Abstract
Research policies in the United States and the European Union have shown increasing eagerness in the last two decades to incorporate insights from publics and the human and social sciences into natural science and engineering research, while Chinese research policies devote relatively little attention to socio-technical integration. The ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications) program of the US Human Genome Project functioned primarily as a parallel exercise with little real influence on genomic research practices, but more recent research policies for nanotechnology go as far as to redefine research and development in this field as a confluence of technological and societal research. In the EU, the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development show a progressive radicalization of integration discourses and practices. ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) research, for example, which has been conducted since the 2nd Framework Programme (FP2, 1987–1991) in parallel to the natural science and engineering research it studies, has been conceived as a constitutive part of science and engineering research projects since FP6 (2002–2006). Although there are few formal Chinese science and technology policies that encourage socio-technical integration, more and more Chinese scholars from both natural and social science and humanities have embraced the idea of integrating social and ethical concerns at an early stage of science and technology development.
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Notes
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http://ec.europa.eu/research/life/elsa/index.html. Accessed March 29, 2011.
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Acknowledgements
Hannot Rodríguez’s contribution is based on research supported by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government under a postdoctoral fellowship for the improvement of research personnel in a foreign country (Ref. No.: BFI08.183; 2009–2010 2-year period). This research was conducted at the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University. The author wishes as well to thank Heather A. Okvat for her assistance during the final revision of his work.
Hu Mingyan expresses her gratitude to Prof. Cao Nanyan for her constructive comments regarding this work.
Erik Fisher’s contribution is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under award number #0849101 and under cooperative agreement #0531194.
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Rodríguez, H., Mingyan, H., Fisher, E. (2012). Socio-Technical Integration: Research Policies in the United States, European Union, and China. In: Christensen, S., Mitcham, C., Li, B., An, Y. (eds) Engineering, Development and Philosophy. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5282-5_17
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