Participatory Approaches in Critical Perspective

Science, Technology &
Human Values
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Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: Historical

Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective
Martin Lengwiler
Science Technology Human Values 2008; 33; 186
DOI: 10.1177/0162243907311262
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Participatory Approaches
in Science and Technology
Historical Origins and Current
Practices in Critical Perspective
Science, Technology, &

Human Values
Volume 33 Number 2
March 2008 186-200
2008 Sage Publications
10.1177/0162243907311262
http://sth.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Martin Lengwiler
University of Zurich and Social Science Research Center Berlin
Recent science and technology studies have analyzed questions of nonexpert

participation in science, technology, and science policy from an empirically
grounded perspective. The introduction to this special issue offers a double
contribution to this debate. First, it presents a summary of the state of the art
and an outline of the historical emergence of the participatory question. The
argument distinguishes four periods since the late nineteenth century, each
with a specific relationship between expert and nonexpert knowledge ranging
from a hybrid, to a politicized, to an autonomous, to a participatory relationship. Second, the introduction summarizes the contributions to this issue. Their
common concern is to take the debate one step further by critically reflecting
the problems and limitations of participatory practices. The contributions point
out the need for contextualizing the participatory question within the wider
social, economic, and political circumstances in which participatory science
and technology is set.
Keywords: participation; democracy; lay knowledge; science and technology
policy; autonomy
n recent years, science and technology studies have shown an increasing

interest in the question of nonexpert participation in science, technology,
and science policy. Ever since the field emerged in the 1970s, science studies have addressed the social and political context of science. Already the
sociology of scientific knowledge has critically pointed out social and political interests involved in the production of scientific knowledge; similarly,
studies in the social construction of technology have revealed the hidden
politics of artifacts. Unlike this early work with its critical view on the
social and political shaping of science and technology, recent studies have
stressed the need for participatory decision processes and tried to discuss
186
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Lengwiler / Participatory Approaches
187
more representative or democratic ways of participatory involvement of

nonexpert actors in science and technology. Sheila Jasanoff has recently
called this interpretative shift the participatory turn of science studies
(Jasanoff 2003).
Early contributions to the participatory question consisted of abstract and
normative calls for more open and transparent decision-making processes
in science. Only recently, empirical studies started to examine real-life
examples of participatory science, for example, in national science policy
debates or in biomedical and climate change research. This special section
of Science, Technology, & Human Values offers a double contribution to this
developing debate. It presents a brief summary of the state of the art (from
a historical perspective), but it also tries to take the debate one step further.
In this sense, the following articles not only review the current status of the
participatory debate; by analyzing the difficulties of implementing the
alluring calls for democratizing science and technology under the present
social, economic, and political circumstances, they also critically reflect the
problems and limitations of participatory approaches. This double focus is
in line with recent contributions to the participatory debate, which are not
confined to merely analyzing the practices of participatory approaches in
science policy, but also point out limitations or biases in participatory settings
(Jasanoff 2003; Latour 2004; Pestre 2003; Kleinman 2000a).
This introduction has three aims. First, it specifies with some conceptual
remarks the meaning of the notion of participation. It then offers a brief survey of how the participatory question has historically evolved since the late
nineteenth century. This outlook will sharpen the issues at stake in the current
debate. Finally, it summarizes the main arguments of the articles and outlines
some of their cross-cutting themes.1
Participatory approaches in science and technology studies usually deal
with the involvement of nonscientists, laypeople, or citizens in science and
technology. In most cases, the involvement refers to decisions on a science
policy levelparticipation at deciding actual research practices is rarely
observed or argued for (Kleinman 2000b, 6). In this sense, Daniel Kleinman
categorized the participatory cases along a continuum of degrees of participation, stretching from the frequent case of a low degree of participation, in
which scientists merely acknowledge a social dimension to a problem, to the
rare case in which lay citizens are directly involved in the research practices
and thus challenging the rules of scientific methods (Kleinman 2000c, 140f.).
Another common distinction to define the concept of participation refers
to research fields. This distinction reflects that the level of participation
often varies according to different scientific cultures. In natural sciences and

