Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 1

Erschienen als Re-thinking science: from reliable to socially robust knowledge (2000). In:
Jahrbuch 2000 des Collegium Helveticum. Hg. mit Martina Weiss. Zrich: vdf. 221-244.
Bitte nur die publizierte Fassung zitieren
Re-thinking Science: From Reliable Knowledge to Socially
Robust Knowledge
Helga Nowotny
In October 1999 a symposium took place, entitled Re-Thinking Science: From Reliable
Knowledge to Socially Robust Knowledge. Michael Gibbons, Peter Scott and Helga
Nowotny presented their latest work and invited prepared comments from Anders Flodstrm,
Vice-Chancellor, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Dieter Imboden, Professor fr
Umweltphysik, ETH Zrich and Willi Roos, Prsident der Schweizerischen Akademie der
Technischen Wissenschaften. The discussion was moderated by Silvan Schweber, Department
of Physics, Brandeis University. The following presentation is based on the forthcoming book
(Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons forthcoming).
In our previous book The New Production of Knowledge my colleagues and I attributed
changes in the constitution of science and in research practice to the growing
contextualisation and socialisation of knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994). One of the
characteristics of Mode-2 science, we claimed, was that knowledge was now generated 'in the
context of application'. The implication of the argument was that science could no longer be
regarded as an autonomous space, clearly demarcated from others of society. Instead all these
domains had become heterogeneous and interdependent, even transgressive to the extent that
they sometimes ceased to be distinguishable. But even in this more open description, much of
the attention remained focused on science rather than society. Science's success has made the
world more complicated and scientists must wrestle with the consequences of this
complication - this seems to be a commonly accepted line of reasoning. Yet, if we are to take
seriously the claim of an increase in the contextualisation of knowledge, it matters whether
the idea of contextualised science is perceived as substantially different from earlier ideas of
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 2
science and, consequently, more threatening to the rigour of scientific method and robustness
of scientific practice. It will depend on how this 'context', i.e. society, is defined.
In the following four major arguments will be presented. First, it is contended that the
emergence of more open systems of knowledge production - Mode 2 science - and the growth
of complexity and uncertainty in society - Mode 2 society - are phenomena linked in a co-
evolutionary process. Second, a process of 'reverse communication' is transforming science
and this is, in the simplest terms, what is meant by contextualisation. Third, the process of
contextualisation moves science beyond merely reliable knowledge to the production of
socially more robust knowledge. This shift moves science into active engagement and
negotiations with society which takes place in the public space we call the agora. Fourth, the
range of perspectives found in the agora together with the ability of their proponents to
articulate their wishes and concerns as well as to mobilise resources for research activities
implies a more complex role for scientific and technical expertise, which is changing as
expertise becomes socially distributed. The social distribution of scientific and technical
expertise has epistemically to resonate in the scientific practices and theories in the manner in
which people be it potential users or be it citizens are conceptualised in these practices and
theories. Further, the social and institutional opportunities where society and science may
enter into a dialogue need fostering. These four interrelated processes provide the framework
for re-thinking science and, perhaps, the elements out of which a new 'contract' between
science and society will emerge.
Growing Complexity and the Co-evolution of Science and Society
The remarkable coincidence between the development of more open systems of knowledge
production (characterised as Mode 2) and the growth of complexity in society - has led to the
increase of an inherent uncertainty in both. One way of looking at this is in terms of an
erosion of society's stable categorisations, namely the state, market, culture and science.
These categorisations increasingly lack clear boundaries. Perhaps they make also less and less
sense, thus fuelling the search for new forms of symbolic expression and leading to post-
modernist hyperbole. Just as Mode 2 knowledge production has overlaid and confounded
Mode 1 disciplinary science by its heterogeneity and pluralism, so state, market and culture
have become 'fuzzy' or blurred categories that defy the orderly picture of functional
differentiation under conditions of modernity. Science too has become 'fuzzy', not because of
its overall failure to demarcate its boundaries and still less because it is running up against its
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 3
limits, but because its success has pushed it into ever more contextualised and contextualising
arenas. There the criteria of what constitutes 'success' are contested on grounds of 'values' that
defy their being opposed to 'facts'. The demarcations between science and non-science are no
longer evident, whenever the 'context of application' merges seamlessly with the 'context of
implication' that has been opened up. In this sense, the limits of science too are contested. Its
autonomous space is no longer guaranteed, since its potential guardians, state, market and
culture, are no longer recognisable there in their old identities, functions and roles. It is in this
sense, perhaps, that it is reasonable to speak of the emergence of a Mode 2 society in whose
shadow the shift towards Mode 2 knowledge production takes place.
