Science and technology, we all know, are constructed in laboratories, and so it is right and fitting that we in the STS community preoccupy ourselves with those haunts. Yet periodically, when suffering snow-blindness from staring at men in dazzling white coats, I close my eyes and fantasize about another planet: Planet XI. Like Earth, Planet XI is a place in which knowledge and technical artifacts are socially constructed, but in other respects it is utterly bizarre and exotic.
For example, on Planet XI a startling amount of knowledge about how the world works is produced by social groups comprising non-experts — that is, ordinary women and men. Sometimes they are organized according to their occupations (a little bit like our trade unions), sometimes according to their social concerns (like our environmental or women’s groups), and sometimes according to where they live (like our community and grassroots organizations).
Some of these groups produce knowledge entirely by themselves. For instance, if they fear that they have been poisoned by polluted water, they conduct their own surveys and empirical examinations to find out whether, how, and why. Farfetched as this sounds, they are able to do this without the benefit of university educations, research grants, or laboratory facilities.
But in other cases they produce knowledge in close collaboration with professionally trained researchers. Yes, it is hard to believe that there could be a place where men and women with professional credentials would even talk, much less cooperate actively, with others less educated. But on Planet XI, I insist, it is so. For instance, in one nation on Planet XI every university has established a set of research centers whose sole purpose is to facilitate studies conducted with or for popular organizations. Thus on Planet XI, understanding how knowledge is socially constructed sometimes entails studying laboratories, but it also means spending time with all kinds of women and men in all kinds of social settings. On Planet XI, knowledge creation knows no sharp geographic, class or other social boundaries.
Even on Earth, science and technology are not, of course, autonomous enterprises; they are strongly influenced, for example, by government policies. But since the only kinds of people who significantly influence those policies are the same people who otherwise wear white coats and busy themselves with laboratory inscription devices, studying science policymaking on Earth hardly requires shifting one’s gaze from the laboratory’s customary denizens. Thus it is both a relief from tedium — and yet also a bit shocking — that on Planet XI many other kinds of people influence science and technology policymaking.
For instance, there is another nation on Planet XI that, realizing that knowledge and know-how are not only socially constructed but also have profound social repercussions, convenes panels of laypeople — that’s right, everyday folks from all walks of life, including school teachers, homemakers and street sweepers — to publicly interrogate men and women in white coats and then reach their own policy conclusions. These lay panelists’ judgements have influenced popular political deliberations, business decisions, and government policies.
You might well imagine that this process is not only costly but leads to ludicrously ill-informed judgements. But a broad cross-section of the nation’s members — including its political and business leaders — claim that these irrational participatory methods actually result in greater social justice and even in real economies. This occurs, according to them, because there is relatively little costly opposition to innovation, insofar as a wide range of social concerns are reasonably well reflected in prior R&D and policy decisions.
In several nations on Planet XI, programs have begun to be established through which workers and consumers can even participate directly in designing alternative technologies better adapted to their life circumstances and aspirations. Workers, for instance, have consistently demonstrated both an interest and impressive capabilities in helping to devise production technologies that are not only efficient but also maintain safe, high wage, high skill jobs, protect the environment, and result in high quality products or services.
Many university students on Planet XI pursue educations and careers no different from the conventional student trajectories familiar on Planet Earth. But others choose to become actively engaged in the preceding participatory activities as an integral aspect of their studies. For instance, one Planet XI university has a community research center located within its academic Technology & Society Program. The center is staffed by STS professors, who also teach courses on participatory research and on participatory approaches to technological design.
Students who take these courses receive credit for conducting participatory community research projects. Their projects, in turn, influence the university to adopt new courses that reflect community concerns (such as sustainable economic development) and to establish new, socially oriented, interdisciplinary research programs that include faculty from many different departments and programs throughout the university. This university’s STS professors themselves hold graduate degrees in either natural science, engineering or social science — but disciplinary credentials turn out to be of secondary importance, because over time all the professors have become generally familiar with one another’s disciplines.
To read the mainstream STS literature currently being produced back home on Earth, one would have to conclude that Planet XI exists only in my fevered imagination. But actually, Planet XI is a real place. (In fact, it is the third planet out from the sun at the center of our own solar system.) I just returned from a brief trip to two of the nations on Planet XI; they are named “Denmark” and “the Netherlands.”
