Maja Horst

Nations at Ease with Radical Knowledge On Consensus, Consensusing and False Consensusness

In response to the recent troubled history of risk-related technological development in Europe, one institutional reaction has been to advocate public deliberation as a means of achieving broad societal consensus over socio-scientific futures. We focus on ‘consensusing’ and the expectation of consensus, and consider both their roots and their performative consequences. We argue that consensus should be seen not simply as the absence of disagreement, but as a particular political and ideological formation. We consider and explore the Danish model based on the folkelig concept of the common good, before turning to the wider European movement towards consensus-building. As presented here, consensusing becomes a focus for political contestation but also for nation- and institution-building. Rather than evaluating deliberation solely in terms of its short-term instrumental effects, consensusing should also be understood as performative of national and international identity.

Mapping ‘social responsibility’ in science

This article employs the Foucauldian notion of ‘political rationality’ to map discussions and ideals about the responsibility of science toward society. By constructing and analyzing an archive of 263 journal papers, four political rationalities were identified: the Demarcation rationality, which aims to exclude the social from the scientific production in order to make it objective and thereby responsible; the Reflexivity rationality, which sees it as sciences responsibility to let itself be guided by problems in society in choice of research focus and methods; the Contribution rationality, which insists that responsible science should live up to public demands for innovation and democracy; and the Integration rationality, which advocates that science should be co-constructed with societal actors in order to be socially responsible. While each rationality is distinct, the article argues that all of them address the issue of a boundary (or integration) between science and society. Hence, it is not possib...

A Field of Expertise, the Organization, or Science Itself? Scientists’ Perception of Representing Research in Public Communication

Social and political interest in science regularly prompts scientists to assume the role of public spokesperson. The article investigates this role of representing science as both “speaking on behalf of” science and symbolically “standing for” science and its organizations. With inspiration from the field of organizational communication, it is argued that science communication should be considered as an activity intimately linked with perceptions of identity and organizational culture. When scientists communicate publicly, they do not just disseminate knowledge, they also represent a particular sense making about what science, scientists, and scientific organizations are. Based on a qualitative analysis of 20 leading Danish scientists’ views on their own role in public communication, three different modes of representation are identified: Expert, Research Manager, and Guardian of Science. Each of these modes of representation implies particular notions of quality, audience, motivation, and learning in science communication.

Crafting the group: Care in research management.

This article reports findings from an interview study with group leaders and principal investigators in Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. Taking as our starting point current interest in the need to enhance ‘responsible research and innovation’, we suggest that these debates can be developed through attention to the talk and practices of scientists. Specifically, we chart the ways in which interview talk represented research management and leadership as processes of caring craftwork. Interviewees framed the group as the primary focus of their attention (and responsibilities), and as something to be tended and crafted; further, this process required a set of affective skills deployed flexibly in response to the needs of individuals. Through exploring the presence of notions of care in the talk of principal investigators and group leaders, we discuss the relation between care and craft, reflect on the potential implications of the promotion of a culture of care and suggest how mundane scientific understandings of responsibility might relate to a wider discussion of responsible research and innovation.

On the weakness of strong ties

Departing from experiences at a recent conference on Science in Dialogue, the paper reflects on the significance of the closure of the Danish Board of Technology as a government funded institution. It is argued that the lack of active support from the Danish public might be an unanticipated consequence of the Board’s successful institutionalisation.

Taking our own medicine: on an experiment in science communication.

In 2007 a social scientist and a designer created a spatial installation to communicate social science research about the regulation of emerging science and technology. The rationale behind the experiment was to improve scientific knowledge production by making the researcher sensitive to new forms of reactions and objections. Based on an account of the conceptual background to the installation and the way it was designed, the paper discusses the nature of the engagement enacted through the experiment. It is argued that experimentation is a crucial way of making social science about science communication and engagement more robust.

Responsible Innovation in the US, UK and Denmark: Governance Landscapes

This chapter explores the notion of responsible innovation (RI) as it is currently being imagined in policy and governance practice. It does this in the context of three different countries: the UK, US and Denmark. We ask how RI is being constituted within policy discussion. What is it understood as being? What kinds of actors are implicated in it? And what is its scope, or field of action? In exploring these questions we argue that responsible innovation is currently a largely international discourse, and that it remains unclear, from current policy discussion, how it should be put into practice. Though it is tied to a linear model of science and technology, in which both the process and outputs of scientific research are, through RI, imbued with responsibility, the actors involved and the fields in which they are assumed to operate are exceedingly general. As such, RI appears to be a fundamentally de-individualised process.

BEFORE STABILIZATION: Communication and non-standardization of 3D digital models in the building industry

Developments within 3D digital modelling are often heralded as a much needed solution to problems of information loss and communication difficulties within the building industry. Despite the abundance of technical possibilities for innovation, however, there is currently no standardized, widely used digital model that solves these problems. Rather, actors in the building industry are assembling technological and other elements in various ways, trying to configure a stable innovation. This article sets out to describe the innovation communication involved in different emerging assemblages by focusing on the articulation of different expectations to their promises. We identify three different sets of expectations, namely visions related to building information modelling, Virtual Worlds and interactive simulation platforms. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how visions are a crucial part of the communication about innovations in information and communication technology (ICT), and to contribute to an understanding of how different visions promise particular future configurations of workflows, communication processes, politics, economic models and social relations. Hereby, the paper adds to the literature on the relationship between ICTs and organizing, but with a distinct focus on innovation communication and distributed innovation processes taking place before ICTs are stabilized, issues which cannot be captured by studies of diffusion and adaptation of new ICTs within single organizations.

‘Nothing really responsible goes on here’: scientists’ experience and practice of responsibility

ABSTRACTScientists face increasing demands to integrate practices of ‘responsibility’ into their working lives. In this paper, we explore these developments by discussing findings from a research project that investigated how publically funded scientists perceived and practiced responsibility. We show that, though the scientists in this study mostly viewed policy discourses such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as irrelevant to them, they articulated and practiced a range of ‘bottom-up’ responsibilities, including for producing sound science, taking care of employees, creating ‘impact’ and carrying out publically legitimate science. The practice of these responsibilities was often shaped by wider dynamics in the governance of knowledge production, such as academic capitalism and the marketisation of universities. Based on these findings, we suggest that RRI scholarship should, first, work to develop a shared language of responsibility with scientists, and, second, more actively address the pol...

Selling the selling point: How innovation communication creates users of Virtual Worlds Architecture

This article explores how virtual worlds are rhetorically constructed as obvious, innovative spaces for communication about architecture. It is argued that the marketization of an innovative use of new media platforms happens in early phases of the innovation processes, and the success of new media technologies such as virtual worlds hinges on the creation of expectations, which are intertwined with the discursive construction of future users. Drawing on the sociology of expectations and the sociology of technology, the article argues that the configuration of expected users is a central part of the communication about the innovation. It is demonstrated that the creation of markets does not begin when innovations such as Virtual Worlds Architecture are settled, but is intertwined with early expectations about their promises and limitations. Rather than seeing virtual worlds as settled and secluded sites for social and cultural innovation in themselves, we have examined how actors involved with them try to sell them as such. A crucial challenge for these actors turns out to be the interpretative flexibility of the innovation, since arguments designed to attract one kind of expected user might problematize the configuration of other types of users.