Governing Technoscience in Society: Tracing the Dialectics of Enthusiasm, Ambivalence, and Adjustment

Abstract

By embracing the performative logic of technoscience, state policy makers are reimagining the relations among science, technology and society, in the process creating both practical and symbolic shifts in governance. These shifts—including possibilities for more deliberative and interactive roles for scientists, social scientists, and public citizens—are themselves situated within a technoscientific frame: they potentially open up more distributed and diverse opportunities for participation in the social processes that shape technological emergence, even as they organize such participatory roles within more broadly coordinated attempts at governmental control and frame them in terms of a state-sponsored imaginary of collectivized innovation and sociability. Using the case of the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the United States, this chapter reflects on the interplay of enthusiasm and ambivalence that led to an increasing acknowledgement of the role social sciences can play in the performance of technoscientific processes. While this development can be seen as an opportunity for distributive and democratic governance of technoscience, it also intensifies technosciencesociety entanglements.