Industrial society, and indeed the process of modernisation, has been characterised, and driven
by, processes of functional differentiation, as more and more specialist activities have
developed that require specialist institutions that embody conceptual as well as material levels
of organisation. The State, Market and Culture, and the relative autonomous spaces they
occupied, were products of this differentiation - as was science. The society of the future,
while being more specialised in its technical processes, may be less well differentiated. This
de-differentiation, which is an important strand within our analysis of Mode 2 in science and
research and also within the wider notions of a Mode 2 society, has been greatly enhanced and
aided by the rise of increasingly transgressive, distributed and instantaneous technologies,
techniques and 'boundary objects' that easily cross time and space, and travel from one
research site to another (Star and Griesemer 1989:393). De-differentiation, as highlighted in
reflexive modernisation, is not particularly conducive to institutional solidity. It makes for
societal volatility, seemingly without anchoring devices.
The inherent generation of uncertainties in both science and society is one of the crucial
elements in their co-evolution. On a historically unprecedented scale, both science and society
have opted for the production of the New in an open-ended process of moving towards a
plurality of unknown futures. Research is primarily valued as the driving force behind
economic competitiveness. As such its focus is on the innovative potential of discovering the
unknown and bringing it to fruition through a consciously designed and intentional process of
(managed) innovation, even if no central authority is in charge. Uncertainties abound in the
process of research. It is, in the word of Francois Jacob, 'le jeu des possibles' - in the sense
that its outcome is not known, nor knowable, before it has been achieved. The process of
research and its multiple practices are steeped in uncertainties which reflect the exponential
increase in the number of different directions which can profitably be explored by researchers.
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 4
The modern research enterprise has become a gigantic and unique kind of innovation
machinery, simultaneously enhancing scientific creativity and selectively filtering which
ideas, newly discovered phenomena or novel methods and techniques should be taken up and
developed. It is not simply that the inexorable accumulation of scientific discoveries
continuously creates new possibilities providing hopeful answers to the equally inexorable
supply of human demands, wants and desires. New scientific breakthroughs, particularly in
the bio-medical field but increasingly across many different research sites, open up new
arenas where social choices can, and must, be made - as well as leading to painful dilemmas
which otherwise could not have arisen.
Societies - like our own - which have embraced, in ideology and in practice, innovation have
not only accepted a certain measure of Schumpeterian 'creative destruction'; they have also
acknowledged in a deep sense the necessity of living with uncertainties. None of these
uncertainties can be limited from the start, or factored out, because both science and society
have chosen the relentless pursuit of the novel through innovation. The generation of
uncertainties is inherent to, and endemic in, research as it is in contemporary life. Among
those uncertainties coexist the positive and the negative. In a typically reflective mode the
identification of the positive (and therefore to be welcomed) and negative (and hence to be
condemned) is an uncertain and volatile process. However, the processes of generating
uncertainties and developing coping mechanisms to reduce them are neither random nor
entirely contingent. To adopt the language of self-organisation, locally limited imbalances
may exist but are prevented from spreading and becoming global through appropriately
structured environments. These local imbalances, nevertheless, are perceived to be and
experienced as uncertainties, which provoke counter-actions and coping mechanisms, which
in turn begin to condition each other and reproduce within a closed and reinforcing system.
Contextualisation: Society Speaks Back to Science
In modern times, science has always 'spoken' to society; indeed science' penetration of society
is close to being a defining characteristic of modernity. But now society 'speaks back' to
science. This, in the simplest terms, is what is meant by contextualisation. Science has always
'spoken' to society - in the sense that it has provided a continuous flow of new ways of
conceptualising the physical and, to some extent, the social world. A triumphant science
acquired a monopoly of describing and explaining 'reality', which both resisted and also
validated human wishes, fancies and follies. Because the physical world, including its
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 5
chemical and biological processes, came to be regarded as the most substantial component of
the 'real' world, a scientific definition of reality became ever more plausible. The everyday
world shrank to what scientists had discovered and were able to exploit.
