Overview
- Constructivist stance on assessment: complementing the usual normative viewpoint
- Relating nanotechnology and its assessment to the question of how societies manage their technological future
- Novel insights into the ways risks and uncertainties are currently governed
Part of the book series: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (SOSC, volume 27)
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About this book
Nanotechnology has been the subject of extensive ‘assessment hype,’ unlike any previous field of research and development. A multiplicity of stakeholders have started to analyze the implications of nanotechnology: Technology assessment institutions around the world, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, re-insurance companies, and academics from science and technology studies and applied ethics have turned their attention to this growing field’s implications. In the course of these assessment efforts, a social phenomenon has emerged – a phenomenon the editors define as assessment regime.
Despite the variety of organizations, methods, and actors involved in the evaluation and regulation of emerging nanotechnologies, the assessment activities comply with an overarching scientific and political imperative: Innovations are only welcome if they are assessed against the criteria of safety, sustainability, desirability, and acceptability. So far, such deliberations and reflections have played only a subordinate role. This book argues that with the rise of the nanotechnology assessment regime, however, things have changed dramatically: Situated at the crossroads of democratizing science and technology, good governance, and the quest for sustainable innovations, the assessment regime has become constitutive for technological development.
The contributions in this book explore and critically analyse nanotechnology’s assessment regime: To what extent is it constitutive for technology in general, for nanotechnology in particular? What social conditions render the regime a phenomenon sui generis? And what are its implications for science and society?
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Keywords
Table of contents (16 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Going ‘Nano’: Opportunities and Risks
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Front Matter
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Making Sense: Visions, Images, and Video Games
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Front Matter
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Assessing ‘Nano’: Repercussions on Research
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Front Matter
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Assessing Dialogue: Governing ‘Nano’ by ELSI
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Front Matter
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Deconstructing the Assessment Regime
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Front Matter
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Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Governing Future Technologies
Book Subtitle: Nanotechnology and the Rise of an Assessment Regime
Editors: Mario Kaiser, Monika Kurath, Sabine Maasen, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter
Series Title: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2834-1
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, History (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Hardcover ISBN: 978-90-481-2833-4Published: 23 November 2009
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-3077-9Published: 14 March 2012
eBook ISBN: 978-90-481-2834-1Published: 29 October 2009
Series ISSN: 0167-2320
Series E-ISSN: 2215-1796
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIII, 314
Topics: History of Science, Philosophy of Science, Sociology, general, Ethics