Mapping ‘Social Responsibility’ in Science

Draft. Submitted to ‘Responsible Innovation’. Do not quote or distribute without permission from corresponding author

Cecilie Glerup (corresponding author)

Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Frederiksberg, Denmark

Maja Horst

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

Copenhagen, Denmark

Cecilie Glerup,

Department of Organization,

Kilevej 14A 4th floor

Copenhagen Business School,

2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark, DK

+45 2942 3161

Maja Horst,

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication

University of Copenhagen

Karen BlixensVej 4
2300 København S, Denmark, DK

+45 3532 8100

Cecilie Glerup is PhD fellow at Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. Her main interests are in the development of the scientific profession in relation to ‘the new governance of science’ and demands for ‘responsible innovation’.

Maja Horst is Head of department at Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at University of Copenhagen. She has published extensively in the areas of science communication and research management and is currently interested in the concept of ‘responsibility’ in relation to scientific work.

Mapping ‘Social Responsibility’ in Science

‘The only true science may be that which is socially robust’ (Scott 2003, 83)

Abstract

This article employs the Foucauldian notion of ‘political rationality’ to map discussions and ideals about the responsibility of science towards 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 science’s 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 forinnovation and democracy; and the Integration rationality, which advocates that science should be co-constructed with societal actors in order to besocially responsible. While eachrationality 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 possible for scientists to avoid ‘a relationship’ with society. The political question is how this relationship is to be defined and regulated.

Key Words:Responsible science; Responsibility; Science governance; Scientific profession; Political rationalities

One of the characteristics of the ‘new governance of science’ (Irwin 2006; Guston and Sarewitz 2002) is that the ability of science to govern itself in a responsible way has been fundamentally problematized (Braun et. al. 2010; Jasanoff 2011). Along with this problematization has come a new set of sensibilities and demands for more deliberative forms of governance (e.g. Irwin 2006; Kearnesand Rip 2009). The theme of social responsibility of science, or even ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (von Schomberg 2011), has gained momentum within both policy and academic discourse (Guston andSarewitz, 2002; Fisher andMahajan 2006; Owen et al. 2009; Stilgoe 2012; Sutcliffe 2011). In particular, notions of the social responsibility of science are evolving in soft law and international settings, yetthere is no unifying definition of what this term means (Davies and Horst, 2012). Rather, the notion of social responsibility of science can be seen as political: It is open for contestation about how it should be defined and interpreted, and each of these interpretations has consequences for the governance of science, i.e., the way science is regulated and practiced (Foucault 2003a).

The notion that science has a responsibility towards society, however, is not new. Scientists have a long tradition of discussing their responsibilities as a balance between their professional autonomy and their general moral responsibility as human beings (Douglas 2003). Nevertheless, there areno clear connections between scientists’ own discussions and that of policy makers and scholars of the new scientific governance, although it should be recognized that the literature on social responsibility ‘in practice’ is growing (e.g. MccarthyandKelty 2010; Phelps and Fisher 2011;Stilgoe, Owen andMacnagten 2013; Davies, Glerup and Horst, forthcoming).This paper contributes to the understanding of the relationship between scientists’ discussions and that of policy makers and other actorsby mapping the overall landscape of ideas about social responsibility in science as it can be found in academic journals.It takes as its point of departure the position that both scientists and scholars of new scientific governance are addressing the same ‘problematization’ of science, namely how it should be governed – or govern itself – in a responsible way. In doing so, all voices addressing this issue are viewed as ‘political’ because they contribute to the shaping of ideals about how science is to be performed and regulated. The paper, therefore, makes no a priori distinctions among different types of voices. Rather, it deliberately treats all voices equallyin order to investigate the governance effects of these discussions.

Mapping discussions on social responsibility in academic journals, we have employed a Foucauldian analysis of governance to understand how a particular conceptualization of responsibility implies a political rationality, i.e., a particular form of governance of science. The analysis identifies four different political rationalities. They differ according to whether they advocate internal or external regulation of science and whether they are focused on regulation of the process or the outcomes of science. They all imply, however, that a particular relationship between science and society is necessary in order for science to be responsible and also that scientists need to conduct their science within the structure of this relationship in order for their practice to be legitimate and proper.