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Science, Technology, & Human Values
engineering, participatory debates have traditionally been limited to more

advanced, end-of-pipe stages in the research process, resulting in a lower
degree of participation. In green biotechnology, agricultural research policy,
or nuclear energy, for example, the participation of nonexperts usually centers
on the consequences rather than the design of science and technology (for
example, Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris [this issue]). In contrast, in medical and
biomedical sciences, participation also concerns earlier research stages, such
as the development and design of therapeutic treatments. Here, the degree
of participation can be much higher, as illustrated by cases of biomedical
activism or the research engagement of patients organizations (Epstein 1996;
Epstein 2007; Rabeharisoa and Callon 1999; Callon and Rabeharisoa [this
issue]). In general, the medical sciences, at least the clinical disciplines,
already have a long tradition of dealing with laypeople in the early research
process, for example, in the context of university clinics or in the course of
clinical trials (Marks 1997; Epstein 2007, 41-52). Although this does not
imply any special inclination for participatory approaches, it makes the
medical sciences still particularly exposed to claims for increased nonexpert
participation.
In recent years, science and technology studies as well as science policy
studies increasingly reflected on the organizational conditions and the social
implications of participatory approaches. A distinct field of scholarship
emerged analyzing the institutional and organizational mechanisms of participatory deliberation processes from the perspectives of organizational theory
and science policy studies, mainly with the practical goal of amending decision making in science and technology policy (Fiorino 1990; Renn, Webler,
and Wiedemann 1995; Laird 1993; Rowe and Frewer 2004). Whereas these
studies are set on a mid-range theoretical level, other work tried to assess the
significance of participatory science and technology from a macro-sociological
perspective. Expanding their previous work on new modes of knowledge
production, Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons suggested
the concept of a mode-2 society, in which scientific research would increasingly be socially embedded, giving way to more socially robust forms of
knowledge production. For conceptualizing the hybrid forms of interaction
between scientific and social actors, the authors offered the notion of an
agora, a public space for open and democratic forms of reasoning and decision making (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001; see also the revisions
in Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2003). More recently, Jasanoff coined the
notion of civic epistemologies to account not only for the arrangements of
research practices and public policies, but also for cultural expectations and

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public forms of reasoning, which all together shape practices and policies of
innovation in a national-specific way (Jasanoff 2005, 248-50).
Four Stages of Participatory Science and Technology

since the Nineteenth Century
The emergence of participatory claims in science and technology is the
result of a specific historic constellation. Although its precursors reach back
to the late nineteenth century and the interwar period, the participatory question only emerged on the grounds of the postwar regime in science policy,
in particular during the 1970s and 1980s. Against this background, analyzing
the long-term emergence of the participatory question helps us to comprehend the scope of present debates, including some of the implicated problems.
We can distinguish four stages, each with a specific relationship between
science, politics, and nonexpert knowledge. Put in ideal type concepts, the
development ranges from a hybrid relationship before the First World War
to a politicized relationship during the interwar period to an autonomous
relationship in the decades after the Second World War, and finally to a
participatory relationship since the 1970s. The following chronology offers
a provisional framework, in the limited space of this introduction and based
on the institutional history of science and research policy making.
1. For much of the nineteenth century, the question of letting nonscientific
actors participate in science did not arise at all. The actors of nineteenth
century science were more concerned with drawing a clear boundary between
the spheres of science and the public or between scientific and lay or religious
knowledge, a process that parallels the secularization of natural knowledge.
The Scientific Naturalists movement of the latter nineteenth century, for
example, confronted the old natural theology with a scientific interest,
assigning the study of nature primarily to the prerogative of scientists
(Shapin 1990, 997-1000). However, in an era of expository science, the
boundary between science and the public was still highly permeable (Shinn
and Whitley 1985), with science trying to find legitimacy by appealing to a
public audience. In this sense, science was a pivotal element and an integral
part of the emerging bourgeois public sphere, a status illustrated by the rise
of the academic societies or, as part of the emerging popular culture, by the
spread of scientific exhibitions and museums or the diffusion of amateur
societies in popular science (Cooter and Pumphrey 1994; Secord 2000;
Bonneuil 2002).
Yet until the late nineteenth century, boundaries between science and polity
were far from insurmountable, and actors often performed hybrid roles. In the
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190
field of early social sciences in particular, scholars often combined their

