5. MAPPING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN SCIENCE
5.4 CONCLUSIONS
sees scientists as a special kind of citizen, one who possess specialized knowledge that can be used to develop society in better directions. But this is only possible if science opens up and allows social concerns to form part of the scientific process, instead of focusing only on technical aspects. In this way, the Integration rationality diverges from the Contribution rationality by articulating that knowledge production is collaboration among different actors and responsibility is something that develops through this collaborative process.
in their work. In this way, it resembles the Integration rationality, which also has as its object of steering the scientific process before-the-fact. Even though the two rationalities are radically different with regard to their choice of internal or external regulation, they are focused on the process of science as the crucial object of steering in order to make science responsible. In contrast, the Reflexivity and Contribution rationalities share a focus on the outcome of science as the important object of steering, although they differ in terms of the steering mechanisms they want to use.
While the Reflexivity rationality describes how scientists themselves should use society’s problems as an inspirational framework that guides their research, the Contribution rationality advocates firm, external control and guidelines from society that scientists should be compelled to follow.
When looking at the four rationalities in their totally, we can also reflect on the distribution of morality or ethics in each rationality. On one hand, the Demarcation and the Reflexivity rationalities articulate science as a fundamentally ‘good’
institution that has an in-built capacity to know how to serve society best. On the other hand, the Contribution and the Integration rationalities point to society as a necessary source of moral knowledge about how to develop ‘a good society’ from which science needs to learn. This perspective strongly reverberates with social studies of science and technology that advocate further involvement of philosophers and social scientists as teachers of responsibility in scientific processes (e.g.
Macnaghten et.al. 2005, Fisher 2007, Flipse et.al 2012).
Following Foucault (2003a) we do not consider the four political rationalities as mutually exclusive or strictly separated. From a very general perspective, they all stress the need to regulate the relationship between science and society. Even in the Demarcation rationality, society plays a large part as that which has to be excluded.
The definition of a boundary (or an integration) between science and society is
therefore an overall shared problematization in the four rationalities. In this way, the analysis portrays the current situation of the profession of science as one in which it is impossible to not ‘have a relationship’ with society. Rather, the main political question is how to define and regulate this relationship.
The identification of these four rationalities serves as a map of contemporary ideas on science governance. Like any other map, it excludes a lot of shades and details, and we might have enlarged certain differences in order to make the map intelligible.
However, the map is intended as a reference point for directions and the understanding of differences, and as such it is useful as an overview of directions in the governance of science. It is clear that there is no uniform agreement about what social responsibility of science is and should be. It is equally clear that the definition of this concept is inherently political – in the Foucauldian sense of structuring fields of action. Similar to Braun et al. (2010), our analysis demonstrates that a particular definition of responsibility also implies a particular understanding of the proper conduct of science, sustaining the description of some forms of practice as responsible and others as irresponsible. Following from this perspective is also the realization that an argument for more responsibility in science is not a way of dealing with the fact that science has political consequences – it is itself a political statement.
However, our map does not make us any wiser about the practice of science and the relationship between what scientists actually do in their laboratories and the normative and political statements about proper conduct of science investigated in this paper. As seminal laboratory ethnographies (e.g., Bloor 1976; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1999) have shown, scientific norms and scientific practice are at times worlds apart. We therefore propose further studies of this relationship – in particular of the ways in which scientists are influenced – if at all – by these political rationalities in their daily practices of making facts in the laboratory
and making organizations when doing research management. It would be interesting to investigate whether there are more or different rationalities at play in these forms for practice. It is also pertinent to explore how these proposals of responsible conduct of science are played out in connection with such mundane organizational concerns as next year’s budget, a debate piece in yesterday’s paper, a failed experiment, or the need for a new coffee machine in the canteen.18
18 We would like to thank Emil Husted for great assistance with the building of the archive and development of the method. Furthermore, we want to thank Alan Irwin, Erik Fisher and Paul du Gay for reading earlier drafts and provide useful comments.