Responsibility as a political rationality

Debates about the social responsibility of science are far from new (Shapin 2008). While many events, important for these debates, have occurred, we restrict our brief discussion to two. First, the Manhattan Project – the development of the atomic bomb in the United States during World War II – led a number of scientists to discuss the purpose of their occupation (Rhodes 2012). Shapin(2008, 65) describes how scientists in this context moved their discussions into the public sphere by debating their moral obligations in relation to the development and use of nuclear bombs. These discussions are continued in present debates about dual use (McLeish and Nightingale 2007), but also more broadly in the discussion of scientists’ responsibilities for the use of the outcomes of their science. In 1973 and 1975, the Asilomar Conferences on recombinant DNA brought together scientists – and importantly some non-scientists – who gathered to discuss potential hazards in connection with the discovery of restriction enzymes and the incipient field of gene technology. These discussions inspired new governmental organizations such as ethics committees in a number of countries and instigated more general discussions of scientists’ abilities to govern themselves responsibly(Braun et. al. 2010).The case of Asilomar demonstrates the contested nature of such activities:Is it a successful story about the will to self-governance, a discussion led by a small elite of scientists, or a story of how scientists were forced to further regulation by outside actors (Barinaga 2000)?Regardless of how one interprets the event, Asilomarepitomizes the question of science’s ability to govern itself.

While the discussions about the relation between the scientific profession and society are thus not new, the debate following the Asilomar conferences marked a shift in the character of the problems discussed and the kind of actors who mighthave a legitimate say about them. In a Foucauldian perspective, this shift can be seenas a ‘problematization’ of the hitherto internal governance of science through professional norms. A problematization should be understood as the emergence of intensified discussions and propositions about the steering of a specific area of the social, because the preceding ideas on how to govern have come under scrutiny (Foucault 2003a, 229-30). In this instance, what had come under renewed scrutiny in the second part of thetwentieth century was science’s ability to govern itself responsibly, its strong connections with the state and its weak links to the public, and its traditional morality as basis for state regulation of new technologies (Braun et. al. 2010, 512). In more recent years, discussions of science and social responsibility have also been connected to more general, theoretical debates about governance. Some consider the demands for responsibility an instance of a growing market-embedded morality spurred by neoliberalism (Shamir 2008); whereas, others are worried that questions of ethics and responsibility are neglected in favour of market considerations (Hellström 2003). The discussions of how responsibility in science relate to broader societal developments further underscores its more prominent place on the agenda as a governance-problem.

Our use of the term ‘governance’ follows Foucault’s argument that the exercise of modern government is characterized by the structuring of possible fields of action (Foucault 2003b, 138). Fields of action shape the freedom of actors to act by rendering some choices of behavior and thinking (rather than others) legitimate and right – what Foucault (2003b, 138) has referred to as ‘the conduct of conduct’. First,it implies a move away from a state-centered view of ‘government’ as something that is conducted by specific individuals or classes of individuals with apre-defined set of interests. Rather, governance should be understood as attempts to shape individual and collective behaviourperformed not by individuals or classes of individuals, but by rationalities or discourses (Foucault 1976/1998, 94, Foucault 2003b, 128). Hence, modern governance is understood as complex multitudes of language, agencies and technologies that seek to administer the lives of others (Foucault 2003a, 237). Second, it implies that studies of modern governance should focus on how these multitudes make different fields of action possible by turning our attention to the study of ‘political rationalities’ (Miller and Rose 1992) – ‘the changing discursive fields within which the exercise of power is conceptualised, the moral justifications for particular ways of exercising power by diverse authorities, notions of the appropriate forms, objects and limits of politics, and conceptions of the proper distribution of such tasks among secular, spiritual, military and familial sectors’(Rose and Miller 1992: 175, our emphasis). In order to study modern governance, we thus have to study how different forms of rationalities about responsibility in science are conceptualized, how they are justified, and to whom the practice of responsibility is distributed.

We pursue this agenda by studyingarticulations about the social responsibilities of science as they appear in academic journals. As a medium for professional and normative discussions about the role of science, such journalsare an important venue for discussions about this issue, and due to the intensity and breadth of viewpoints they present, the analysis can serve as an indicator of the current, more general perspectives on the social responsibility of science. Using empirical material from academic journals accentuates the fact that the governance of science is, to a large degree, structured by the profession’s own norms and standards. Merton emphasized this point when he described the norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism based on interviews with various scientists (Merton 1973). Sociologists of science have subsequently criticized these CUDOS norms for not capturing what goes on in the daily work-life of scientists (e.g., Lynch 1997). In our view, such criticismshould not be taken to imply that the CUDOS norms are irrelevant, but rather that they are insufficient as an account of the practices ofscience.

Departing from our focus on the conduct of conduct, norms – and among them norms similar to what Merton described – have an important influence on ideas about the objectives of science and the purpose of the scientific profession. Rather than study scientific norms of professional conduct as a good or bad description of scientific practice, we are studying their performative effects for the governance of science. In this way, the discussions of social responsibility of science as they take place in academic journals are a governance technology, part of ‘the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 175). The journals are the specific, material technology (albeit not very ‘high-tech’) that allows arguments about responsibility in science to be circulated and read by those who are considered as the objects of governance, namely, scientists, science scholars and science policy actors.It is thus a specific‘apparatus’ that shapes conduct and ways of thinking towards a more responsible practice (Miller and Rose 1990, 8).

