Harro van Lente

The sociology of expectations in science and technology

In recent years a growing number of social science studies have pointed out the significance of expectations in science and technology innovation. This special issue of Technology Analysis and Stra...

In search of relevance: The changing contract between science and society

This paper presents a framework to study the historical development of the relationship between science and society. We elaborate this relationship as a contract that specifies the mission of scientific research, the rationales for public support for science, and the conditions under which scientists work. These three structural elements will always be part of the contract, but their specific content can vary. The credibility cycle, as a model for scientific practice, helps to describe and understand the consequences of a changing contract for the work of individual scientists. A brief case study of chemistry in the Netherlands demonstrates the usefulness of the framework. We show how concepts of relevance have changed since 1975 and how this affects the practice of academic chemistry.

Navigating foresight in a sea of expectations: lessons from the sociology of expectations

Foresight can be described as the articulation of possible futures. It has a range of applications and is used with different methods, for different objectives and in different settings. Yet, anticipation in science and technology is not limited to foresight, but occurs in many more informal ways. This paper investigates the phenomenon that socio-technical developments are saturated with formal and informal anticipations and discusses the implications of this condition for foresight. The range of foresight studies is reviewed as well as the main results of the sociology of expectations, which studies the informal production and circulation of expectations in science and technology. Finally, three generic lessons from the sociology of expectations are derived, and it is discussed how these support or limit the ambitions of foresight.Foresight can be described as the articulation of possible futures. It has a range of applications and is used with different methods, for different objectives and in different settings. Yet, anticipation in science and technology is not limited to foresight, but occurs in many more informal ways. This paper investigates the phenomenon that socio-technical developments are saturated with formal and informal anticipations and discusses the implications of this condition for foresight. The range of foresight studies is reviewed as well as the main results of the sociology of expectations, which studies the informal production and circulation of expectations in science and technology. Finally, three generic lessons from the sociology of expectations are derived, and it is discussed how these support or limit the ambitions of foresight.

Competition in a technological niche: the cars of the future

The notion of ‘niche’ has proved to be useful to account for the emergence of radical innovations. Most studies, however, deal with the development of single emerging technologies. In this paper we address the competition between multiple niche technologies. Within the niche of the ‘car of the future’ two options compete: the battery-electric and the hydrogen car. While both are shielded from regular market forces, they have to compete in terms of R&D funding, supportive regulation and infrastructure build-up. In our case study we trace the competition in terms of design rules and expectations and show how attention for both options has alternated in three phases, which follow the high hopes and subsequent disappointments of the different component technologies. Whereas there is room for simultaneously developed, multiple options at the local level, at the global level attention and expectations seem much more focused on either the one or the other.

Competing expectations: the case of hydrogen storage technologies

The development of a wide range of hydrogen technologies is linked to the promise of hydrogen as a sustainable energy carrier and the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. These promising technologies, however, have to compete among each other in terms of visibility and credibility. The paper introduces and discusses the notion of competing expectations. To trace the competition between three on-board storage technologies, 263 articles on ‘hydrogen’ and ‘storage’ are analysed with the help of Stephen Toulmins scheme of argumentation. The paper concludes with a characterisation of the ‘expectations’ phase of competing technologies.

Where Are the Politics? Perspectives on Democracy and Technology

The politics of innovation involves displacements between various interrelated settings ranging from the context of design to the context of use. This variety of settings and their particular qualities raise questions about the democratic implications of displacements, which have been addressed within science and technology studies for decades from different perspectives and along various theoretical strands. This article distinguishes five different traditions of conceptualizing the relation between technological innovation and democracy: an intentionalist, a proceduralist, an actor—network, an interpretivist, and a performative perspective. They differ in their concepts of “technology,” “politics,” and “democracy”; they imply different roles for the analyst and they suggest or urge other political means. It is suggested that spelling out the differences and similarities between the five perspectives creates the possibility to overcome the limitations of any particular perspective of technology and democracy.

What is Sustainable Technology?: Perceptions, Paradoxes and Possibilities

1. What is sustainable technology? 2. Perceptions of Technology: An historical overview 3. Chlorofluorocarbons: Drivers of their emergence and substitution 4. Vehicles of Sustainability in the Field of Nanocoatings Harro van Lente, Innovation Studies, Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands and Jon van Til, Technopolis Group, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 5. Articulations of sustainability in the development of wind power in the Netherlands Linda M. Kamp, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft, The Netherlands 6. Environmental technology in a new urban neighbourhood: Stockholms Hammarby Sjostad Ronald Wennersten and Anna Spitsyna, Department of Industrial Ecology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 7. Trade-offs in the district heat distribution system Magdalena Svanstrom, Associate Professor in Chemical Environmental Science and Director of Chalmers Learning Centre, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden and Morgan Froling, Associate Pro 8. Municipal solid waste: Treatment, management and prevention Chantal Block and Carlo Vandecasteele, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Leuven, Belgium 9. What is a sustainable transport system? Dilemmas regarding transport solutions in Sweden Ronald Wennersten and Anna Spitsyna, Department of Industrial Ecology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 10. Reducing material use in passenger cars 1920-2020: Balancing energy, waste and safety Erik Tempelman, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands 11. Hydrogen: A stack of competing visions Sjoerd Bakker, Innovation Studies Group, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands 12. Sustainable technologies for water treatment Jordi Morato, Alex Pires Carneiro and Angeles Ortiz, Sustainable Water Management Group, UNESCO Chair of Sustainability, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain 13. Dilemmas in water systems development in China Xingqiang Song, Department of Industrial Ecology, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden and Xingqiang Song and Wim Ravesteijn, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft, The Netherlands 14. Conclusions: perceptions, paradoxes and possibilities Karel Mulder, Technology Dynamics and Sustainable Development, TU Delft, Netherlands Didac Ferrer, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona Harro van Lente, Department of Innovation and Environmental Studies, University of Utrecht, Netherlands

Practical Applications as a Source of Credibility: A Comparison of Three Fields of Dutch Academic Chemistry

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits.

Steering with big words: articulating ideographs in research programs

Nowadays, science should address societal challenges, such as ‘sustainability’, or ‘responsible research and innovation’. This emerging form of steering toward broad and generic goals involves the use of ‘big words’: encompassing concepts that are uncontested themselves, but that allow for multiple interpretations and specifications. This paper is based on the premise that big words matter in the structuring of scientific practice and it empirically traces how three ‘big words’ – ‘sustainability’, ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘valorization’ (a term closely linked to knowledge utilization) – steer research activities within a Dutch research program of nanotechnology that is explicitly related to societal challenges. To do so, the theory of articulation is extended with the concept of ideographs. We report on how the top-down steering ambitions of policy are countervailed by the bottom-up dynamics and logics of researchers. We also conclude that when ‘big words’ are used in an organizational and administrative setting, it changes their effects

Responsible innovation as a critique of technology assessment

ABSTRACTThe notion of ‘responsible innovation’ has become fashionable amongst policy-makers and knowledge institutes. In the new Horizon 2020, calls of the EU ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI) figures prominently as a condition and an aim in itself. The rise of RRI shows considerable overlap with the aims, philosophies and practices of Technology Assessment (TA). The overlap, though, is not perfect and this raises questions about how RRI relates to TA. While it is plausible to interpret the relationship as RRI being a sequel of TA ambitions, we explore an alternative interpretation: RRI as a critique of TA.