Production and Use of Science

Production and Use of Science Some research issues approached by Uppsala STS For Uppsala Newsletter History of Science, Uppsala University Alexandra Waluszewski

Science and Society - some hyped and some neglected issues

Early March 2005 and the telephone is ringing at Uppsala University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies. On the other end is a journalist from one of Sweden’s largest business magazines. “Can you tell me which are Uppsala University’s most creative research environments, and what benefits they create for the regional business world?” Instead of a reply, the question ends up in a long, intense discussion on what basic understanding of academic research triggers the journalist to ask this question. First, why is it that academic research is thought to produce values that are not only useful in the business world, but can also contribute to economic benefits? Is not the basic logic of science is to produce new knowledge – while the economic world always has to go for solutions that are possible to combine with the main part of earlier investments? Second, why is it is thought to be possible to activate academic research in a time and space close to where it is produced? Third, why is the activated knowledge produced by academic research thought to be easy to recognise when it is embedded in a user structure? The telephone discussion is concluded with the journalist stating; “Interesting. I have never heard that view on the use of science and technology before.” We had not even had time to touch upon a fourth related issue: how academic research in itself, science as well as social science, is affected by the strong desire for rapid economic outcomes.

Although this small “telephone intermezzo” was nothing more than an individual journalist’s clash with an engaged STS researcher, it could also be a sign of something more serious. Was it not an illustration of how different the relationship among science, technology and society

1 appears, depending on the perspectives and underlying assumptions from which it is considered?

Being engaged in academic research has probably always meant being exposed to expectations. However, the contemporary academic researcher faces not only expectations related to the research discipline itself, but also to its effects on economic growth – particularly if this scientist is engaged in such areas as molecular biology, nanotechnology or biotechnology. If, however, the academic researcher is engaged in social science, the expectations include the ability to deliver recipes for developing innovation systems and dynamic science-based clusters, populated by fast growing entrepreneurial firms. Worldwide, governments and research policy organisations are increasingly looking to science as a producer of innovations and economic growth. Or, as expressed by OECD, “In the knowledge-based economy, science and technology and their applications in industry and communications are major sources of economic growth and well-being.”1 A twin perspective is presented by the EU Commission. To reach goals of the “Lisbon strategy”, i.e. “the goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world,” science, and its ability to produce innovations, is given a key role:2 “Europe needs more innovations.”3 In the EU interpretation there is no doubt as to where this underused source of innovation can be found – it is waiting within the walls of the universities. Also in countries and regions with a “developing” economic and scientific system, such as China, science is ascribed an important role in the creation of innovations and prospering businesses. For example, on behalf of the Chinese government, the Chinese Academy of Sciences is encouraged to create a “modern science civilization and innovation culture in China,” through the “dissemination of scientific knowledge, spirit and methodology throughout society by adopting an open and networked means”. 4

If faith in science and technology as engines of economic progress seems to have reached an all time high, the understanding of the nature of science also appears to be shifting. “Scientific research used to be seen as a tool to probe the secrets of nature; today it is increasingly

1 http://oecd.org/about/0,2337

2 http://europa.eu.int/comm/enterprise/entrepreneurship/action_plan

3 http://europa.eu.int/comm/enterprise/innovation 4 http://english.cas.ac.cn/eng2003

2 thought of as cutting-edge technological development.” (Widmalm, 2004, p. 7) However, while the reliance on science as a benefactor of economic growth increases, public trust in scientific and technological expertise seems to stand on more shaky ground; “…many fear that, if science is seen as a form of technological development, and if research teams become more like small firms, the freedom and variety of intellectual pursuits at the university is imperilled.” (Ibid p. 8) 5

A common denominator

What all these contemporary efforts to connect academic research to technological change and societal development and economic growth have in common is a strong concentration on the production of academic research and on the intermediary side. The main attention is concentrated on how to get academic research to produce innovations, and how to create an “innovation system” that can deliver these new solutions to entrepreneurial, high-tech oriented businesses or organisations. However, this view of science means neglecting a particular issue: How is science (including social science) activated in society, and how does this activation affect the production and use of knowledge? This issue is also a common denominator of the research related to Uppsala STS. It is approached from three different angles, all related to science, technology and society.

A first aspect concerns how academic research is affected by this increasingly “economistic” view of science. How are science and social science influenced by expectations of outcomes that can be rapidly translated to economic growth? The increasing faith in science not only concerns the ability to utilise its outcome, but also the prospect of managing the development towards certain areas. How do these ambitions affect academic research? For example, how are research areas that are assumed to produce outcomes that can be translated into economic values – life science in particular – affected by being managed towards goals that appear as beneficial from the managing side’s short term perspective? Furthermore, how are research areas that are assumed to produce outcomes that are difficult to translate into economic values – humanities in particular – affected by the contemporary objectives?