This is not to say that political rationalities on social responsibility in science are a straightforward phenomenon to study. As Foucault points out, modern governance can have a plurality of specific aims, and these aims can be ambiguous and even contradictory and yet still work on the same object of steering (Foucault 2003a, 237). There can, in other words, be different political rationalities at play at the same time. They overlap, contradict and supplement each other continuously.Furthermore, arguments about enhancing the responsibility of science are pervasive, and they flow in many directions with circular forms. No a priori distinction between arguments coming from ‘within science’ or from ‘outside science’ can be made, as this distinction is itself an effect of political struggles.

On this basis, ourtask in this paper is to map the different political rationalities ofsocial responsibility in science as they appear in contributions to academic journals. We have done that by studying how the ‘problem’ of social responsibility in science is articulated in various journal papers by asking of a sample of such papers the following three questions:

  • How is the specific problem (or problems) about lack of responsibility in science articulated?
  • What are the central aspects of science (or its relation to society) that need to be changed according to each articulation?
  • What kinds of solutions to the problems are imagined in these articulations and how are these solutions supposed to be put into place?

Through these questions, we want to carve out how spaces of action are constructed as legitimate for scientists and how these spaces differ from each other and overlap. In the next section we will go further into the description of how we constructed an archive that made it possible to map political rationalities about social responsibility and investigate their implied effects on the governance of science.

Building an Archive of Political Rationalities on Responsibility

The first step of a Foucauldian analysis is to define and delineate the archive in which to study political rationalities (Foucault 1972/2010). Based on initial readings of a large number of papers, we identified 13 keywords central for the responsibility of science:

1

  • Science policy
  • Publishing
  • Public participation
  • Research misconduct
  • Social responsibility
  • Responsibility
  • Upstream public engagement
  • Risk management
  • Ethics
  • Environmental impact assessment
  • Science
  • Moral and ethical aspects
  • Public opinion

1

We combined the keywords into different search strings,and the resultingsearchesyieldedapproximately1000 articles.[i] From this collection we then selected all papers that explicitly stated normative ideals about the governance and responsibility of science, i.e., statements about the purpose of science and directions for how science should be regulated or steered towards this purpose.[ii]For each of the remaining 263 papers, we summarized the answers to the three research questions above and extractedillustrative quotations.

The papers in our sample are diverse and range from editorials addressing problems such as fraud in laboratory research to journal articles on how science can become more innovative. The samplealso includes critical papers on science’s damagingside effects and how they can be avoided, as well as debate pieces on how the direction of science could be subject to more democratic decision-making. Some papers are focused solely on the development of their own discipline, while others are concerned with the entire scientific community. Some papers are written by scientists and others by scholars in thehumanities and social scienceswithopinions about the development of science. In the analysis, we do not distinguish apriori between different speech positions, and so we have not differentiated between papers written by scientists and non-scientists. Rather, we have treated all voices equally in order to understand the total sum of possible articulations of the responsibility of scientists. The archive is therefore quite diverse and the positions plentiful. Nevertheless, all the papers offeranswers to our three research questions and, in this way, they all point to a political rationality with implications for how science is governed.

Four Kinds of Responsibility

Based upon our close readings of the texts, we have identified four different political rationalities, which can be described using a 2x2 matrix. The first dimension describes whether regulation of science should be internal or external; the second dimension describes whether issues of responsibility relate to the process or the outcomes of science. Figure 1 illustrates the four rationalities and their relationship to each other. The Reflexivity and Demarcation rationalities bothadvocate internal regulation of science but, while the Reflexivity rationality insists that the responsibility of science is to strive for outcomes that can work as solutions to society’s problems, the Demarcation rationality aims for a total separation between science and society in order to prevent social norms and values from biasing the otherwise objective production of knowledge. The Contribution and Integration rationalities both point to a need for the external regulation of science, but they also differ in their focus on whether responsibility relates to the outcome of science, as the Contribution rationale proposes, or itsprocess, as the Integration rationale suggests.

--- INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE ---

In the following sections, we will describe each of these political rationalities in more detail using illustrative quotations from the papers in our archive. We have chosen the quotations as poignant examples of the patterns found in the analysis, but they should not be understood as ‘evidence’ in their own right outside of the analytical context. Within the Foucauldian analysis, it is not the individual texts but rather the patterns found in specific articulations– in this case the arguments – presented in the texts that matter. When including references to similar arguments in other papers, however, we have used the conventional way of referencingthe entire paper rather than trying to reference the specific argument. It should also be noted that these four rationalities are found throughout the archive. As such, the findings are robust in describing a recurrent pattern. However, as Foucault has also pointed out, different rationalities overlap and intersect even though they can seem contradictory. Our description of these four rationalities should therefore be understood as an analytical construct thatpoints to some patterns in the archive, while not offering justice to the fullcomplexity thatis also at play.