Conjunto de planos y diagramas del sistema propuesto

cognition to context

A researcher calls at your home. You make her a cup of tea. After taking down some demographic details, she asks a series of questions about science and scientific method. Does the sun go round the earth or the earth go round the sun? Do lasers work by focusing sound waves? How scientific are physics, psychology, history, astrology? How do scientists test a new drug? After the questionnaire (and the cup of tea) has been finished, you are left wondering just how your ‘scientific literacy’ compares with the rest of the population. A few months later, an article in the newspaper tells you what you had half- expected: many members of the public are revealed as quite ignorant about basic scientific facts.

You have lived in the same area since you were a child. You know nearly all your neighbours. Your town is situated close to a chemical works and many of your friends and relatives work there. Occasionally you hear about things that have gone wrong at the plant: mishaps such as chemical spillages and gas releases. You and your neighbours begin to suspect that the recent increase in local children’s asthma may be linked to the plant. The chemical company holds a number of open meetings which you attend. Managers and scientists from the plant reassure you that there is nothing to worry about. At the back of the room are two university lecturers – sociologists – taking notes. You recog- nize them because they came to your house and interviewed you about the chemical plant, what you knew about it, where you got your information and who you trusted. You ask one of the lecturers after the meeting whether he would choose to live in your neighbourhood. He replies that he is there to listen not to ‘bias’ local discussions. One of your friends observes afterwards that sociologists probably live in nice houses where there are no smelly factories.

These two simple vignettes take us into the multidiscipline generally known as the ‘public understanding of science and technology’ (some call it ‘PUSET’, but we’ll refer to it by the more common abbreviation, ‘PUS’). That is to say, they are both concerned, in one way or another, with exploring and

gauging the relationship between the ‘public’ and ‘science’. Our liberal use of ‘scare quotes’ should immediately alert the reader to the fact that understand- ing, science and public are all contestable concepts. That is, they are all inter- preted in various, often conflicting ways, among those who work in the field of the public understanding of science and technology.

This point about the contested nature of language in this sub-field is linked to our description of PUS as a multidiscipline. As we shall see, PUS

incorporates the concerns, assumptions and techniques of several disciplines (especially psychology, sociology and anthropology). However, and as we will later suggest with regard to social theory, PUS has developed at a distance from these disciplines – so that, despite their importance, the issues raised have effectively been dismissed from most social scientific discussion.

Although very simply expressed, our vignettes reflect two prevalent ways of doing research in the public understanding of science and technology. Crudely, these can be labelled ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’, but there is more at stake here than a simple question of research technique. Instead, each approach embodies a range of assumptions that are both ‘intellectual’ and ‘practical’ in character. Thus, each approach reflects differing tacit models of the nature of the person, the role of knowledge in social understanding, the structure of society and the purpose of politics. On one level, these differences can be seen as typical of academic debates: each vignette reflects separate intel- lectual traditions that to some extent address different intellectual questions. Within many such controversies, arguments over the ‘rigour’ of research are paramount. Certainly, these abound in the public understanding of science and technology. As such, the researches being represented in the two vignettes above involve different claims about whether conducting questionnaire stud- ies ‘really’ does get at people’s understandings (ecological validity), and about whether conducting ethnographic studies of local communities ‘really’ does tell us anything generalizeable (reliability).

In turn, these questions of rigour are bound up with issues concerning what the research is ‘for’. If one can show that one’s research into the public understanding of science and technology reveals ‘something real’ about the public, then this ‘something real’ can serve as the basis for action (e.g. the development of science policy, the production of educational initiatives, innovation in public consultation mechanisms). Practical questions of what to

do about the sometimes-troubled relationship between science and the public

are very much to the fore within PUS research. However, and as we will sug- gest, the very definition of practical problems (should we be addressing the public understanding of science or the scientific understanding of the public?) has major implications for the form and direction of academic research.

Here, we come to the second level on which one can approach the public understanding of science and technology. It is a multidiscipline that has, in various ways, developed in direct response to the expressed needs of science

and scientifically related institutions. Why is the public critical of develop- ments in science and technology? Why can’t people take a more careful look at the scientific evidence before getting agitated over nuclear waste disposal, genetically modified foods or the activities of the chemical industry? Ques- tions like these have led to a call for further initiatives in the area of PUS (including social scientific research) from institutions that span central government, local government, research councils and scientific institutions, the commercial sector and charities. We will consider in detail the institutional environment in which the public understanding of science and technology is embedded in Chapter 3. Suffice it to say for now that the institutional context within which funds for public understanding of science and technology research are made available – and within which such studies are received and acted upon – is crucial.

But lest it appear that the public understanding of science and technology is simply shaped by this institutional context, we should make it clear from the outset that these institutions increasingly have come to rely upon the public understanding of science and technology as a multidiscipline. In mak- ing this point, we are drawing in particular upon recent European experience. Sceptics would say that this is largely due to the increasing frustration and confusion within industry and government (why can’t the public learn to love science and technology?). Certainly, this reliance, as will become apparent in subsequent chapters, reflects a growing number of pressures on scientific institutions. Increasingly, it would seem, institutions must address:

• the requirement to embed research programmes within the concerns of the public;

• the need to assess the economic receptivity of a population to techno- scientific products such as genetically modified foodstuffs;

• the need to map scientific illiteracy to enhance the public’s demo- cratic capacities;

• the desire to increase institutional credibility by visibly taking account of the complex and nuanced views of the relevant public. From this list, it is already possible to see that the different perspectives and approaches that make up the public understanding of science and tech- nology are likely to serve different purposes depending upon the institutional context which, in part, shapes them. However, in this chapter we concentrate on the academic (or internal) development of the public understanding of science and technology. That is to say, we consider what constitutes the multidiscipline of public understanding of science and technology – the range of techniques, models, studies and so on. We trace the ways in which earlier – largely quantitative – work in this field presupposed a particular model of the member of the public. This entailed a citizenry that required scientific

education because it was essentially deficient in scientific knowledge. Con- sequently, the citizen was disabled from proper involvement in the democratic process which increasingly depended, or so it was claimed, upon a certain level of scientific literacy.

We next show how this ‘deficit model’ has been challenged in a number of ways. In particular, we look at how, within PUS, there has been an ‘ethno- graphic turn’ that places emphasis less on cognition and more on cultural context. This turn, we shall argue, involves a more complex conception of the public’s relations with science. For this reason, and for the fact that it is begin- ning to play a greater role in science policy (see Chapter 3), we spend more space explicating and exemplifying it. In particular, we review two key case studies to provide a flavour of this research style. These main case studies will be supplemented by the findings from other selected empirical studies (e.g. Couch and Kroll-Smith 1991; Layton et al. 1993; Michael 1996a; Arksey 1998;

Barr and Birke 1998). In the process, we elaborate on how publics’ responses to expert knowledge and scientific institutions have been shown to be funda- mentally bound up with issues of identity and trust. However, we also draw attention to the ways that these approaches have rather neglected the ‘broader picture’ – one that has traditionally been provided by social theory.