Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:06:30.534Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The place of people in our knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2009

Helga Nowotny
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The science system of Western civilization is facing irreversible transformations. These transformations will affect the relationship between the public image of science and the actual practice within the sciences. In a situation in which scientists are increasingly asked ‘what have you lately done for us’, the alleged purity and objectivity of the sciences have to be reconsidered and we have to rethink the place of people in the knowledge produced by the sciences. Bringing together insights from social and historical studies of science, this article argues for the awareness of a more local, historically and socially contingent knowledge production, which – due to this local embeddedness – can lead to a socially more robust science.

Type
Focus: Science and society
Information
European Review , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , May 1999 , pp. 247 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Nowotny, H. (1997) New societal demands. In Science in Tomorrow's Europe, edited by Barré, Rémi et al. (Paris, Economica International) pp. 87–94.Google Scholar
2.Ezrahi, Y. (1990) The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
3.Sarewitz, D. (1996) Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (Philadelphia, Temple University Press).Google Scholar
4.Irwin, A. (1995) Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development (London, Routledge).Google Scholar
5.Hajer, M. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourses: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford, Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
6.Jasanoff, S. (1990) The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
7.Husserl, E. (1936) Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Philosophie (Hamburg, Meiner).Google Scholar
8.Huizinga, J. (1936) Im Schatten von morgen. Eine Diagnose des kulturellen Leidens unserer Zeit (Bern/Leipzig, Gotthelf Verlag) pp. 44–47.Google Scholar
9.Rip, A. (1998) Modern and post-modern science policy. EASST Review, 17, 13–16.Google Scholar
10.Elkana, Y. (1981) A programmatic attempt at an anthropology of knowledge. In Sciences and Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Studies of the Sciences, edited by Mendelsohn, E. and Elkana, Y. (Dordrecht, D. Reidel) pp. 1–76.Google Scholar
11.Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London, Sage).Google Scholar
12.Fuller, S. (1997) Science: Concepts in Social Sciences (Buckingham, Open University Press) pp. 132–133.Google Scholar
13.Daston, L. (1998) Fear and loathing of the imagination in science. Daedalus, 127, 73–95.Google Scholar
14.Daston, L. and Galison, P. (1992) The image of objectivity. Representations, 40, 81–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15.Daston, L. and Park, K. (1998) Wonders and the Orders of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books).Google Scholar
16.Wenneras, C. and Wold, A. (1997) Nepotism and sexism in peer-review. Nature, 387, 341–343.Google Scholar
17.Ziman, J. (1978) Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
18.Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
19.Shapin, S. (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
20.Callon, M. (1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power Action and Belief, edited by Law, J. (London: Routledge & Kegan) pp. 196–123.Google Scholar
21.Callon, M. (1992) Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays of Power, Technology and Domination, edited by Law, J. (London: Routledge & Kegan) pp. 132–161.Google Scholar
22.Callon, M. and Latour, B. (1981) Unscrewing the big leviathan: how actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociology, edited by Knorr-Cetina, K. and Cicourel, A. V. (London, Routledge & Kegan) pp. 277–303.Google Scholar
23.Wynne, B. (1991) Knowledges in context. Science, Technology and Human Values, 16, 111–121.Google Scholar
24.Wynne, B. (1996) Misunderstood misunderstandings: social identities and public uptake of science. In Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, edited by Irwin, A. and Wynne, B. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press) pp. 19–46Google Scholar
25.Irwin, A. (1995) Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development (London: Routledge).Google Scholar
26.Hajer, M. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourses: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
27.Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage).Google Scholar
28.Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1995) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press).Google Scholar
29.Nature, 381, (30 05 1996) 355.Google Scholar
30.Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. B. (1984) Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley, University of California Press).Google Scholar
31.Michael, M. (1996) Ignoring science: discourses of ignorance in the public understanding of science. In Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, edited by Irwin, A. and Wynne, B. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) pp. 107–125.Google Scholar
32.Wynne, B. (1996) Misunderstood misunderstandings: social identities and public uptake of science. In Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, edited by Irwin, A. and Wynne, B. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) pp. 19–46.Google Scholar
33.Gago, J. M. (1998) The Social Sciences Bridge (Lisbon, Observatório das Ciências e das Tecnologias).Google Scholar
34.Nowotny, H. and Schuebeler, P. (1998) Urbanisation problems and challenges.In Proceedings of the 1998 Annual Meeting Alliance for Global Sustainability, 24–27 01, Zurich, Switzerland, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, pp. 53–55.Google Scholar
35.Epstein, S. (1996) Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press).Google Scholar
36.Epstein, S. (1997) Activism, drug regulation, and the politics of therapeutic evaluation in the AIDS Era: a case study of ddC and the ‘surrogate markers’ debate. Social Studies of Science, 27, 691–726.Google Scholar
37.Galison, P. (1997) Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
38.Galison, P. and Stump, D. J. (eds) (1996) The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Stanford University Press).Google Scholar