For instance, this past May 9th I was privileged to deliver a plenary address to the national meeting of the Dutch “science shops”. The meeting was attended by staff from the Netherlands’ 50 university-based community research centers, which together produce more than 1,000 studies each year in response to requests from community groups, trade unions, public-interest organizations, and local governments. [1] Other science shops, or related endeavors (not always based in universities), now exist in many other nations, including Denmark, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Canada, and the U.S. — although the Dutch system is the oldest and mostly highly evolved. In the developing world there is a somewhat analogous international network of indigenous knowledge resource centers; its newsletter is published in The Hague. [2]
I also met with staff from Teknologi-Rådet (the Danish Board of Technology), who since 1987 have conducted a dozen “consensus conferences” in which lay panelists become intensively informed on selected topics in science and technology policy and then, after participating in a public forum, announce their judgments at national press conferences that are attended by members of Parliament.[3]
I spent a day with several professors at Århus University, who are among the world’s leading practitioners of participatory technological design.[4] I was hosted for another day at the Danish Technological University in Lyngby, where indeed there is an 11-year old science shop located within an STS program and staffed by Professors Michael Søgaard Jorgensen and Børge Lorentzen.
And so one comes naturally to the question of why these, as well as other real-life examples that seemingly represent an important thrust toward democratizing science and technology, are so little considered within the conventional STS literature. The first Danish consensus conference was held in 1987, but the main STS journals, such as Science, Technology & Human Values and Social Studies of Science, have not discussed these procedures. How do the reports produced by Danish lay panels compare substantively with those produced by conventional technocratic approaches to technology assessment? Is their social and political impact typically greater or less? The bulk of the STS community has apparently not found such questions of interest.
During the mid-1980s Loet Leydesdorff and colleagues published several illuminating studies of the main science shop at the University of Amsterdam. [5] But at the time there were already about a dozen other science shops scattered throughout the Netherlands. What of them? Indeed, since that time the number of Dutch science shops has quadrupled, but apparently no one in the STS community has found this vibrant effort to democratize university research capabilities worthy of serious attention. In fact, when the very shop that Leydesdorff et al. studied was recently shut down, ostensibly owing to university budget constraints, did a single person from the STS community know, care, or do anything to try to help?
How do the four dozen remaining Dutch science shops vary from one another? How are participating students’ career decisions affected? Do the shops appreciably influence faculty research programs? What is the social impact of the shops’ research? How does their social utility and cost efficacy compare with that of conventional research systems? How do science shops in various countries reflect the different circumstances of their origin? Could science shops and the popular constituencies they serve evolve into a grassroots foundation for challenging other, non-democratic science and technology institutions? Is the Internet permitting transnational collaborations among science shops to emerge?
No one knows the answer to these and a hundred other such questions, for the simple reason that no one has asked them. The answers would not merely be of academic interest; they could help provide a basis for maintaining and greatly extending the practice of community-based research. (In the U.S. I have argued that a “National Community Research Network” ought, in principle, to supplant our vast national laboratory system, which includes over 700 labs spending more than U.S. $20 billion in tax dollars annually, largely as an anachronistic holdover from World War II and the Cold War.)
The pioneering anthologies on participatory action research have all been published by Third World activists or by social change-oriented sociologists, not by members of the STS community. [6] Likewise, the pioneering anthologies on participatory design in the workplace were compiled by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, an activist group, not an STS organization. [7] The latter anthologies are extremely useful, but other questions remain to be asked. For instance, if workers and users should participate in technological design, what about affected non-users? What are the cultural, institutional, and legal barriers to participatory design, and what types of political strategies might be used to soften them? [8]
Several years ago I noted that (at least in the U.S., with which I am most familiar) a majority of new STS graduate students arrive each year motivated primarily by awareness of some particular deep social problem involving science or technology. [9] They want to study that problem, and to contribute constructively and actively toward addressing one or another real social ill. Do our current STS programs nurture that eminently worthy desire? For the most part, no. These admirably motivated students are coopted into courses and research programs whose inadvertent (?) thrust is to remake their social commitment into a commitment to largely idle scholarship instead. This is good for academic careers, perhaps, but not for society. STS — as a codified profession, field or discipline — is now near-perfectly accomplishing just what Foucault claimed disciplines normally do: producing docile utile bodies.
Similarly, the STS community’s recent, intense preoccupation with establishing that technologies are contingent social products (a theoretical point that was actually pretty well established in the 1970s by social historians of technology and by appropriate technology practitioners) has meant that almost no one in the STS community is studying the other half of the coin: particular technologies and technological complexes specific social consequences. The relative inattention to consequences has been noted, for instance, by sociologist of telephony Claude Fischer, diffusion theorist Everett Rogers, and urban infrastructural historian Christine Rosen. [10] The embarrassing truth is that when I want to learn about the social consequences of emerging technologies, I do better canvassing human interest stories by New York Times reporters than reading anything in the leading STS journals. Recently in the U.S., the most influential scholarly claims about the social and political implications of technology have been made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who never cites any STS literature and has never published in our journals.[11]
A few others in the STS community have called attention to various expressions of depoliticization within our field — famously symbolized by the recent the shift in meaning of “STS” from “science, technology & society” to “science & technology studies” — but little has yet changed as a result of these critiques. [12]
So, why is STS relegating overt attention to democratizing science and technology to a back burner? One obvious hypothesis is that such attention would directly challenge current social power relations and so risk currying disfavor within the corridors of power, including those that provide funding. Servants of power are rewarded in our societies; challengers are frequently punished.