5 This report can be downloaded at www.sts.uu.se

3 A second aspect concerns development of research policy and its underlying assumptions. Research policy emerges as a central area in national as well as trans-national politics. But on what understanding of the relationship between production and use of science and technology is contemporary research policy based? Why is it that so many endeavours are directed to the creation of a supply of “cutting-edge” science and innovations, while so little attention is directed towards how the use of science and technology is created? A simplification that becomes rather surprising when we consider the impressive numbers of empirical studies on the relationship between production and use of science, carried out in the history of science, history of technology, economic history and business studies, among others. What these studies, representing a wide variety of research perspectives, call forth is that the relationship between production and use of scientific knowledge is far from smooth and straightforward. For example, already thirty years ago, in his Nobel Prize lecture, Hayek (December, 1974) warned us of the predominant understanding that production of knowledge is equal to the creation of a base of useful knowledge. “Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.”

A third aspect concerns how science and technology are used in the business and organisational world. As soon as the role of science and technology is approached from the user side, it is not the supply of science and technology that appears as a main problem, but rather how to embed new solutions into the existing, intricate patterns of organisational and technological solutions. In an industrial world where the exchanged resources are heterogeneous, economic values are created in resource combinations activated over business and organisational borders. Thus, in a user perspective it is not the new knowledge in itself that creates economic values, but its effects on other resources when embedded into existing structures (Håkansson, Waluszewski, 2002). Activating new science or technology in an economic setting, as Lindqvist (1984), Rosenberg (1984) and Hughes (1990) have illustrated, means to bring it into new economic, social and technological contexts. And, if science and technology are, as Hayek (1945, p. 519-520) suggested a half century ago, just “disperse bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge”, a main question becomes: Why is it possible to embed and activate some scientific knowledge in an economic setting?

4 Some research projects and some sources of inspiration

Uppsala STS approaches the above questions on science, technology and society through two main research programmes: a) Life Science, Industry and Society, b) Research and Policy. Although the research projects related to Uppsala STS stretch over many different disciplines, from philosophy to business studies, they all share the understanding that science and technology are neither autonomous, developing in accordance with an internal logic, nor given resources that can be easily manipulated and tapped for economic or social profit by industry or government. Instead, a common consideration is how the production and use of science and technology appear when approached as outcomes of interactive, problem-solving processes – taking place in rather different, but related structures. Uppsala STS also promotes cross-disciplinary educational initiatives, such as the STS Masters of Engineering Programme, on undergraduate as well as graduate levels. The STS (“Systems in technology and society”) was launched during autumn 2000, and some of the first graduated students are engaged at Uppsala STS.

If it is difficult to map the sources of inspiration behind an individual research project, it is probably impossible to deliver a fair view of what’s colouring the many research activities connected to a multi-disciplinary research centre. However, some sources are more obvious than others. Uppsala STS owes a lot to a research programme called “Scientific Research – Technological Change – Industrial Renewal”, abbreviated VTI. (Vetenskaplig forskning – Teknisk förändring – Industriell förnyelse). Since 1996, scholars engaged in the history of science and business studies at Uppsala University, together with historians from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, have carried out an extensive collaboration on research concerning the relationship among science, technological development and industrial renewal. The project, which will be concluded in 2006, is a research school financed by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund, with fourteen doctoral students. Some of the researchers engaged in initiating, developing and co-ordinating the VTI project are Svante Lindqvist, the Nobel Museum (formerly Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm,) Tore Frängsmyr, Office for History of Science, Uppsala, Sven Widmalm, University of Linköping and Uppsala STS, (formerly Office for History of Science, Uppsala), Marie Nisser and Arne Kaijser (both at The Royal institute of Technology, Stockholm), Håkan Håkansson, BI, Oslo (formerly Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University and Alexandra Waluszewski, Uppsala

5 STS, (formerly Department of Business Studies) Uppsala University. In addition to being an important source of experiences on how to approach the relationship among science, technology and industrial development, Uppsala STS is also benefiting from the involvement of several post-docs graduated from the VTI project.

Another important source of inspiration, also used in the VTI project, is the traditional STS field, encompassing approaches for how to analyse science and technology and the relationship to social and cultural settings. Some approaches that have contributed important insights in this area are “LTS”, Large Technological Systems, “ANT”, Actor-Network, “SSK”, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and “SCOT”, Social Construction Theory, among others used in STS research environments as Stanford, MIT and Georgia Tech in the US, Oxford, Lancaster, Exeter, Twente, Copenhagen and Oslo.

A third important source, also used in the VTI project, is the so-called IMP or industrial network approach (see e.g. Håkansson, ed, 1982; Ford, et al, 2003; Håkansson, Harrison, Waluszewski, eds, 2004. For more recent studies, see www.impgroup.org). The IMP approach has its roots in research carried out at Uppsala University, Department of Business Studies during the last decades of the 20th century, but is today represented by scholars across Europe as well as other parts of the world. The IMP approach shares the interactive view on the relationship among science, technology and society with the above-mentioned STS schools. However, it also provides tools for investigating, in particular, how science and technology is activated in an economic setting, and how these sources of knowledge can contribute to the creation of economic values.

The general issue of how science is activated in society – the different logics of production and use of science included – is articulated in research projects such as “Boundary-crossing science: Swedish life science after 1900”, “The politics of research and the science of policy”, “Interactive Economy”, “Life Science and Biotech Uppsala, part 1; Seven decades of interactive resources” and “Life Science and Biotech Uppsala, part 2; Seven decades of international embeddedness”. For more information about these, welcome to the website www.sts.uu.se .