenda that focused on problems of biodiversity, climate change, and transborder pollution. These problems were, of course, identified by scientists and engineers as serious and urgent, particularly after the hole in the ozone layer was disclosed over Antarctica. It is, however, worth noting that most of these international environmental problems had been discussed at least since the 1940s by concerned scientists and nature-lovers, and, at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the global nature of environmental problems had been stressed by many scientific participants.
What had changed in the meantime was the character of the international political economy. By the mid 1980s, production, in many branches, had become increasingly globalized, with research carried out in one part of the world, development in another, and manufacture in still another. Individual firms were increasingly nodes in transnational corporate networks. Economic life had more and more come to be governed by international patterns of production and diffusion, and this globalization trend was further accentuated by developments in telecommunications and information technology. It became possible, and, in a few short years, common practice, to plan industrial operations on a global basis, and to shift operations from country to country depending on changes in market and financial conditions. There are, of course, many elements to this globalization that are open to dispute, and there is, to say the least, a lively discussion of what all this means. For environmentalism, and environmental science and technology policy, globalization has meant a shift in substantive focus - from the local and national to the global, when it comes to the issues to be dealt with - as well as a shift in location - from national policy-making bodies to intergovernmental and international organs, when it comes to agenda-setting, and, increasingly implementation of research programs, as well. In actual research practice, the new information technologies have meant a great deal, in terms of the kinds of observations that can be simulated, the kinds of models that can be constructed, and the kinds of calculations that can be made. The social construction of scientific facts has been shifted from a more or less direct interaction with the environment and its component parts, to an ever more abstract and aggregate meta-environment of atmospheric, hydrological and geological processes that cannot be directly observed or, for that matter, studied.
It can be suggested that what has made these new issues particularly interesting for the new cadres of environmental professionals that had grown out of the environmental movement, is that their solution requires something more than old fashioned science and technology. They require rather a new kind, or mode of knowledge production that combines various disciplinary perspectives. Most importantly, these new global environmental problems require a new kind of social or political expertise to complement the traditional kinds of scientific-technical expertise that had previously dominated environmental science and technology policy. In particular, there is need for an intermediary expertise between the global and the national, an expertise in the social, or, as it is often called, the human dimensions of global change. What this expertise often involves is a knowledge of particular methods of accounting, assessment, scenario building, forecasting, foresighting, prediction, and the like that seem to be called for in dealing with these extremely abstract and uncertain global problems. But it is also, at various levels and in various ways, an expertise in societal adjustment, environmental management, “life-cycle” analysis, risk assessment. It is what Ulrich Beck calls reflexive knowledge, a kind of knowledge that Beck sees as characteristic for the emerging risk society that, one might contend, the environmental movement first identified. Instead of calling it risk society, which, in essence, implies an acceptance of continuous and ever more serious risks in our complex societies, the environmental movement saw the construction of risks as the problem to be overcome, and those technologies - nuclear energy, automobiles, chemical fertilizers - that were too risky simply had to go. It was science-driven development itself that was the problem, because, as Barry Commoner showed already in 1971, that development favored artificial, synthetic techniques; an ecological society would be one that lived within nature’s limits, however difficult it was to define those limits in practicable - and economically profitable - terms. The ecological society - Ernest Callenbach’s “ecotopia” - proved to be a vision that could not be made amenable to a capitalist, market-based logic, at least not on a general, global scale. Risk society, on the other hand, can be lived with, and it can be incorporated into a capitalist economic system, but it requires new kinds of expertise in order to become sustainable.
How can we as social scientists continue our analysis of these transformations? Let me briefly present the project that I have just initiated within the program on targeted socio-economic research (TSER) of the European Commission. It might serve to inspire others among us who are culturally and critically minded to respond to the upcoming second call for proposals (deadline in January 1997). We call the project PESTO, since we are green and saucy; it stands for Public Participation and Environmental Science and Technology Policy Options.
What we want to investigate is how the transformation of the environmental movement that I have described above has affected environmental science and technology, both in terms of policy agendas, as well as in terms of project implementation and institutional restructuring. We conceptualize science policy as a cultural process, by which representatives of the concerned policy domains, or cultures, negotiate decisions, or non-decisions, of various kinds. In this perspective, the environmental movement can be said to represent a civic “policy culture”, and its influence can be evaluated by seeing how much its conceptions of policy measures, doctrines, and programs are taken into consideration in policy deliberations with the other policy cultures - economic, bureaucratic and academic. Science policy making can be thought as a field of cultural tensions, where the different actors try to impose their prirorities and policy principles onto the system as a whole.
