Abstract
Conventional analysis of science policy or the management of science pays little or no attention to the public dimension, in terms of public reactions to science and technology. There is a striking polarisation between the ‘policy for science’ interest in organising and directing science for national or industrial economic advantage, and ‘science for policy’, where concerns about persuading the public to accept ‘expert’ perspectives on environmental and risk issues, for example, have become paramount.1 So far there has been no interest in asking whether public responses to ‘science’, for example in the form of expert pronouncements and prescriptions about risks, have anything to do with the ways that science is managed.
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Notes and References
See, for example, J. Brown (ed.), Environmental Threats: analysis, perception, management (London: Belhaven, 1989).
For example, in the area of embryo research and genetic manipulation. See ‘Scientists warn of dangers of mob rule’, Observer, April 1989. For an argument in favour of a new social contract of science which involves extended peer-group communities, very much in parallel with the present analysis, see S. Funtowicz and J. Ravetz, Global Environmental Issues and Post-normal Science’ (London: Council for Science and Society, 1990).
B. Wynne, ‘Technology, risk and participation: on the social treatment of uncertainty’, J. Conrad (ed.), Society, Risk and Technology (London: Academic Press, 1980) pp.83–107.
For an insightful discussion in the field of risk assessment, see Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Contested boundaries in policy-relevant science’, Social Studies of Science, 17, (1987) pp. 195–230;
also T. Gieryn, ‘Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science’, American Sociological Review, 48 (1983) pp.781–95.
G. Myers, ‘Unmistakeable Identity: actors and events in news reporting of DNA fingerprinting’, Lancaster University, mimeo, 1989.
S. Krimsky, ‘The recombinant-DNA dispute’, in D. Nelkin (ed.), Controversy (London/Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979).
For an exemplary study of this kind, see S. Schaffer and S. Shapin, Leviathan and the Air pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Again, there is a huge literature on this topic, but see for example, M. Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (New York/London: Bantam Books, 1984).
D. Nelkin (ed.) Controversy (London/Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979).
E. Yoxen, ‘Public Concerns and the Steering of Science’, London, Science Policy Support Group, March 1988.
D. Layton, ‘Transforming science for public access’, University of Leeds, Dept. of Education, mimeo, 1986.
G. Benguigi ‘The Scientist, the fishermen and the oyster farmer’, in S. Blume (ed.), The Social Direction of the Public Sciences, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (Dordrecht:Reidel) (1987) pp. 117–134.
See, for example, C. Helman, ‘Teed a cold, starve a fever’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2 (1978) pp. 107–137.
The Mertonian model of science as an ideal democratic republic of co-operation, complete egalitarian sharing of ideas, impartial critical examination of knowledge claims and meritocratic distribution of recognition and status, has been recognised as a ‘functional myth’, rather than a description of scientific practice. See, for example, S.B. Barnes and D.O. Edge (eds), Science in Context (Oxford: Open University Press, 1982) especially pts 1 and 2.
For a systematic and insightful, though ultimately, I suggest, flawed analysis of these dimensions, see B. Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987). One of the questionable aspects of the approach of Latour and Callon is their conflation of analysis and engineering. Thus they refer to scientists as expert social analysts in plotting the reorganisation of society so as to enlarge their scientific or technical ‘empires’. Whilst there is a warrant in instrumentalist epistemology for equating social engineering with social analysis, there are many cases where scientists inadvertently employ naive social models and assumptions about contexts of application, where often elementary social analysis could have adapted their understanding and their strategies. The Latour-Callon approach implies a degree of deliberate, conscious intent to manipulate the social world which may be post hoc gratuitously reading singular volition into a more multivalent, less determind social process of interaction across several social frameworks and localised interests. To reduce all analytical possibilities to instrumental manipulative intervention is to imply that such intervention is always ‘strategic’, in the sense of planned against a systematic method of feedback, correction of original assumptions and revision of strategies.
This fallacy seems to have been perpetuated in the large-scale surveys of public attitudes to science. For an example, see J.R. Durant, et al., ‘The Public Understanding of Science’, Nature, 340, 6 July 1989, pp. 11–14. Distinction must be made between attitudes to, and understanding. If one asks people in our society in such surveys whether the earth goes round the sun, or vice versa, one can be reasonably assured that there is a commonly shared meaning of the terms ‘earth’, ‘sun’ and ‘goes round’ across all the respondents, and between them and the researcher. Their answers can be gauged against established scientific understanding. But if one asks people whether they believe ‘scientists can be trusted to make the right decisions’ (as was asked in the Durant et al. survey) then uncontrolled variation is almost certain to enter into the responses as to what people mean by ‘scientist’, ‘right decisions’ and ‘trusted’.
See, for example, B. Wynne, ‘Unruly technology: practical rules, impractical discourses and public understanding’, Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988) pp. 147–67;
W. Krohn and P. Weingart, ‘Nuclear power as social experiment: political fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown’, University of Bielefeld, mimeo, 1986.
Also, Krohn and J. Weyer, “Society as Laboratory” Bielefeld, mimeo, 1989.
See, for example, E. von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1988);
C. Freeman, The Economics of Industrial Innovation (London: Pinter, 1982).
D. Burn, The political economy of nuclear power (London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 1967) contains this kind of critique of the UK programme, but with a strongly free market promotional slant.
I laid this as a suggestion in B. Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: The Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain (Chalfont St Giles, Bucks: British Society for the History of Science, 1982) but never followed it up.
For a useful case-study and discussion of the idea of cultural identity as a determinant of intellectual constructions, see G. Downey, ‘Reproducing cultural identity in negotiating nuclear power: The Union of Concerned Scientists and Emergency Core Cooling’, Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988) pp.231–64.
For the ‘interests’ debate, see S. Shapin ‘Following Scientists Around’, Social Studies of Science, 18 (1988) pp.533–50;
S. Woolgar ‘Interests and Explanation in the Social Study of Science’, Social Studies of Science, 11 (1981) pp.365–94. See also Correspondence in Social Studies of Science, 11 (1981) pp.481–514.
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© 1991 The British Association for the Advancement of Science
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Wynne, B. (1991). Public Understanding and the Management of Science. In: Hague, D. (eds) The Management of Science. British Association for the Advancement of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21275-0_9
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