An ironic reflection by John Ziman

Arie has fitted the key in the lock and tumed it boldly; but the gate needs to be opened wide. We should indeed make a conscious effort to unblock the pathways between science and technology studies and the obscure objects of our attentions. He is right in suggesting that the S&T are being re-integrated and linked more closely with society at large, but that has not made scientists and technologists significantly more knowledgeable about the nature of their work. Oh yes, they have learnt to parry Popperian falsifications with Kuhnian paradigms, but remain as naive as ever in their self analyses. I am a very bad ‘example’ of a reflexive practitioner. Who else was he thinking of? I gave up `practising’ natural science 25 years ago to devote myself fully to STS. The irony here is that I would count myself now with Arie, David Edge, and many other prominent members of our Association, who moved out of science and found their true intellectual home in this field.

Yet I have deep sympathy with the S&T worthies trying desperately to cope with the immoderate demands of society. With only the anecdotal tradition of the academic ethos to guide them, they are improvising erratically at every level of policy. Unfortunately, as Arie points out, the microsociological bias of STS has provided the policy-makers with no new insights about the social structures that they are expected to reform. They know that major changes are inevitable, but they naturally reject advice from scholars who seem intent only on debunking their cherished institutions, practices, and norms. This may be a misreading of the motives of STS experts. Yet even the established social sciences can find little policy guidance in research that mainly demonstrates the logical contradictions and human fallibilities embodied in all S&T - as they are in all forms of social action. Such findings are not only shallow and trite: they are as misguided and offensive as the fabled ethnographer’s report: “Manners none: customs beastly”.

Casting an empathic sociological eye on the manners and customs of S&T folk does not mean going native. Research commissioned by bemused policymakers to answer their own questions throws no light forward into a new era. What is now needed is detailed but independent study of S&T as a peculiar social institution in its own right, with particular attention to the features that differentiate it from other institutions of a similar kind. Those features are not uniquely purposeful, or uniquely successful in achieving these purposes, but they are seen as distinctive by those who are involved with them - including STS scholars themselves when they don their own academic robes.

There is a genuine intellectuel challenge in trying to understand a number of complex practices, such as the peer review of project proposais, that have evolved in and around S&T. These practices are shaped by purposes that are larger than the competing personal interests of those who are caught up in them. The actors themselves are often quite aware of these purposes, but lack the sociological insight required to articulate and explicate them. These could be ‘meso’ and ‘middle range’ rather than ‘macro’ or ‘long-term’ studies, and do not necessarily involve research on a heroic scale. What is important is that their findings should indeed be `named’ - that is, translated into concepts that ordinary scientists and technologists can grasp for themselves and incorporate into their reflexive and constructive practices.

Twenty-five years ago, S&T were carrying all before them. A critical modem mission for STS was appropriate. Nowadays, the whole scientific enterprise is at risk of being taken over by much grosser powers. Ironically, we should now be re-orienting STS towards a postmodem mission of helping S&T to reinvent themselves.

STS: Constructing the Client by Les Levidow

‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’

It is right to ask the question, ‘What kind of engagement should STS have?’, rather than assume that it could be neutral. Better yet, we could ask, `What kind of commitment is implied by a particular conceptual framework and terminology?’ In this regard, Arie Rip’s article begs crucial questions or even forecloses them. Here I briefly pose three such questions:

1)Where and what is the ‘constructive’? Often technological innovations encounter political disputes over how society should define the problem which is to be solved. This is because the supposed solution pre-empts the problem-definition, by imposing an implicit model of social relations, human needs, nature, etc. Some CTA approaches have left open these issues for democratic debate among diverse social forces. In Arie Rip’s article, however, such antagonisms disappear; they become flattened into mere dysfunctions, to be avoided through better planning. The task of ‘good’ technology becomes a matter of how to optimize the engineering design for intended users, and how to avoid negative external `impacts’.