It is interesting that, by becoming respectable, the environmental movement - renamed “non-governmental organizations” - has been allowed to take a more active part in policy-making. But that participation differs substantially from country to country. In Denmark and the Netherlands, for instance, technology assesssment is an officially established activity, and the general public is involved in a variety of ways in the new programs of sustainable science and technology. In Sweden, on the other hand, science policy remains largely in the hands of the experts, and public participation is much more limited and circumscribed. I would contend that policy makers, activists, and social scientists have a lot to learn from cross-national comparative research.
PESTO is divided into three main phases, or “work packages,” as they say in Brussels:
In the first work package, the project investigates the interface between the public and policy-makers, focusing on issues of representation and legitimation, and on the communication strategies of environmental organizations and relevant authorities.
The second work package will analyze the evolution of new innovative networks in environmental science and technology in the different countries. We will study the connections, or linkages, that are being established between universities and private companies, and the role that the public is allowed to play, or not play, in these emerging networks.
In the third work package, we will explore the transnational exchanges that are taking place in environmental science and technology policy. Here, we will examine how the new policy activities and programmes transcend national borders, especially in Europe.
PESTO thus focuses on how the “public”, in different countries and in different ways, participates in the new approaches in environmental science and technology policy. The aim of PESTO is to compare the reconstitution of environmental science and technology policy in eight European countries: Britain, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It is our contention that the involvement of the general public is crucial for the successful implementation of environmental science and technology policies, and that, in this regard, the countries of Europe have a great deal to learn from each other’s experiences. By systematically comparing what we term the cultural tensions in environmental science and technology policy making in a wide range of different countries, we hope to develop a better understanding of these important policy transformations.
What we hope to achieve in PESTO is an interactive process of social learning, both among the participants, but also with various participants in the networks that we study. We want to provide an opportunity for reflection and for the sharing of experiences across the European countries. We would also like to carve out a new kind of role for social science in the new discourse of sustainability, a more partisan role, in that we believe that the issue of participation is central to the value of the new environmental science and technology policies. And finally, we want to strengthen the comparative understanding of ecological modernization, by identifying, in a systematic manner, the national differences in policy making, network building and public participation.
Note: This paper was presented, in slightly different form, at a conference on Environment and Power, organized by the Center for Technology and Society at the University of Trondheim, October 30-31, 1996. For a more developed version of the argument, see my article in Risk, Environment, Modernity, edited by Scott Lash, Bron Szerzynski and Brian Wynne (Sage 1996).
Theme paper for a Conference in New York City, January 1998
As the university crosses traditional boundaries in developing new linkages to industry, it must devise formats to make its multiple purposes compatible with each other. The primary role of the university in relation to industry is through its educational activities that prepare graduates for industrial employment. The second academic focus of relations with industry builds upon the development of scientific research capabilities and the transfer to industry of economically relevant knowledge. Thirdly, the production of commercially relevant knowledge, either as an extension of basic research or by solving problems presented by industry, has been institutionalized through the creation of a series of boundary-spanning mechanisms (Etzkowitz, Webster, & Healy, 1997).
Within industry, questions are raised about what should be located within the firm, among firms, or between firms and other types of institutions, such as universities and government laboratories. Given market pressures, is there a role for the corporation in supporting basic research, or is this task best left to academia and government? What is the role of government given the perceived need for research in economic and regional development?
Thus, universities and industry are assuming tasks that were formerly the province of the other in the development of new technologies. We argue that a spiral model of innovation in terms of university-industry-government relations is required to capture the evolution of multiple linkages at different stages of the capitalization of knowledge (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz 1996; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 1997). In a knowledge-based economy, the distribution of research locations provides a focus of strategic opportunities for both research and policy-making.
The Triple Helix Model
Three institutional spheres (public, private, and academic) which formerly operated at arms’ length are increasingly working together, with a spiral pattern of linkages emerging at various stages of the innovation process, to form a “triple helix.” There are four dimensions to the development of the triple helix: the first is internal transformation in each of the helices, such as the development of lateral ties among companies through strategic alliances or changes in the resource base of university systems. The second is the influence of one helix upon another, for example, the role of the U.S. federal government in instituting an indirect industrial policy in the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 or of state governments in formulating policies and programs to encourage universities to establish industrial ties.