Today, at any rate in developed countries, society 'speaks back' to science. Science is now
'listening', in part because the boundaries separating science and society are becoming more
porous. This is not entirely new. Indeed, the capacity of science and technology to generate
innovation has always depended on creative and interactive links between science and society,
many of which may have been mundane but some were crucial. However, to emphasise the
economic and societal significance of such links and to attempt to articulate them whether
through structured national innovation policies or in less structured ways through popular and
political expectations concerning science and technology already implied that the language
being spoken was that of society. The social had already entered. If it is taken for granted
today that science and technology are the driving forces behind increased economic
competitiveness and societal change, such dominant assumptions are themselves produced by
complex interaction processes. The current emphasis on science's and technology's potential
for innovation is only half the story. It is equally important to describe and understand the
impact of this mutual interpenetration on science itself.
Our thesis is that a Mode 2 society generates the conditions in which society is able to 'speak
back' to science; and that this reverse communication is transforming science.
Contextualisation is invading the private world of science, penetrating to its epistemological
roots as well as everyday practices, because it influences the conditions under which
'objectivity' arises and how its reliability is assessed. The claim that Mode 2 is a new mode of
knowledge production largely depends on this transformative quality of contextualisation.
However, to argue that society 'speaks back' to science is not to assert that science no longer
'speaks' to society. That new knowledge is being produced in increasingly complex contexts
of contemporary society is hardly controversial, but whether that knowledge should count as
science is hotly contested. Those who contest the scientific status of new knowledge argue
that when these contexts are themselves elements in the mode of knowledge production they
inevitably obstruct the production of 'real' science; that the externally imposed objectives and
expectations bound up in the contextualisation of knowledge threaten to destroy science by
undermining its objectivity which depends on disinterestedness. Since disinterestedness
guarantees objectivity, context-free science must be preserved. But this argument not only
invalidates the bulk of contemporary research; it also leads into what we call the 'objectivity
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 6
trap' from which no escape is possible without abandoning disinterestedness or compromising
objectivity. To evade this trap and validate the bulk of contemporary research, it is necessary
to demonstrate that contextualised knowledge is at least as 'objective' as uncontextualised
knowledge - albeit in a different sense.
What are the conditions under which contextualised knowledge would allow such a reverse
transformation to take place, while not undermining either disinterestedness or reliability?
The challenge is to demonstrate that contextualisation - often a reflection of shifting and
unstable configurations of interests and perspectives - can actually enhance what it means to
produce 'good science'. This amounts to a reversal of the traditional pattern of scientific
working, which has been to restrict as far as possible the range of external factors, or contexts,
which must be taken into account. Many of the most powerful scientific techniques -
reductionism, normalisation, sampling methods, control groups - are based on this
presumption of containment or isolation. The laboratory, or wider research arena, was a sterile
space - in a metaphorical as well as physical sense. Good science was constantly at risk of
being contaminated, even overwhelmed, by a surfeit of contexts. We argue that this is now in
the process of being changed.
Some, perhaps many, scientists may be prepared to accept that more highly contextualised
knowledge is not only inevitable (in the sense that, in the absence of contextualisation,
resources for science would dry up) and 'relevant' (in the sense that political, economic and
social agendas are more directly addressed) but even scientifically beneficial (in the limited
sense that a wider range of perspectives and techniques may be brought to bear on scientific
problems). But most will be reluctant to admit our contention that the more highly
contextualised the knowledge the more reliable it is likely to be - not necessarily within the
reductionist framework of disciplinary science which defines reliability almost exclusively in
terms of replicability, but because it maintains valid outside these 'sterile spaces' created by
experimental and theoretical science, a condition we have described as 'socially robust'.