scientific ambition with a political agenda, mixing scientific, political, and
often entrepreneurial biographies. The early-nineteenth-century utopian
socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, for example, was originally
designed as a scientific endeavour; Saint-Simon in particular inspired Auguste
Comte to develop his program of a social physics (Picon 2003, 71-72).
Similarly, the social reformist program of the German Kathedersozialisten
in the late nineteenth century was academic in its form but political in its
practice and long-term strategy (Grimmer-Solem 2003). Founders of modern
statistics also often grounded their methodological approaches on a political basis; the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet with his concepts of a
social physics and the moral sciences is one example (Porter 2003, 240-2).
Also the radical exponents of the early Chicago School of Sociology, such
as those academics involved in muckraking journalism or in the settlement
movement, extended their academic research into the area of social policy
(Bannister 2003, 335-6). For the natural sciences, the colonial history offers
many examples of the politically embedded work of biologists, botanists,
or geographers (Drayton 2000; Bonneuil 2000). Under these premises, with
science as an often inherently political endeavor, the question of nonexpert
participation remained a blind spot: as scientists acted concurrently as politicians and citizens, the need for lay involvement was simply indiscernible.
Thus, the earliest examples for participatory expert bodies belong to
political and not to academic institutions, namely to corporatist welfare institutions and international social policy organizations. In early social insurances, for example, in the organizations of the public accident insurance of
Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s, physicians, actuaries, and other scientific
experts were appointed by corporatist boards that included representatives
from the main interest groups among the insured: trade unions, employers
associations, and sometimes government representatives. Around the turn
of the century, this corporatist system of social insurance was exported to
other European countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland
(Lengwiler 2006, 298-308).
Similarly in international social policy organizations, political bodies
were directly involved in shaping expert regimes and research projects.
A prominent case is the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva,
a tripartite organization directed by representatives of governments, employers, and workers and engaged, since its foundation in 1919, in research on
labor statistics and occupational health. This politically composed organization had a crucial influence on the research and recognition of occupational
illnesses over the twentieth century. One exemplary case is the history of

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silicosis, a medical diagnosis for respiratory diseases caused by the inhalation

of quartz dust and a condition among the most severe occupational illnesses
of the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, the ILO teamed up with the
international union for the stone industry to lead a campaign to grant silicosis
the status of an official occupational disease, a status disputed by the German
and French medical communities, who were firmly rooted in a bacteriological
tradition and who treated silicosis as a subform of tuberculosis, not counting
it as an occupational illness. Eventually, the ILO succeeded in convincing
several specialized medical associations of the concept of silicosis, and by
1929, the International Congress for Occupational Hygiene (Congrs mdicale
internationale pour les accidents du travail) officially recognized silicosis as
an independent disease category (Lengwiler 2006, pp. 248-60).
2. However, these early precursors of participatory forms of research
were exceptional and limited to social policy institutions. Until the early
twentieth century, the academic world was marked by the rise of universities
and technical schools and by the professionalization of medicine and law;
these transformations indeed deepened the gap between lay and expert
knowledge. In science, the participatory question only emerged in the following period, stretching from the First to the Second World War. Basically,
this period witnessed a gradual differentiation between science, politics, and
the public. Indirectly, these cleavages fueled claims for an improved integration of the separate institutions. The growing distinctions between science
and politics are illustrated, for example, by the methodological debates
within social sciences. In Germany already in the years after 1910, in the
wake of the Werturteilsstreit (the dispute on value judgments), a debate
within early economics and sociology, namely in the ranks of the Verein
fr Socialpolitik, the differentiation between scientific and political statements quickly became common sense in modern social sciences (Weber
1988, 156-7; Beck 1974, 63-65; Wagner 2003). Similar processes of differentiation happened on the side of the public. In the immediate after-war
period, critical reactions of the public against the involvement of scientists in
the First World War, mainly against the participation of German and British
chemists in the development of chemical weapons of mass destruction, led
to an increasing alienation between the sciences and the public and to calls
for an improved public scrutiny over research institutions (Johnson 1990;
Burchardt 1990). In some cases, the public criticism led to a conservative or
elitist retreat of scientists, a complete U-turn against the overt politicization
and militarization of science and technology during the First World War. In
Germany, for example, the foundation of the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen
Wissenschaft (the precursor to the German Research Foundation) was partly