This hypothesis is unfashionably straightforward and simple, but there is also some evidence to support it. For example, two of the most gifted and inspiring STS professors with whom I studied as a beginning graduate student in the 1970s were David Noble and Langdon Winner; both were politically engaged, and both were, not coincidentally, denied tenure by MIT. Did these spectacularly unjust and irrational decisions function as early warning shots across the bow, teaching other aspiring STS scholars the career risks they might run if they didn’t depoliticize their research and teaching programs?
Perhaps one way to start reversing this socially damaging climatic chilling within our field would be for socially concerned STS professors — or, better yet, the leading STS professional societies — to establish standby mechanisms for quickly mobilizing external support to colleagues whose political commitments are jeopardizing their careers. We could also establish prizes to recognize and reward socially engaged research and teaching.
One of the interesting features of the studies conducted by science shops is that normally projects are never initiated unless there is an organized social group committed to utilizing the research results within some sort of emancipatory social practice. It seems today as though most STS research is only conducted under exactly the opposite conditions; that is, only when there is clearly no risk at all that any progressive social group will make constructive use of the results.
NOTES
Richard E. Sclove, “Putting Science to Work in Communities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 41, no. 29 (31 March 1995), pp. B1-B3.
Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor is published by the Center for International Research and Advisory Networks (CIRAN), P.O. Box 29777, 2502 LT The Hague, Netherlands, e-mail .
Richard E. Sclove, “Town Meetings on Technology,” Technology Review, forthcoming July 1996; Simon Joss and John Durant, eds., Public Participation in Science: The Role of Consensus Conferences in Europe (London: Science Museum, 1995).
See, for example, Computers in Context: Joining Forces in Design, Third Decennial Conference Proceedings, rhus, Denmark, August 14-18, 1995 (Århus: Dept. of Computer Science, Århus University, 1995).
E.g., Loet Leydesdorff and Peter Van den Besselaar, “What We Have Learned From the Amsterdam Science Shop,” in The Social Direction of the Public Sciences: Causes and Consequences of Co-operation Between Scientists and Non-Scientific Groups, eds. S. Blume et al. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. 135-160; Rolf Zaal and Loet Leydesdorff, “Amsterdam Science Shop and Its Influence on University Research: The Effects of Ten Years of Dealing with Non-Academic Questions,” Science and Public Policy, 14, no. 6 (Dec. 1987), pp. 310-316.
E.g., Orlando Fals-Borda and Muhammad Anisur Rahman, Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action-Research (New York: Apex Press, 1991); Peter Park, et al., eds., Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993).
E.g., Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, eds., Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993); Randall Trigg, et al., eds., PDC ‘94: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (Palo Alto: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 1994).
Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1995), esp. chap. 11; and ke Sandberg, et al., Technological Change and Co-Determination in Sweden (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1992).
Richard E. Sclove, “Soul-Searching: What About STS Activism?,” Technoscience, 6, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 12-13.
Ibid.; and Christine Meisner Rosen, Book review of “The City and Technology,” edited by Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr, Technology and Culture, 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1989), pp. 1070-1072; Claude S. Fischer, “Understanding Technology: An Agenda,” Book review of “The Social Construction of Technological Systems,” edited by Wiebe Bijker, et al., Science, 238 (20 Nov. 1987), pp. 1152-1153; Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (3rd ed., New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 371-379.
E.g., Robert D. Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect, no. 24 (Winter 1996), pp. 34-50.
See, for example, three 1993 articles in Science, Technology & Human Values: Brian Martin, “The Critique of Science Becomes Academic,” vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring), pp. 247-259; Susan E. Cozzens, “Whose Movement? STS and Social Justice,” vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer), pp. 275-277; Langdon Winner, “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology,” vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer), pp. 362-78; and also Carl Mitcham’s review of “The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies” in the Lehigh University newsletter Science, Technology & Society, no. 106 (Winter 1995), pp. 2-4.
Richard E. Sclove is the author of Democracy and Technology (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1995). He directs the Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization commited to making science and technology responsive to democratically decided social and environmental concerns. The Loka Institute manages several action-oriented Internet discussion lists, including FASTnet (the Federation of Activists on Science & Technology Network). Another current Loka project is working to establish a National Community Research Network in the U.S., modeled partly on the Dutch science shop system; the Institute’s “scishops” Internet listserv is dedicated to advancing this endeavor. The Loka Institute, P.O. Box 355, Amherst, MA 01004, USA; Tel. +(413) 253-2828; Fax +(413) 253-4942; E-mail Loka@amherst.edu; World Wide Web http://www.amherst.edu/~loka.