Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short RI, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to RI as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a (...) solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for-granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to RI, socio-technical integration research is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography. STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary RI collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in RI and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work. (shrink)

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is (...) that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal. (shrink)