The third dimension is the creation of a new overlay of tri-lateral networks and organizations from the interactions among the three helices, established to generate new ideas and formats for high-tech development. This phenomenon is especially salient at the level of regional industrial clusters which formerly lacked a common organizational structure. These new arrangements typically arise under crisis conditions such as those induced by general economic depression or increased international competition. The fourth dimension of the helix model is a recursive effect of these exchanges among institutional spheres, both on the spirals from which they emerged and on the larger society. One such effect is on science itself, as a result of internal changes within academia, strengthened and diffused by government policy (Gibbons et al. 1994).
The incorporation of economic development into the mission of universities and the further integration of the knowledge infrastructure into systems of innovation are shaped differently in various countries. Institutional backgrounds and cultural traditions affect the future location of research. At the global level, however, we are witnessing a Second Academic Revolution: a reconfiguration of institutional boundaries and the introduction of an economic mission into the university system (Etzkowitz 1994).
The First Academic Revolution introduced new roles into academia, transforming professors from teachers of youth, who would not likely remain in academia, into researchers in disciplinary specialties as well (Jencks & Riesman 1968). In some European countries like France and Italy, this revolution began only recently. Research was located in an institute structure apart from the universities, while the latter were largely confined to a teaching mission.
Even in the U.S. the transition through the “Second Academic Revolution” is not complete. As awareness of the significance of research to economic development spreads, schools in less research intensive parts of the country, attempt to restructure themselves into research university, typically by beginning research centres focussing on topics relevant to the local economy. In older schools and at the level of the development of disciplines, we note a shift towards specialties like biotechnology, information sciences, new materials, etc. Corporations are structurally involved in this development of new knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 1997). Institutions like Cooperative Research Centers are nowadays the most rapidly increasing sector in the knowledge infrastructure (Turpin & Garrett-Jones 1997).
Nations, regions, and states are able to compete globally for the economic benefits of these new developments by changing their respective infrastructures (Porter 1990). The Triple Helix provides us with a model for mapping these new arrangements across regions, industrial sectors, disciplines, and technologies (Leydesdorff 1995). Under what conditions does collaboration provide new opportunities for strategic alliances, research centers, spin-off firms, and SMEs? What is the role of market forces, government policies, and technological restructuring? What is the potential of these emerging arrangements as new sources of employment?
Code sharing
Beyond intermediary linkages between different institutional spheres is the issue of emergent structures arising across spheres. As Europe moves toward the U.S. entrepreneurial academic model, some U.S. academics, supported by the NSF and state government science and technology programs, are attempting to create institute-based research structures in order to accomplish longer-term projects and multiple goals beyond the compass of individual research groups. Large facilities like Lincoln at MIT or JPL at Cal Tech were traditionally located apart from the university with their own staff, although there was always some connection in training of graduate students, etc. The new labs, often called Centers, are nowadays organized within the main campus (Betz 1996).
No single line of organizational development can be discerned internationally, except for an increasing tendency for R&D to be located in emergent structures that cross-cut traditional institutional spheres such as corporate, governmental, and academic laboratories. The new arrangements can be conceptualized as “code shares,” by analogy with the airline practice of sharing equipment, personnel, and routes among companies. Thus, an academic research group and a spin- off firm located outside the university may actually be operating in tandem as a coordinated virtual unit, despite their apparent separation. Note that “code sharing” is different from “cost sharing”: the regime of collaboration and differentiation has changed. Knowledge is no longer transferred, but co-developed.
While university-industry relations have been established on the basis of mutual complementarities, this older model assumes that each of the partners will assess the collaboration and negotiation in terms of its own code. For example, a university department has to balance its relations with relevant partners against teaching obligations, high- level publications, and other academic objectives. The industrial partner is interested in the transfer of insights in terms of strategic and operational profits from the perspective of the business, while government is expected to orchestrate, but not to intervene in this collaboration. Thus, each partner assesses the collaborative efforts in terms of its own institutional codification.