From Reliable Knowledge to Socially Robust Knowledge
Our argument is that we are currently witnessing a significant shift from 'reliable knowledge'
to 'socially robust knowledge' (Nowotny 1999a). To be sure, the increasing importance of
'context' and the move towards contextualisation of knowledge has been under way for some
time. Changes in its epistemological dimension have been reflected within science in moving
from the search for 'truths' to the much more pragmatic aim of providing a provisional
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 7
understanding of the empirical world that simply 'works'. As the work of Lorraine Daston,
Peter Galison and other historians of science has shown, 'objectivity' did not spring suddenly
from once-for-all methods, but its historical understanding and altering definitions are the
outcome of a gradual process of 'objectification' that has gradually replaced 'truth'. The
concept of objectivity is itself a many-layered, polymorphous, and polyvalent notion (Daston
1992; Daston and Galison 1992). But whatever its many-layered meanings, it has been an
indispensable support to obtain certified and reliable knowledge. Without this reliability,
science would only be a game of the imagination, a powerless effort leading nowhere.
No one has done more than John Ziman to emphasise this aspect of science. Ziman argues
that scientific knowledge can be distinguished from other intellectual artefacts of human
society by the fact that its contents are consensual - achieving a maximum degree of
agreement - and consensible, i.e. to be comprehensible to other (although the definition, and
so the extent, of 'others' are crucial). It is through the operation of the twin processes of
consensibility and consensuality within the relevant peer group that science is able to produce
reliable knowledge (Ziman 1978). This is not the place to go into a detailed critique of the
limits of Ziman's model. However, one difficulty that came up already, pertains to the
development of Mode 2 knowledge production. Ziman's epistemological model holds that if
the rules which guide research practice are followed, a limited and provisional consensus is
produced and science produces reliable knowledge. But not everyone is equal. It is only
important that such a consensus is established among the members of a tight-knit community
of other specialists, within a particular peer group. They alone, it is argued, are in a position to
judge their peers and to uphold the standards leading to good science. In the context of Mode
2 knowledge production, with its shift from a discipline to a problem focus, a key question,
therefore, arises. In this new environment characterised by more intense interaction within a
much wider community of other practitioners - embracing other disciplines; or stretching
across the boundaries of academia and industry; or embracing even more heterogeneous
'users' - is it still possible to produce reliable knowledge? In The New Production of
Knowledge we acknowledged that the question of how scientific quality could be maintained
in a Mode 2 environment had not been properly addressed. To argue that, in principle,
additional criteria have to be considered in addition to traditional scientific excellence, even if
it continues to be a predominant element in the quality control system, is easy enough; the
tensions, dilemmas and contradictions that actually arise in scientific practice are more
difficult to dismiss. So it is essential to consider how Mode 2 knowledge production, a greater
emphasis on problem-relevance within a transdisciplinary setting and the specific contexts of
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 8
application in which this relevance arises, affects the formation of consensibility and
consensuality.
Ziman's verdict is unequivocal: Mode 2 may also incorporate traditional scientific values -
including, of course, the sheer obduracy of physical reality. According to Ziman, however, it
is clearly an activity where socio-economic power is the final authority (Ziman 2000). But
does this orientation towards a context of application and engagement with 'extra-scientific'
forces fatally undermine capacity of Mode 2 to produce reliable knowledge? How precisely
does the broader configuration of researchers coming from different disciplinary and
institutional backgrounds, who have been orchestrated or self-organised to search for
solutions to a common problem, undermine consensibility and consensuality? It is not clear
why the importance of consensuality should be less within such a diverse group, despite the
(apparently) greater difficulties in communicating and reaching a consensus. Consensibility,
although it too may be more difficult to sustain under Mode 2 conditions, is equally - or
perhaps even more - crucial. Peter Galison has described the emergence of so-called 'trading
zones' characterised by ingenious processes of negotiation between different cultural sub-
groups of physicists. For example, they devise 'pidgin' languages, which bridge the gaps
between theorists, experimentalists and machine-builders, and allow everyone to understand
and to be understood by the others. The members of such groups have very clear and nuanced
strategies of mutual exchange at work because, in their pursuit of a common objective, they
depend on the knowledge, skills and know-how of others which they would be unable to
obtain otherwise (Galison 1997). But there is no suggestion that consensuality, like
consensibility, cannot be practised in such a context.
Reliable knowledge, therefore, has always been reliable within bounds. In its conventional
(and constrained) as well as refined (and 'pure') sense, these bounds embrace a relatively
small number of peers. They police the bounds of reliable knowledge, ideally through
disciplinary cohesion, in order to limit as far as possible the contamination likely to be
produced if the surrounding social context is allowed to enter the realm of knowledge. The
ethos of academic science, and its social practices were designed to achieve this containment.
