Measuring the tectonic shifts in public-private power and influence

Private funding of research and development has taken a much larger role in the United States over the decades. The values inherent in this shift reflect a shift in motivations as well. While pre-World War II research was much more private, Vannevar Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in an era of post-war, government funded research that would last for decades. The National Science Foundation (NSF) may have been a bastardized hybrid of Bush’s vision, but it served its purpose well for many years. Still, the public value in placing such responsibility in such an organization could have been hotly debated by the populace for years, but it was not. Even today, amid budget cutting nightmare scenarios, research funding is not coming under the same public/political scrutiny as other pieces of public expenditures. Why is that?

The shift toward privatization is one of the reasons for this shift in public sentiment. While the government may still claim to be at the wheel of the spending ship, it is actually the populace and private industry who are the pilots charting the course and the crew working the ship. One model that has worked well over time is that of privatizing profits and socializing the risks. As Sheila Jasanoff might say, this would be a conversation about “legitimacy and meaning”. Who gets to call the shots and who takes responsibility when things go wrong?

This very question plays out in other discussions of privatization. Take the military contracting company Blackwater, for example. Their cavalier treatment of civilians in Middle Eastern war zones has kept American diplomats awake at night and drinking lots of tea during the day to patch things up with the locals. It’s an example of privatizing the profit and socializing the risk.

When private companies are allowed to take out patents on new discoveries, we are privatizing profit. When national or international governments cover the cost of governance of new technologies we are socializing the risk. Private companies may have trade groups and some small amount of self- governance, but generally it is the large governments who set up commissions and foundations to study the risk of new technologies. So where does the public voice come in? How do we decide who calls the shots and who takes the fall?

Over the decades since World War II, the United States has fostered a partnership between private and public institutions with standards set up for examining risk and distributing profits in order to promote scientific breakthroughs. The public and other institutional actors – ie. religions - have had varying degrees of influence in the decision making process, but the shift in power has become accepted over time. As we frame and resolve these philosophical questions, we have come to an accord. Both private and public interests co-produce scientific knowledge and technology within the context of society. While it may be an uncomfortable and contentious peace at times, it is a workable dynamic system, nonetheless. The fact that we recognize and debate the power shift between public and private funding of research and development shows that the system itself is healthy.

Explaining Co-Production

Co-production is a simple, yet powerful idea. Tomorrow, I'll be talking about this weeks readings, but as prelude, I would like to discuss what exactly Sheila Jasanoff means by co-production, how it can be used to improve STS scholarship, and common pitfalls.

Co-production, at is core, is “the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it.” (Jasanoff, pg 2). What this means explicitly is that scientific knowledge and technology are produced by people and institutions, with inbuilt biases, political motives, and generally imperfect understanding. At the same time, science and technology legitimate and modify the power of the state and other institutions in critical ways. Telling only one side of the story, for example, presenting science as a purely social product with no relation to external reality, or explaining the economy as the simply mechanical workings of technology, do harm to the subject.

The goal of co-production is to possess explanatory power about how new objects and phenomenon come into existence, how controversies are created and resolved, how science and technology can be made intelligible across time, space, and culture, and finally how science and technology in particular, are made legitimate and meaningful.

Jasanoff divides co-production into two major branches. Constitutive co-production is concerned with “the ways that stability is created and maintained”. This branch is heavily influenced by the work of Foucault, and includes scholars such as Bruno Latour, who's Actor-Network Theory premises an equality between technology and human, natural and artificial, in terms of the role they can play. Anderson and Scott describe how nation-states are the product of ideas, in terms of convincing people to follow a flag as aided by mass media, and how they impose power through technological grids.

Interactional co-production is more concerned with epistemology, how we know what we know, how controversies are resolved, and credibility determined. Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump is the seminal work in this area, exploring how in their era Boyle and Hobbes were both natural and political philosophers, but Boyle was note-worthy for creating in his air pump expriments and the Royal Society, a means by which strangers could be made to trust the validity of scientific knowledge. Science becomes a form of politics. Merton and Polanyi study the structure of the “republic of science,” while sociologists of science use boundary work and core sets to delineate different fields. Langdon Winner's politics of technology explains how large technological systems impose their own structure onto society. Feminist scholars like Donna Haraway have done great work showing how theories of primate evolution embody the social norms and expectations of researchers more than reality. A profound ambivalence towards modernity, and the power that science has given to a small group of actors to shape society characterizes the vast majority of interactional scholarship.

The very diversity of major works Jasanoff lists as co-productionists shows it scope. The ambition of co-production encompasses every part of society, but it also tries to remain evenhanded, and know its limits. Co-production as an idiom, not a complete and absolute theory. Science and society are not co-produced in universal, repeating patterns, each instance much be properly situated in its historical context, and should draw from other theories. We cannot simply state that something is 'co-produced' and leave it at that empty holism. Similarly, it is not predictive or prescriptive, but with its superior ability to resolve questions at the intersection of science and society, co-production can improve work in history, anthropology, science and technology studies, political theory, and moral philosophy.

The modern world as we know it is one defined by scientific knowledge and technological artifacts. But science and technology are not givens, they are influenced by cultural and political institutions, which are themselves dependent on science and technology, and so on all the way down. The goal of co-production is insight into this complex, and absolutely fundamental process.