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motivated by an antidemocratic opposition of the scientific elite to the social

democratic governments of the Weimar Republic (Schroeder-Gudehus 1972,
552-5; Feldman 1990, 92-94). In other contexts, the process of differentiation
prepared the ground for utilitarian uses of science by polity, such as in state
interventionist policies in the interwar period. Utilitarian approaches underlie
the social planning efforts of the New Deal policies or the instrumentalized
role of science and technology in the planned economy of the Soviet Union.2
Such interventionist approaches in science policy remained strong in the
United States as in European countries until the early after-war period
(Elzinga and Jamison 1995, 582-3).
With the emergence of social planning and technocratic policies, the
interwar period also witnessed an increasing politicization of science. Some
scientists welcomed this development for political reasons, and left-wing or
socialist scientists even claimed a political radicalization of science. By the
1930s, a crucial decade in this respect, several scientific associations
embraced claims for fundamentally democratizing science. This international trend was most visible with socialist associations of scientists, such
as the British Association of Scientific Workers or the so-called Science and
Society movement in Britain and the United States. The intellectual head of
the British association was John Desmond Bernal, a physicist and until 1933
a member of the Communist Party; Bernals influential 1939 book, The
Social Function of Science, became the classic textbook for the progressive
approaches (Ravetz and Westfall 1981). The American movement found, at
least in the early years, the support of prominent scientists such as J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Franz Boas, and Walter B. Cannon (Kuznick 1987). Both
movements saw the scientific system as a product of a bourgeois and capitalist society, unable to fulfill its inherent social mission to advance social
and economic progress, for example, by advising the governments social
and technological planning policies. Science was defined as dependent on
the social and political contexta perspective that later formed the basis for
participatory claims (Kuznick 1987). These activist awakenings had their
heyday in the latter 1930s but suffered under the political consequences of the
Second World War. Suffering from internal splits between Soviet-friendly
pacifists and an antifascist camp opposed to the Soviet appeasement policy,
the movement lost its influence completely after 1945. As a lasting achievement, the notion that science was part of the political system, combined with
the socialist claims for scientifically guided planning policies, helped to
pave the way for a more interventionist postwar science policy.
3. The development of postwar science policies has been examined by a
series of recent studies.3 Authors usually distinguish between two periods,

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the first set between 1945 and the early 1970s. In this era, science policy was
based on a social contract for science, under which the relations between
science and politics were guided by the principle of blind delegation. That
principle granted science wide autonomies of self-regulation in terms of the
division and use of funding as well as the instruments of quality assessment
(Guston 2000), not least to prevent the political instrumentalization of science
as in National Socialist Germany or in the Soviet Union. Science became
dominated by the model of basic research, initiating a period of autonomy
that lasted at least until the 1970s. Although after the Sputnik shock in 1957,
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
countries massively expanded public expenditures for research and development, building up big science institutions for applied research in the 1960s
and 1970s, the realm of basic science remained the prerogative of autonomous
and self-organized organizations (Elzinga and Jamison 1995, 584-6; Guston
2000, 141). Christophe Bonneuil called this science and research policy
approach a fordist arrangement, granting government and business elites
autonomies, whereas the public would receive the medical and technological
advancements in the standard of living in return (Bonneuil 2004). In this
context, participatory claims only marginally mattered in science policy.
4. Only since the late 1960s has the participatory question emerged in its
present forma development also thoroughly examined in recent science
studies.4 A crucial factor for this process was the technological criticism of
several social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as the feminist
movement, the antinuclear movement, and the ecological movement (Nelkin
1977; Wynne 2002). Against this background, this era has been called a
period of social relevance in science and technology policy (Elzinga and
Jamison 1995, 591). Already in the 1970s, the criticisms led to early forms
of participatory science and technology policy. By means of administrative
reforms, the political procedures were opened to reflect differences in scientific opinions and later the perspective of lay citizens in policy making.
Early precursors of participatory deliberation can be found in the fields of
early environment and planning policy, biotechnology, nuclear and other
large-scale technology, and in technology assessment in general (Nelkin
1977, 58-90; Mazmanian 1976; Mazur 1981; Conrad 1983). The first consensus conferences in biotechnology, for example, were organized in the
United States in the mid-1970s, soon spreading to European countries. At
the beginning, they only involved experts with different opinions; at a later
stage, also participants representing the public (Kelly 2003, 345-7; Guston
1999, 451-4; Joss and Durant 1995).
The emergence of participatory approaches was paralleled by new forms
of governance in science and technology policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, the
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principles of postwar science policy came under increased pressure. As a

