Diverging Perceptions of Hazards and Risks
Review of Misunderstanding science? The public reconstruction of science and technology edited by Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne. Cambridge University Press. 1996. Cambridge. ISBN 0 521 43268 5
The debate about whether and to what extent the public misunderstands science has a long history. Part of that debate relates to what Harry Otway termed ‘the social construction of ignorance’ and part, for policy makers, relates to increasingly beleaguered industries and companies who, fearing threats to sales, production and production processes, present public worries about the science and its application as ill-informed and inaccurate.
This book draws primarily on qualitative data and the ethnographic studies are used explicitly to offer an important conceptualisation of the public understanding of science for the reader. The text brings together the findings of a UK research council programme on the public understanding of science and runs the gamut of such subjects as biotechnology, reproductive medicine, the role of museums in ‘authorising science’, scientific activity on a small Island ( the Isle of Man), environmental and occupational hazards on sheep farms and in industrial cities. The relevant or current theoretical underpinning to the wider debate is effectively set in the context of the case studies.
In a country which has produced a large share of so called ‘scares’ about the application and use of science and technology, the topics have particular relevance. The book also focuses on ‘the operation of science in everyday situations’ and therefore covers a diverse range of occasionally well worn topics providing new insights and coherent themes for their exploration. Indeed a central and very valuable observation is, as Irwin and Wynne, note that “the ‘local’ machinations around science as analysed in this collection are of much wider significance than the particular local context in which they are manifested”.
There has been fierce debate in the UK between some scientists and several of the social scientists who contribute to this book about the role of science and the social influences which work upon it. In that sense perhaps the book is ‘quaintly’ British not only because most topics are based on UK experiences but also because elsewhere in Western Europe, social influences on science appear to be more readily acknowledged. The book draws primarily on European social theory and, with a few exceptions - Nelkin and Jasanoff - tends to neglect the important seam of work on public involvement in science, risk perception and communication and scientific controversy generated by researchers on risk at Carnegie-Mellon and on lay perceptions and public actions on pollution by researchers at Brown University, Harvard and Boston University. This is a pity and on occasions detracts from the analysis despite the avowed aim of the authors to explore “the ‘local’ and ‘the cosmopolitan’ in the ‘micro-social’ research presented here”.
There may also be some value in texts like this briefly exploring the impact of education outside the museums setting and the lack of a Freedom of Information Act on the type of public reconstructions of science which occur in the UK as distinct from other countries: two topics highly pertinent to the way the public may reconstruct and assess science and technology. The authors, however, cover a lot of very useful ground in a slim volume. Future volumes may follow to plug some of the gaps?
The ‘social framing of science’ as well as the “role of science in ‘framing’ public debate” are central themes of the book. The need for scientists to reach the public and for the public to comprehend scientific information and its limits are basic requirements for informed decision-making in any society. To what extent the scientific community needs to detail and explain its work is problematic as indeed is the extent that the public need to understand the details. For instance, the screening and selecting process of what data and mechanisms explain hazards and risk from hazards in the field of public health? Does the ‘public’ need to understand basic physics and meteorology to make sense of global warming: probably not.
Most recent examples in the UK, which the book touches upon but does not look at in detail - partly because the controversy and the ‘facts’ surrounding it are evolving all the time - is the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) problem/’scare’. The book nicely catches, with several of its case studies, what the authors describe as the ‘diverse, shifting and often diverging categories’ of both ” ‘science’ and the ‘general public’ “. This example has revealed the inability of some scientists - and the book rightly notes the lack of homogeneity of scientists’ views as much as ‘the public’s’ - in government service, in research institutes, in industry and in academia - to reach the public. Part of the scientists’ problem has been that they do not understand themselves the science or acknowledge the hypotheses which explain BSE. Part of the problem has been that the response to incomplete knowledge and challenges to established theories and knowledge has led to ‘knee jerk’ reactions by scientists which assert absolute safety without explanation. Such assertions tend to confirm public scepticism about scientists.
The book poses a number of central and ‘common analytical questions’ about public understanding of science. These include what people understand by science and scientific expertise, to whom do the public turn for technical information and advice and then how do the public select, evaluate and use the information so gleaned. Quite critical to these questions for the authors is how the public relate the scientific advice to their own experiences. This may be seen as participatory research or lay or community epidemiology developed in the USA and Africa and described in the 1980s but somewhat neglected in Europe outside Scandinavia, terms the authors surprisingly do not use although several of their case studies relate to this approach.
Several of the studies - especially those on sheep farmers in the English Lake District affected by pollution from Chernobyl, communities living near industrial hazards in northern cities, islander views of science - provide rich data and combine such data with apt theoretical underpinning. The chapters which look at organisations per se and some of the wider issues in overviews rather than the more detailed ‘fieldwork’, a term which is a misnomer for the accounts offered in one or two chapters prove more problematic and perhaps reveal some of the snags and pitfalls which the public themselves experience in dealing with scientists. These chapters may also suffer because the volume totals only 225 pages and hence contributions always run the risk of being too brief and compressed in places.
For instance, the chapter on environmental organisations and their use of science reviews a wealth of literature which has of course been funneled, filtered and, in some instances distorted before it reaches the analyst: caveat emptor! The reference to the Alar story states that the ‘media publicity overrode the processes of technical debate, ensuring that only [the environmental group] assessments of risk counted’. A more detailed study of this episode would show that the technical debate and one set of processes had been going on for many years before the media story broke and that the biggest difference at the end of the day were those between the industry producing the chemical and the US Government agencies.
The Alar story is an example of a constricted scientific debate and more an example of what earlier commentators in the book identify as misperceptions of knowledge but in this case the misperceptions are by the analysts themselves. The concept of ‘a technical debate’ harks back to the idea of ‘pure science’ with the testing of hypotheses and unequivocal data production whereas the Alar story really illustrates the availability of ‘a greater plurality of sources’ in which a relatively well informed ‘public’ succeeded in forcing through a public health precautionary policy. The myth now presented by industry and EPA critics is that the public misunderstood the science because of media distortion. In this particular instance, the author compresses the story, fails to identify distorting influences from industry and its own scientific lobby and hence misinterprets the role of ‘the public’. This is a minor criticism in a book which is generally well researched but probably under-referenced.
Irwin and Wynne conclude that “useful scientific knowledge needs to be reflexive and self-aware rather than dismissive of (such) social and epistemological concerns as irrelevant and ‘soft’. If science is to work with rather than against public groups ( or simply be ignored by them), then usefulness’ and ‘self-reflexivity’ must form part of the same social and institutional process”. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands such a statement would probably be a truism for some science, technology and health professionals: in the UK it most certainly is not.
This book finishes with a brief consideration of the practical and policy implications of their work. The role of ‘learning systems’ based on science shops, trade unions and other non-governmental community and environmental organisations in making the link between science and ‘practice’ in the public arena is viewed as central to this process.
The book is well worth obtaining and will provide both an insight into the nature and direction of the UK debate on the public understanding of science and rich case study material.