Nanomedicine: a socio-technical system

Abstract

Abstract Recently, nanotechnology has put forward considerable opportunities for healthcare–including novel diagnostic and therapeutic prospects–leading to the emergence of nanomedicine. Together with such technological advancements, social science research has placed increasing attention to this emerging and complex discipline. Still missing, however, is a systematized, coherent understanding of nanomedicine as a discrete socio-technical system. By charting the extant literature and drawing on insights from science, innovation, technology, and organizational studies, we review the field of nanomedicine and pinpoint key thematic areas in which the field unfolds. Collectively, our work advances both theoretical and practical aspects as to why and how nanomedicine may be best understood as an idiosyncratic setting for the advancement of novel social science research inquiries.