Maarten C. A. van der Sanden

Dialogue guides awareness and understanding of science: an essay on different goals of dialogue leading to different science communication approaches

Dialogue has become a buzzword in science communication. Many governmental initiatives involving information transfer use dialogue as a selling point. We have, for example, a dialogue on genetic manipulation, a dialogue on the scientific future of Europe, a dialogue on food safety. Dialogue has almost become a communication target on its own, beside such things as public understanding or awareness of science. Dialogue is, however, just a technique, a method that can be used in any modality of science communication to serve any of its goals. New developments in the growing use of dialogue should therefore be considered as part of science communication as a whole. In this essay we discuss the various operationalizations of dialogue for different science communication modalities and goals, based on different notions of science. Dialogue offers various possibilities for science communication. There is an important difference between dialogue with a functional goal and dialogue with a conceptual goal. This distinction and its implications are based on our recent study on effective biomedical science communication on predictive DNA diagnostics.

Midstream modulation in biotechnology industry: redefining what is 'part of the job' of researchers in industry.

In response to an increasing amount of policy papers stressing the need for integrating social and ethical aspects in Research and Development (R&D) practices, science studies scholars have conducted integrative research and experiments with science and innovation actors. One widely employed integration method is Midstream Modulation (MM), in which an ‘embedded humanist’ interacts in regular meetings with researchers to engage them with the social and ethical aspects of their work. While the possibility of using MM to enhance critical reflection has been demonstrated in academic settings, few attempts have been made to examine its appropriateness in industry. This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aiming to find out firstly whether MM can effectively be deployed to encourage and facilitate researchers to actively include social and ethical aspects in their daily R&D practice, and secondly to what extent the integration activities could form an integral part of the engaged industrial researchers’ professional activities. Our data show that after MM, researchers display increased reflexive awareness on the social and ethical aspects of their work and acknowledge the relevance and utility of such aspects on their daily practice. Also, all participants considered actively reflecting on social and ethical aspects to be part of their work. Future research on the role of MM in industrial settings could focus on how to embed social and ethical integration as a regular part of innovation practice. We suggest that one possibility would be through aligning social and ethical aspects with innovation Key Performance Indicators.

Food crisis coverage by social and traditional media: A case study of the 2008 Irish dioxin crisis.

The world of communication has changed significantly in the last decade as a result of the evolution of social media. Food crisis managers and communicators should be cognizant of the messages presented to the public by all media channels during a crisis. Using the 2008 Irish dioxin contamination incident as an example, a quantitative content analysis was carried out to investigate the relationship between social and traditional media. Messages published in printed newspapers (n = 141), blogs and forums (n = 107), and Twitter (n = 68) were analysed to investigate sourcing practice, story topic and use of tone. Results revealed that traditional media relied on diverse offline sources in reporting a wide range of topics. In comparison, social media responded faster and diminished faster, using offline and online media news messages as the primary sources in reporting very limited topics. No significant difference was found in the presence of negative tone across media.

The Why and How of Enabling the Integration of Social and Ethical Aspects in Research and Development

New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) based innovations, e.g. in the field of Life Sciences or Nanotechnology, frequently raise societal and political concerns. To address these concerns NEST researchers are expected to deploy socially responsible R&D practices. This requires researchers to integrate social and ethical aspects (SEAs) in their daily work. Many methods can facilitate such integration. Still, why and how researchers should and could use SEAs remains largely unclear. In this paper we aim to relate motivations for NEST researchers to include SEAs in their work, and the requirements to establish such integration from their perspectives, to existing approaches that can be used to establish integration of SEAs in the daily work of these NEST researchers. Based on our analyses, we argue that for the successful integration of SEAs in R&D practice, collaborative approaches between researchers and scholars from the social sciences and humanities seem the most successful. The only way to explore whether that is in fact the case, is by embarking on collaborative research endeavours.

Setting Up Spaces for Collaboration in Industry Between Researchers from the Natural and Social Sciences

Policy makers call upon researchers from the natural and social sciences to collaborate for the responsible development and deployment of innovations. Collaborations are projected to enhance both the technical quality of innovations, and the extent to which relevant social and ethical considerations are integrated into their development. This could make these innovations more socially robust and responsible, particularly in new and emerging scientific and technological fields, such as synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Some researchers from both fields have embarked on collaborative research activities, using various Technology Assessment approaches and Socio-Technical Integration Research activities such as Midstream Modulation. Still, practical experience of collaborations in industry is limited, while much may be expected from industry in terms of socially responsible innovation development. Experience in and guidelines on how to set up and manage such collaborations are not easily available. Having carried out various collaborative research activities in industry ourselves, we aim to share in this paper our experiences in setting up and working in such collaborations. We highlight the possibilities and boundaries in setting up and managing collaborations, and discuss how we have experienced the emergence of ‘collaborative spaces.’ Hopefully our findings can facilitate and encourage others to set up collaborative research endeavours.