combined effect of the end of the honeymoon period of public funding,
obvious failures of self-regulating mechanisms (illustrated by a series of
research scandals) and an increasing lack of public confidence in scientific
expertise and expert-based science policy spurred by the bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) crisis and other crises in agricultural, food, and environmental policy, new arrangements of science and technology policy began
to emerge in Europe and the United States (Guston 2000, 140-5). In medicine, for example, the influence of health advocacy groups and grassroots
social movements led to a fundamental shift in research practices, first in the
United States, and more recently in Europe, from a homogenizing approach,
basically relying on the clinical study of white, middle-aged men to an inclusive approach involving some sort of a democratic constituency of men,
women, children, and racial or ethnic minorities (Epstein 2007). Since the
1990s, participatory approaches further proliferated into new research fields
such as telecommunications, gene technology and genetic engineering, climate change research, and nanotechnology (Guston 1999; Kleinman 2000a;
Guston and Sarewitz 2002; Kelly 2003; Miller 2005). On the level of the
European Union in particular, participatory approaches have played an
increasing role since the mid-1990s, for example, in its consumer and agricultural policies and in the research strategies of the sixth and the seventh
framework programs (Jasanoff 2003, 236-7; Levidow and Marris 2001).
Critical Appreciations of Contemporary Participatory

Practices: The Contributions to This Issue
The common concern of the following articles is to critically specify the
potential and limitations of participatory practices in science. To this end,
the articles suggest a series of conceptual specifications and point out unresolved questions that future debates about participatory approaches will
have to face.
Conceptually, the articles deal with both understanding the mechanisms
of the participatory process and analyzing its social consequences. In a partly
theoretical contribution on Participation, Power, and Progress in the Social
Appraisal of Technology, Andy Stirling argues that the participatory question
should not only focus on the pluralistic enlargement of actors in a decision
process but should also reflect on the eventual closure of such a process. He
distinguishes between the top-down side of science policy, which he calls
the unitary and prescriptive perspective, and the bottom-up side, the plural

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and conditional perspective. Stirling is critical of the fact that in current

debates, both perspectives are still largely unrelated to each other; he claims
that even if the tensions between the two poles remain ultimately irreconcilable, both perspectives should be more thoroughly integrated.
One specific concept for understanding decision and closure processes
is suggested in the article of Christophe Bonneuil, Pierre-Benot Joly, and
Claire Marris. Their argument critically rephrases the concept of the agora,
of an open arena for the exchange and negotiation of scientific, economic,
or public interests. By analyzing the debates on genetically modified (GM)
crops in France, Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris point out that depending on the
setting of the agora, the participatory debate can take very different directions.
Their case study reveals different phases in the process of the debate on GM
organisms, from a stage where biotechnologists were keeping their research
away from public attention, over several conflictive stages with activist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fighting to have a say over the research
process and over field trials (sometimes by public field destructions), to a
stage where an arena of participatory debates around the experimental release
of GM crops has emerged. The argument is a reminder that the agora is not
only an open and participatory arena, in the sense of a Habermasian public
sphere, but also a hierarchical and agonal setting where opposing interests
clash. In the field trial case examined by Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris, an
early public controversy, including the deliberate destruction of trial fields
by NGO activists, convinced the involved national research institute, the
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, of the need for a new
research policy retreating from field trials and fostering instead the field of
biosafety research. The article concludes that on a theoretical level, microsociological approaches in science and technology studies should be combined with work in the sociology of social problems, dealing with the framing
of problems within a wider socioeconomic context.
A similar conceptual specification, dealing with the social dimension of
participatory research contexts, is proposed by the contribution of Michel
Callon and Vololona Rabeharisoa. Based on their study of a French patients
organization, the Association Franaise contre les Myopathies (AFM), and
its sponsoring of biomedical research, the article develops the notion of an
emergent concerned group for the association of patients and parents. By
combining a sociological with an epistemological perspective, this notion
understands the formation of a social group as a problem-driven process
focusing on a common concern. Also, emergent concerned groups are defined
in opposition to a traditional notion of laypersons. Thus, the concept aims at
transcending the layexpert divide. Moreover, the phenomenon of spreading