The development of the complex network of univeristy- industry-government relations is driven by a dialectic between functional differentiation of communications and institutional integration. As the institutional code itself becomes increasingly differentiated, each partner has to develop mechanisms for integration at the interfaces. University departments have developed specialized agencies for such transfer, but in the meantime the nature of the research enterprise itself has changed. Computer software can no longer be categorized in terms of “pure” and “applied” research (Kaghan and Barnett 1997); “biotechnology” is not a technology, but a science (McKelvey 1996).
Within academia, puzzle solving has nowadays become as important as truth finding. The quality of the communication and the validity of the knowledge claims is warranted by disciplinary control, while the system opens laterally in terms of the agendas that the various specialties are designed to address. Thus, universities take on some business roles: marketing knowledge, taking research into product development, and assisting in the formation of new firms. The recombination of elements from different sources has become a major challenge, leading to new developments.
This recombination can be computer supported, but the emphasis is on human agency for translating among codes into new arrangements (“puzzle solving”). As the new arrangements become codified in niches, they put pressure on the institutional layer to adapt (Freeman & Perez 1988). The institutional layer is functional for conflict resolution and decision making, but it generates its own bureaucratic pressures. A systematic “dis-organization” of institutional boundaries, however, has prevailed during the “post-modern” 1980s (Turpin & Garrett-Jones 1997). If the overall system is complex enough, institutions are able to innovate gradually toward the “knowledge intensive mode” (Gibbons et al. 1994).
In this transition the reflexive dynamics of government at various levels becomes crucial (Van den Belt & Rip 1987). Hierarchically organized institutions like those in the former Soviet Union may suffer catastrophic crises when coping with the uncertainties generated by a regime that flourishes on the basis of knowledgeable reorganizations of previous modes of communication, and at various intermediate levels.
Regime change
In contrast to a biological double helix, a triple helix is by nature unstable. It remains an emerging construct on top of the underlying communications. But as in a nested structure, its global stabilization feeds back onto the underlying communications to solve internal problems of differentiation at the interfaces. This complex system continuously reorganizes itself with reference to its past. Thus, the new regime rests on the bi-lateral and tri-lateral arrangements from which it emerges, and legitimates action in terms of rearranging functions in favour of further developmental possibilities.
These emerging possibilities are by definition not given. The unintended consequences of previous interactions, however, remain initially latent for the actors involved. The economic potentials have to be constructed reflexively, and in this context they are the subject of research options. Expectations can then be specified in the terms of codified, i.e., scientifically controlled, communications. Thus, knowledgeable reconstructions drive the knowledge-based economy in terms of expectations. The institutional basis of this system is itself a laboratory for testing expectations in terms of niches. Institutional adaptations are maintained or not, depending on their viability in the relevant environments.
The niches can be of different sizes: some reconstructions can be tested in a single test tube, while others require complex infrastructures like modern cities or specific regional developments. Tong (1996), for example, has pointed to niche management on China’s eastern coast aiming at picking up momentum from economic developments in the Pacific region. Thus, the size of research and the locus of an experiment may vary dramatically across disciplines, trades, and industries, and according to the specific organization of the interface between innovations and markets in a prevailing system of innovations.
Niches are constructs that build on specific complexities. Surplus value is generated in terms of interaction systems among institutions. The emerging code in the interactions feeds back on the underlying differentiations. Of course, this does not mean that the underlying institutions are abolished. Some may be in need of replacement, but in general the system adds complexity to itself in layers. New arrangements supplement the existing ones, so that the creative researcher is able to shift gears and thereby to draw upon existing code or on code that is shared in another context.
The analysis of knowledge-intensive action is contextual: events are generated in a distributed mode in the interaction among contexts. Accordingly, one can no longer analyze “research” in general; one can distinguish among “laboratory research”, “economic research”, “organizational innovation”, etc. As far as an emerging overlay can be (provisionally) stabilized, it is expected to develop its own sharing of code. In this way, different contexts are being created. Some of them will persist, while others will disintegrate. Competition among them is a dynamic function that includes the analysis of evolutionary life cycles (cf. Freeman & Perez 1988).
The Analysis
In summary, the analysis of the future location of research focusses on the contexts of research in terms of university facilities, industrial needs, and government policies. These contexts, however, cannot be considered as given; they are dynamic functions as well. The future location of research is expected to be found in the interaction among the different contexts. Each context selects according to its own codes; the triple helix builds on the negotiations and interactions in terms of reflexive codes that potentially emerge in the communications among the institutional actors.