The DNA of socially responsible innovation: Social and natural scientists need to establish mutual understanding and a common language to efficiently work together

The nature and purpose of academic and industrial research has slowly been changing during the past decades. Academic research, in particular of the applied nature, is more frequently done in collaboration with industrial partners and attracts funding from industry or private foundations that support research. Even public funding agencies increasingly require scientists to justify their work by explicitly asking them to clarify potential social relevance. Industrial research and development (R&D) not only needs to come up with sophisticated and competitive new products and services but also has to demonstrate social or environmental responsibility to contribute to a more positive corporate image

The wicked problem of Socially Responsible Innovation

One of the goals of our article on the DNA of Socially Responsible Innovation (SRI) was to start a discussion on how to implement SRI in research and development (RD we feel that exactly such dialogue is necessary to advance innovation to the next level. We acknowledge that the “ecosystem” of science, technology and society is much larger than the collaborative space between the natural scientist and the social sciences scholar that we describe in our article. Yet, our article portrays a starting point to “flesh out” SRI, making it tangible in innovation practice. Unfortunately, in discussions about SRI, perspectives for action are often omitted, which disconnects theoretical analyses on what SRI entails from “what …

Evidence-Based Science Communication: An Essay

Use of the literature review in scientific publications is often poorly thought out and unsystematic. The reader, therefore, has no insight into the quality of the conclusions that were drawn from the literature used. Those conclusions are often based on a coincidental, and not necessarily complete, set of articles. A set of empirical findings resulting from methodologically sound research, as well as a set of essays or editorials can be interesting and peer-reviewed, but the informational value, based on the validity and relevance of both types of literature, is different. This has consequences for which publications should weigh more heavily in the conclusions of a literature review or in the design of an educational science campaign, for example. We make a plea for a systematic literature search within the field of science communication. We will propose a system for evidence-based science communication based on the principles of evidence-based medicine.

A step-by-step approach for science communication practitioners: a design perspective.

Science communication processes are complex and uncertain. Designing and managing these processes using a step-by-step approach, allows those with science communication responsibility to manoeuvre between moral or normative issues, practical experiences, empirical data and theoretical foundations. The tool described in this study is an evidence-based questionnaire, tested in practice for feasibility. The key element of this decision aid is a challenge to the science communication practitioners to reflect on their attitudes, knowledge, reasoning and decision-making in a step-by-step manner to question the aim, function and impact of each issue and attendant communication process or strategy. This approach eventually leads to more professional science communication processes by systematic design. The Design-Based Research (DBR) derived from science education and applied in this study, may form a new methodology for further exploration of the gap between theory and practice in science communication and. Practitioners, scholars, and researchers all participate actively in DBR. 1 write in Nature Biotechnology that science communication becomes increasingly complex due to science and technologys development and intricate relationship with society. Science-related controversies in society typically involve clashes of values and beliefs. These controversies are due not only to deficits of scientific understanding, but also of social capital. 2 The deficits not only increase the complexity of the controversies, but the uncertainty of processes of science communication as well. The medical field teaches us that, particularly in the public arena, mono-causal explanations and simplistic solutions ignore the complexity of the relationships between individual health, care and public health. Values, norms and conventions in these three domains may be discordant. 3 Therefore, for the practice of science communication, we consider creating balances within the individual and between individuals, society and the scientific and professional domains as a basic assumption. However, the gap between science communication theory and practice is a deficit of the science communication domain itself. At the PCST 4 conferences where practitioners, scholars and researchers gather from all over the world, one recognizes a wide field of practice and a much smaller field of theory that in practice is rarely integrated. This problem is also often mentioned in science communication textbooks. 5,6,7 Moreover, practice is multifaceted ranging from well equipped, experienced or at least full- time information officers, science writers, web designers or science journalists, to practitioners, managers or researchers who are only occasionally involved in science communication. This study examines a science communication officer working in an academic institute for gene technology and society, who needs to communicate about new developments in predictive DNA-diagnostics. How should he prepare for various meetings with disparate audiences? To overcome the gap between theory and practice while addressing various people involved in or with science communication, we argue that a systematic approach to facilitate the design perspective of science communication professionals might be helpful. This design perspective allows the professional to cope with a science communication problem efficiently and effectively, while taking into account the aforementioned contextual constructs and variables; thus leading to an optimised science communication process. How can this approach prove to be insightful and manageable for the science communication practitioner looking for a profound and sustainable communication process? How can science

Towards an ontology of consumer acceptance in socio-technical energy systems

Policies and economics in social networks are intertwined with a physical system. Research on socio-technical systems, including eco-cities, energy systems, transport infrastructures and supply chains, tries to combine the technical engineering discipline for the physical system with the social perspective on consumer behaviour. However, efforts to develop an ontology, i.e. a shared formal conceptualisation, for socio-technical systems have so far focussed mostly on the technical part of the system. In this paper a first step is made towards inclusion of consumer acceptance by including views from communication science and psychology. This takes advantage of an extensive body of work and enables co-operation and successful communication between different fields of research. This eventually may lead to a more societal realistic ontology of socio-technical urban energy systems for eco-cities. The rationale for the approach and preliminary results of the ontology are explained using the example of a low-carbon city regarding consumer acceptance of new energy technologies.