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emergent concerned groups indicates a new science policy regime. Callon

and Rabeharisoa argue that the activities of the AFM are neither merely
political nor scientific but both at the same time. By articulating patients
interests, the AFM influences French biomedical research and simultaneously
advances the social recognition of patients (in this case people with disabilities). Both processes are intertwined and result in a reconstruction of the
patients identity as well as in the shaping of research policyan interaction
not included in the common concept of laypersons. The authors hold that the
rise of emergent concerned groups is not limited to the biomedical sphere
but accounts for a common phenomenon in contemporary societies.
Beyond these conceptual arguments, the articles point at two limitations
of current research on participation; here the contributions are a starting point
for further critical reflection and debates. One limitation refers to the micro
policies, the other one to the macro implications of participatory practices.
On the micro level, several authors stress the distinction between participation and representation. A mere involvement of outside actors does not yet
stipulate a system of equal or adequate representation. Making nonexpert
actors participate does not equip them automatically with the means necessary for bringing in their concerns. Thus, participatory processes often suffer
from hierarchical power relations among the actors involved, as for example,
in the case of field trials of GM crops mentioned above (Bonneuil, Joly, and
Marris). In a similar sense, Callon and Rabeharisoa stress that the participation of a patient organization in biomedical research is not the end, but
rather the beginning of a struggle for equal rights between representatives
of technoscience and of society. In theoretical terms, the articles are not based
on a Rawlsian or Habermasian notion of an egalitarian process of public
reasoning or an open concept of the public sphere; rather, they adhere to a
Foucauldian notion of a discourse intrinsically shaped by power relations.
Consequently, the authors suggest that science studies will have to reflect
more closely the micro policies of participation, for example, by comparatively
examining the decision mechanisms according to their social and organizational context (for a similar argument, see Jasanoff 2003, 237-8).
One way to specify the micro policies of participation is suggested by
Stirling. He points out that participation is only one aspect of an ambivalent
deliberative procedure that encompasses both stages of opening up and closing
down the process. In the context of the whole process, open, participatory
phases alternate with more closed, restricted ones. Participatory assessments
of new technologies are often limited to the end-of-pipe phases and do not
stretch back to early stages of technological design. To understand these
dialectics, Stirling introduces a conceptual distinction between the functions

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of appraisal and commitment in technology policies and between normative, instrumental, and substantive approaches in the process of
appraisal. His argument is a reminder of the inherently ambivalent and conflictive character of participatory practices. In other words, participatory
reasoning is not necessarily in contradiction with deliberative closure at
the end of a policy process.
As important as the study of micro policies is, the articles also point at
the need for enhancing the analysis of macro policies of participatory practices. Even a seemingly egalitarian participation of nonscientific actors on
the micro level (for example, within single research projects) will be futile
as long as the political and economic conditions under which research is
performed are not reflected. In this sense, Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris point
at the close connections between government authorities, such as public expert
commissions, and the biotech industryconnections with a crucial influence
on the shaping of government policies. Similarly, Callon and Rabeharisoa
caution against a romantic view of participatory approaches in science policy
as long as participatory policies take place in the context of an economic
market with its own rules. Under contemporary market conditions, participation does not automatically substitute commercial activities with
noncommercial ones. The authors therefore call for a new sociological or
anthropological analysis of markets that would insist on the diversity of
markets and organizations (similarly to Callon and Muniesa 2005).
Notes
1. The articles go back to papers presented at an international conference on Shifting
Boundaries between Science and Politics: New Research Perspectives in Science Studies
held in June 2004 at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
fr Sozialforschung, WZB). This introduction profited considerably from the collaboration
with Sheila Jasanoff in preparing the congress and from helpful comments by Christophe
Bonneuil.
2. To conceptualize such planning policies, sociologists Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes
Weyer (1994) spoke of an emerging experimental society, in which modern science is recognized as crucial for social process and therefore granted big institutional spaces for its
knowledge production (i.e., big science institutions). For a detailed discussion of Krohn and
Weyers argument, see Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris [this issue].
3. For a recent survey based on the American case, see Guston 2000; for OECD countries,
including Western Europe, see Elzinga and Jamison 1995; Braun 1997; Braun 2003; and
Jasanoff 2003.
4. For recent accounts, see Joss 1999 and Jasanoff 2003. See also the contributions to
Kleinman 2000a and Irwin and Wynne 1995.

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and conditional perspective. Stirling is critical of the fact that in current

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