The traditional selector, of course, is the market. However, price competition is no longer the only dynamic function at work. Thus, the new economics of science (Dasgupta & David 1994) are relevant for the analysis of the triple helix by focussing on product competition and innovation. Other analyses can inform us about historical contingencies in developments, about competitive advantages in strengths and weaknesses of the research potential of a region, a nation, or a corporation, and about deliberate policies to increase the knowledge-intensity of regions and/or their failure.
Contextual analysis is itself a well-known tradition in sociology. The sociology of science, for example, has distinguished between the level of disciplinary developments and the local context of a laboratory group. Scientific literature, for example, is evaluated at the field level, while local contingencies and informal communication prevail at the group level (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984). Research can be considered as the translation of the mixture of resources at the group and at the field level into new configurations, for example, by the publication of scientific results. Successful interactions are those which change the interacting constellations (Latour 1987).
In this conference, we wish to generalize contextual analysis for studying future locations of research. The observable events can be considered as functional to interactions between contexts, like the “code sharing” among aviation corporations. What is being shared? What is linked in an interaction among which contexts, and why? How are the events selected and provided with meaning from different perspectives, and how are these meanings adjusted in processes of negotiation? Can one specify the asymmetries and confluences in the relations, and can one identify the forces that stimulate integration into specific collaborations? How has research changed the institutional contexts from which it was generated? Are options visible along new dimensions of events that were initially unintended, but which allow us to specify a new dimension, i.e., potentially a new layer, using the evolutionary model?
During the past decade, the evolutionary model has pervaded our thinking about technology developments and its co- evolution with relevant contexts (Nelson 1994). We have become aware that developments can be “locked” into a sub-optimal state (David 1985); that network externalities can reinforce unpredictable developments (Arthur 1989), etc. In our opinion, it is urgent to take the next step: how can one analyze the events that have occurred from a perspective of hindsight, as specific instances of mutual shaping among ranges of events that could have occurred.
The evolutionary perspective requires a shift of focus: we no longer “follow the actors” along the time axis. The contingencies of the positive instances are analyzed in terms of the interacting dynamics among university science, industrial development, and government intervention. These selective contexts have to be specified on theoretical grounds. Then we can ask when the selections have reinforced one another. What can these case studies teach us about policy making and its (lack of) interaction with other social forces?
The central question
This conference focusses on the question of where the locations of research will emerge. The question is obviously relevant for higher education, since teachers wish to qualify students for jobs in the newly emerging configurations. Thus, the theme relates to human resource issues.
In general, human capital is expected to generate variation, since theorizing enables us to understand the translation and recombination among codes. By providing the communications with specific meaning, the codifications can be considered as selections. If the specificity can be stabilized in a niche, the initially latent dimension may gain momentum by repetition. Institutions are expected to adapt in varying degrees (Tong 1996).
Instances of new lines of research enable us to specify the evolutionary selections that have brought about these particular instances. The specification of the relevant codes can provide us with an expectation of future locations of research, since the latter are generated by the interactions among the former. The Conference This conference follows a first meeting in Amsterdam at which the Triple Helix model was discussed with a group of researchers from thirty countries (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 1997). Now we propose to extend the model to address policy issues, and to discuss its relationship to the relevant theoretical perspectives of economics, engineering, and science studies. The discussion will also include practitioners and policy analysts from these three spheres. We propose to commission a series of orienting papers as the basis for discussion. These will provide the basis of a volume of proceedings. Additionally, some of the papers submitted will be selected for a more specialized book. The conference itself is composed of plenary sessions, submitted paper sessions, and workshops. Additionally, panels of practitioners will be constituted from organizations like the European Union, state and regional organizations in the U.S., relevant industries, and spin-off companies.
REFERENCES
Abernathy, W. J., & Clark, K. B. (1985). “Innovation: Mapping the Winds of Creative Destruction,” Research Policy 14, 3-22.
Arthur, W. Brian (1989). “Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events,” Economic Journal 99, 116-31.
Betz, Frederick (1996), “Industry/University Centers for Connecting Industry to Science”, in: Ruhi Kaykayoglu and Okyay Kaynak (Editors), Proceedings of the International Conference of Technology Management: University/Industry/Government Collaboration, June 24-26 (Istanbul: Bogazici University), pages 1-5.
