After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have-nots, (...) meaning that reconstructivist scholars often will be opposing the behaviors of government, business, and technoscientific elites. Because reconstructivists normally will be outnumbered, we need to devote more systematic professional attention to setting our collective agenda concerning what is most worth researching. (shrink)

Rationalities of Knowledge Production: On Transformations of Objects, Technologies and Information in Biomedicine and the Life Sciences. Since decades, scientific change has been interpreted in the light of of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. The Kuhnian interpretation of scientific change however is now more and more confronted with non‐disciplinary thinking in both, science and studies on science. This paper explores how research in biomedicine and the life sciences can be characterized by different rationalities, sometimes converging, sometimes contradictory, all present at (...) the same time with varying ways of influence, impact, and visibility. In general, the rationality of objects is generated by fitting new objects and findings into a new experimental context. The rationality of hypotheses is a move towards the construction of novel explanatory tools and models. This is often inseparable meshing with the third, the technological rationaliy, in which a technology‐driven, self‐supporting and sometimes self‐referential refinement of methods and technologies comes along with an extension into other fields. During the second and the third phase, the new and emerging fields tend to expand their explanatory reach not only across disciplinary boundaries but also into the social sphere, creating what has been characterized as “exceptionalism” (e.g. genetic exceptionalism or neuro‐exceptionalism). Finally, recent biomedicine and life‐sciences reach a level in which experimental work becomes more and more data‐driven because the technologically constructed experimental systems generate a plethora of findings (data) which at some point start to blur the original hypotheses. For the rationality of information the materiality of research practices becomes secondary and research objects are more and more getting out of sight. Finally, the credibility of science as a practice becomes more and more dependent on consensus about the applicability and relevance of its results. The rationality of interest (and accountability) has become more and more characteristic for a research process which is no longer primarily determined by the desire for knowledge but by the desire for relevance. This paper explores in which ways object‐driven and hypotheses‐driven experimental life‐sciences transformed into domains of experimental research evolving in a technologically constructed, data‐driven environment in which they are subjected to constant morphing due to the forces of different rationalities. (shrink)

In response to political pressures arising from controversial science policy decisions, the United Kingdom (UK) government conducted a review of its biotechnology governance framework in 1999, identifying best practices of open government and creating strategic bodies to adopt them. Drawing from empirical data on the context and nature of the open government framework, this paper argues that the framework may be interpreted as elasticizing objectivity. Value-neutral scientific objectivity is essentially 'stretched' into a pluralist objectivity that purports to represent a spectrum (...) of interests without privileging any, allowing the policy culture to retain its legitimating objectivity and authority. Governance implications of this analysis are discussed. (shrink)

This article examines the debate about the normative relevance of social constructivism, arguing that the criticisms of Winner, Radder, and others are fundamentally accurate. The article argues that a combination of Radder's notion of nonlocal values and Martin's concern for deliberative interventions may offer a theoretical exit from the normative irrelevance that marks constructivism. The article goes on to suggest that theoretical and praxeological developments in two other literatures, participatory public policy analysis and deliberative democracy, may provide fruitful initiatives for (...) constructivist scholars eager to address normative concerns. The article next reviews a range of problems facing deliberative and participatory practices and suggests ways in which constructivist insights might help to advance deliberative theory. (shrink)