2)Whose problems shall STS adopt? Yes, for example, biotechnology faces legitimation problems, which in turn lead innovators to anticipate and shape public attitudes. STS could respond in various ways: we could treat the legitimation problem as a dysfunctional obstacle for policymakers to overcome, or as an opportunity for critics to exploit, or as a topic for supposedly neutral study, etc. When Arie Rip advocates that we identify with ‘the problem of the client’, the implicit clients are high-level policymakers (who were the explicit clients in his Budapest talk). Who shall be the clients for our ‘professional services’? Can a particular STS framework serve all actors equally? Indeed, how shall STS construct `the client?

3) Who will define ‘value added’? Further to the biotechnology example above, industrialists have been developing ‘value-added genetics’, whereby they anticipate the market value of genetic ‘properties’ in order to set their R&D priorites. By analogy, if we are to promote STS as ‘value-added knowledge’, or even to use such terminology, then who decides what kind of analysis is valuable? Who calls the tune? Shall the pipers compose their tune in advance as a commodity?

Anticipating and Intervening by Andrew Barry Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

The topic of time used to preoccupy historians and philosophers of science. When did modern science begin? What stages did it progress through? When and how did a ‘scientific revolution’ occur? Did science progress steadily through time or was it transformed in a series of radical epistemological breaks? And will scientific progress ever end?

As Arie Rip reminds us a concern with time and, in particular, the ‘long term’ has not marked recent work in science and technology studies. Studies in the sociology of science have, as he notes, been much better at micro-analysis than in tracing long-term transformations. Sociologists of science have sought to situate knowledge production, but the situations that they have analysed have not been temporal but spatial. On the one hand, the sociology of scientific knowledge has been preoccupied with the peculiar spatial locale of the laboratory: its instruments, skills, visual displays, architecture and so on. On the other hand, both economists and sociologists of innovation have emphasised how difficult it is to translate the ‘results’ of laboratory work into the rather different spaces of the outside world. The full implications of this spatial shift in the history and sociology of science have probably yet to be realised.

But if the ‘new’ science and technology studies has led us to recognise the importance of the spatiality of science, what about its temporality? Arie Rip’s paper suggests that we need to rethink the relation between science and time as well or as, he puts it “we should turn to the macro and the long-term again, but with the benefit of the detour through the micro”. In brief, science and technology studies has lost a sense of history.

There is a contemporary political context to this need to consider the question of time. As the paper argues, ‘science and technology’ are no longer granted the autonomy they once were. Instead they are surrounded by an array of institutional and technological mediations: technology assessment and foresight, industry-academic links, research evaluation studies, framework programmes and ethics committees. Rip himself makes the importance of time clear in discussing the notion of Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA). The development of CTA, he notes, involves a significant shift away from the assessment of the past - “fully articulated technologies” to the anticipation of future possibilities and dangers. In my own study of recent European science policy, I observed how the relation between the temporality of technological innovation and the temporality of politics had become an important focus for political and intellectual debate within the European commission. Was it desirable, commission officials asked, to carry out an evaluation study before the start of a research programme? Could the European Commission have a particular role to play in developing a long term strategy for European science and technology policy? What role could prospective studies of science and technology play in informing or in intervening in the political process? And even if it were no langer possible to forecast the future was it nonetheless possible to anticipate what might happen?

In investigating the ‘long term’ we can no longer return to the old models of the history and philosophy of science, just as we cannot return to a Hegelian model of historical change. As Bruno Latour has argued, the traditional categories of the long term in the history of science (such as ‘revolution’, and ‘progress’) need to be understood not as analytical concepts but as tools with which actors have intervened in the historical process.1 Today ideas of revolution may have gone out of fashion but, as Rip points out, concepts such as `path dependency’, ‘co-production’ and ‘paradigm’ are used increasingly by practitioners including, I would add, European Commission officials. His paper suggests that there is a complex route between the way notions of time are employed in science policy and the changing articulation of time in economic and social studies of science. This does not mean that ‘long term’ studies are impossible, but it does mean that analysts need to recognise the significance of intellectual work in defining and intervening in the process of historical change.

Note:

1. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 40.