Dasgupta, Partha, & Paul A. David (1994). “Towards a new economics of science,” Research Policy 23, 487-522.
David, Paul A. (1985). “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review, 75, 332-7.
Etzkowitz, Henry (1994). “Academic-Industry Relations: A Sociological Paradigm for Economic Development.” Pp. 139-51 in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar (1994).
Etzkowitz, Henry, & Leydesdorff, Loet (Eds.) (1997a). Universities in the Global Knowledge Economy: A Co-evolution of University-Industry-Government Relations (London: Cassell Academic).
Etzkowitz, Henry, & Leydesdorff, Loet (Eds.) (1997b). “Science Policy Dimensions of the Triple Helix of University- Industry-Government Relations,” Special Issue of Science and Public Policy (forthcoming).
Etzkowitz, Henry, Webster, Andrew, & Healey, Peter (Eds.) (1997). Capitalizing Knowledge: The Growth of Academic-Industry Relations. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Freeman, Christopher, & Carlota Perez (1988), “Structural crisis of adjustment, business cycles and investment behaviour”, in: Giovanni Dosi et al. (editors), Technical change and economic theory (Pinter, London), pages 38-66.
Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, & Martin Trow (1994), The new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies (Sage, London).
Gilbert, G. Nigel, & Mulkay, Michael J. (1984). Opening Pandora’s Box. A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Jencks, C. & Riesman, D. (1968). The Academic Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Kaghan, William N., & Barnett, Gerald B. (1997). “The Desktop Model of Innovation in Digital Media,” in: Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff (1997a, forthcoming).
Latour, Bruno (1987). Science in Action (Milton Keynes: The Open University).
Leydesdorff, Loet (1995). The Challenge of Scientometrics: The development, measurement, and self-organization of scientific communications (Leiden: DSWO Press, Leiden University).
Leydesdorff, Loet, & Etzkowitz, Henry (1996). “Emergence of a Triple Helix of Univeristy-Industry-Government Relations”, Science and Public Policy (forthcoming).
Leydesdorff, Loet & Van den Besselaar, Peter (Eds.) (1994). Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New directions in technology studies (London: Pinter).
McKelvey, Maureen (1996), Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
Nelson, Richard R. (1994). “Economic Growth via the Co- evolution of Technology and Institutions.” Pp. 21-32 in: Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar (1994).
Porter, Michael E. (1990). The Competitive Advantage of Nations. London, etc.: Macmillan.
Tong, Jian (1996). “Reflections on Human Capital Theory and Niche Theory of Evolutionary Economics,” paper presented at the Triple Helix Conference, Amsterdam, January 1996.
Turpin, Tim, & Sam Garrett-Jones (1997). “Innovation Networks in Australia and China”, in: Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff (1997a, forthcoming).
Van den Belt, Henk & Rip, Arie (1987). “The Nelson-Winter- Dosi model and the synthetic dye chemistry.” Pp. 135-58 in: Wiebe Bijker et al. (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Is there a future for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge? Well, it all depends what you mean by Future, Sociology, Science, and Knowledge. Ho ho. Nearly a hundred and fifty people were drawn together by this question for a conference in London on Saturday 7 September (organised by Sally Wyatt and Tim Jordon here in Innovation Studies and Sociology, UEL), although we didn’t take a vote it seems reasonable to tentatively suggest the hypothesis that, given certain conditions, there is. So long as no-one insists on calling it by that name.
This is interesting.
Naming, the passing on of names, the assumption of names, and the attachment we have to those names seems significant. Proper Names are the sign of Property. Property supposes ownership. Belonging supposes a willingness to be owned.
On the top table at the opening of the conference we had the usual suspects as keynote speakers. The unifying theme of all the speeches was their difference from each other. For example, Keynote Lecture number one: Steve Woolgar was against Natural Realism. Keynote Lecture two, Barry Barnes was for Natural Realism, but against Essentialism. Keynote three: Sandra Harding, stressed her surprise at being invited, after all she was an Epistemologist - nothing to do with SSK. And Keynote number four: Wiebe Bijker said, we should pay our respects to our Epistomological roots, but move swiftly on and dedicate ourselves to the real matter at hand - the practical details of the Political dimension - i.e. change society.
