SSK’s Challenge to Natural Science Governance

Abstract

There are some old, classical questions at the intersection between science, politics and democracy. One way in which society addresses them is through governance structures and practices. In turn, the general thinking on governance prevalent at the time, to a greater or lesser degree, will influence the politics and governance of particular areas of research. Governance of bioscience research is intrinsically connected with the wider trends in the politics and governance of science that have been so widely discussed and debated in the past 15 to 20 years within the STS/SSK community and more widely. A critical engagement with the debates within and about STS (Science and Technology Studies) and SSK in this chapter is used to highlight the distinctive approach taken by critical STS and SSK to governance and to discuss some key features of contemporary debate on governance and politics of bioscience research.

We may reasonably be asked to cultivate a reflexive self-awareness of the ways in which our scholarly work may play out in the arenas of the ‘real world’. In seeking to explicate the nature of science and the sources of its authority, all SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) scholars are necessarily engaged in an enterprise that is as deeply political as it is intellectual, even when their case studies or historical projects seem to be remote from the driving political concerns of late-twentieth-century societies. How could a branch of enquiry that takes as its central preserve the making (and unmaking) of human knowledge be anything but political to the core? If nothing else, the recent surge of concern about the ‘anti-science’ tendencies of science studies offers a useful reminder that our field cannot stand detached and apart from debates about the allocation of power and resources to the very institution whose external relations and internal dynamics we seek to illuminate.

In reflecting on the objectives and possible influence of our individual research programmes, we should not be content, however, with an artificially thinned description of the politics to which we contribute. The framework of controversy studies, in particular, with its implied (and I have suggested untenable) dualism between winning and losing beliefs, seems far too constraining to accommodate everything that happens when work in science and technology studies is brought to bear on political ends. We cannot simply be guided by the instrumental uses to which others may put our work, for what we represent is not merely a ‘side’ in a controversy but an entire worldview: one that is deeply committed to seeing science as a dynamic and integral part of society- a social construct — and to probing its distinctive characteristics with all of the theoretical and methodological resources at our disposal.

Sheila Jasanoff, 1996