Thus we can conclude that this community values difference, and that its members belong to different camps (either positively or negatively) Natural Realists, Epistemologists, Marxists, Not-natural-realists, Not-orthodox-marxists, Not-SSK.
So, the un-named (unnamable?) community values difference, and this value is firmly held, deeply entrenched, and faithfully honoured. Evidence? Each of the speakers and many of the listeners were pushed to the point of perplexity when someone seemed to be agreeing with them: `No no’, they replied, ‘you’ve misunderstood me’ etc until the difference was once more established, and disagreement reigned - at least at the level of talk.
And what other level might there be? Well it certainly seems to have some relationship to something in the body. Evidence? Red faces, and blustering fluster, and the calling of names. One point in a question session had some members hankering for a unity of feeling: they began speaking about past battles that SSK had participated in, they raised the spectre of old (and still active) enemies. Someone (I wouldn’t dream of saying who…) seemed to be suggesting that SSK would be ok if it could win over the likes of Lewis Wolpert to the cause… Tension rose at the prospect of such a union. Suddenly we all knew which side we were on. Evidence? - the gale of laughter that ripped through the room when someone (I wouldn’t dream of naming names) located Wolpert in a specific camp: he was a Prat. Well, why not, it unstuck the debate and enabled us to continue talking about how different we were from each other (safe in the knowledge that none of us were THAT different).
Have you, by the way, seen The Usual Suspects? That wonderful film with the wonderful Gabriel Byrne. If you saw it you might have noticed that it was impossible to make any sense of it on traditional who-dunnit kind of lines. Epistemologically speaking it caused confusion. Morally, however, it made sense when you put the cripple in the place of the devil and thought about redemption and god (buy me a beer and I’ll explain it to you - in the meantime it all depends upon realising that the Devil is ultimately in the Service of God). I mention it here because god and the good was one way of making sense conhere with reference to that Saturday meeting in September. We were engaged in asking about the right the good and the true, avoiding a mono-theic order.
Names. Now, what is this business about names, the level of talk, the relationship of bodies - be they bodies of knowledge, insitutions, men, or women - Property and ownership? Or put it another way, how do you be part of a community that refuses a common name and a common figure. Is it possible to name oneself (auto-nomie) without reference to ownership and property? (clue: no), or is this a question about the difference between an-archy and poly-archy? (clue: yes). Last night I noticed a programme on telly which showed some anthropologists talking about a society of apes. The focus was on what happens to baby apes when their fatherhood is in question. First of all we were invited to focus on what this means to the perplexed possible father. He seemed to realise that said infant was not a consequence of his productivity, so he killed the offending product. And then we were invited to see it from the perspective of the other female apes in the society. They killed it too. (There are enough of these illegitimate offspring to make it possible for the whole community to join in the ritual.) Oh yes, and then they ate it. Thus we can conclude, that it is impossible to know some pretty important things in the absolute (vis: the patronage of a baby ape), and that the inability to decide this and to attribute a name (a patro-nym) is cause for considerable concern. The implication of the programme (it seemed to me) was that it mattered quite a bit what one did with the concern once it was unleashed.
If we allow the idea of Difference to be the fundamental defining point of our community (and this phrase implies both ownership and belongingness) then it raises some interesting questions about how to belong. The notes I took as Steve Woolgar spoke are peppered with suggestions on this topic: SSK is provocation not position'.The purpose of reflexivity is modesty’. Reflexivity avoids arrogance'.We must avoid the dangers of complacency’ (cf Ethnomethodology which has been accused of moving out to the suburbs’). So far so good. `The linear model is deeply entrenched, needs uprooting, exorcising.’ I personally have a few problems with this last one.
The conference itself was held at The Tavistock Institute in North London, in a room with glorious views over the vast spread of this great and wonderful city (ok, so my prejudice is on view - better out than in say I). It was great to be in a conference venue that admitted so openly to the outside world, and invited it in so unreservedly. I wonder if this is coincidental to the owner of the place? The Tavistock Insitute is a psychoanalytical clinic, and invites parts of the world in that other institutions prefer to leave outside. I wonder whether we - whatever banner we each choose to rally under - have the technical capacity (and, of course, I am using technical in the new post-SSK sense of the word, that is the pre-modern) to accommodate such differences as there are in the world, or whether we are in grave danger of adopting the more forthright strategy of our friends the apes. Watch this space.