But it is difficult to see how this containment strategy can remain valid, except in the
exceptional context of the need to preserve scientific 'enclaves', when science has entered the
agora. In this new environment the boundaries within which reliable knowledge is contained
have been dramatically extended, even abolished. Reliable knowledge, as validated in its
disciplinary context, is no longer self-sufficient or self-referential. Instead, it may become
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 9
endlessly challenged, and often fiercely contested, by a much larger potential community,
which insists that its claims to be heard are as valid as those of more circumscribed scientific
communities and demands that its preferences are taken into account. Objective knowledge is
no longer sufficient in itself if the outcomes of its objectivity are ceaselessly negotiated,
contested and often rejected on grounds that are not even related to its objectivity. Of course,
reliable knowledge in terms of its disciplinary relevance and validity, like objective
knowledge, are not simply to be discarded or ignored. Reliable and/or objective knowledge
continues to provide the foundations on which our knowledge of the natural world depends.
But neither is any longer sufficient of itself.
The shift towards socially robust knowledge is a necessary outcome of the process of
contextualisation, but in order to become effective, it has to be fully articulated, internalised
and continually tested. This does not mean, however, that the basic conditions and processes
which have been underpinning the production of reliable knowledge are necessarily
compromised by the shift to socially robust knowledge. Reliable knowledge remains the
indispensable 'condition sine qua non' of the fact that 'science works'. But if reliable
knowledge has been undermined, it is possible that this has occurred as much by the narrow
reductionism of scientific practice as by any attempt to widen the range of stake-holders or
more systematically to articulate the context in which science is produced. Science was
recognised to be inherently incomplete because it is, primarily, a method but also to achieve
reasonable reliability the problem terrain had to be circumscribed and, therefore, restricted to
the judgements not of the scientific community as a whole but to those of a peer group. Both
of these aspects are carried forward into socially robust knowledge: knowledge remains
incomplete, but no longer only in the conventional sense that it will eventually be superseded
by superior knowledge, but also in the sense that it is sharply contested and no longer entirely
within the range of control of scientific peers. This shift involves re-negotiating and re-
interpreting boundaries that have been dramatically extended so that science cannot be
validated as reliable by conventional discipline-bound norms. While becoming robust, it must
be sensitive to a much wider range of social implications.
Today, there is a genuine urge to participate in a democratically responsive manner in
scientific and technological developments, which carries serious consequences for society and
individuals alike. Participation is a form of appropriating otherwise arcane knowledge through
and for the agora. The shift from a culture of scientific autonomy to a culture of
accountability, although never smooth and easy, is a case in point. But accountability is still
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 10
too reactive; it is permanently at risk of being interpreted in a formalistic and bureaucratised
way. Far from being a mere nuisance or a necessary price to be paid for the democratic
demand of greater accountability, contestation of scientific and technological knowledge co-
induces and produces a transformed and enlarged definition of knowledge production. In
order to respond, scientific knowledge has to become even more reliable which entails its
being made socially robust. This can only be achieved by acknowledging that objective
knowledge is the result of a historical process, which inevitably renders it partial and
contextual. It is inherently incomplete, but it can become better suited for and made to fit the
particularities of specific locations, instances, and conditions in which it is produced, applied,
contested or negotiated. Such an enlarged notion of reliable knowledge starts from the
premise that there cannot be any one 'objective method', nor any abstract appeal to the laws of
nature, which would dispense from allowing itself to be drawn even further into the special
configurations of the context which demands more, and not less, socially robust knowledge.
The Context of Implication and the Changing Role of Expertise
Socially robust knowledge has three aspects, all of which are closely interrelated. First, it is
valid not only inside but also outside the laboratory. This means that the context of
application has to be extended to include the context of implication - the many, partly
foreseeable, partly not foreseeable impacts that the production of new knowledge and the
innovations that will result from them are likely to have. Second, this validity is achieved
through involving an extended group of experts, including lay 'experts'. In this process of
extension, the notion of what constitutes 'expertise', its role and function, are likely to undergo
changes in meaning, however (Nowotny 2000b). Put briefly, the role of scientific and
technical expertise that is so crucial to decision making in highly industrialised societies, is
changing, as expertise spreads throughout society, resulting in the fragmentation of
established links between scientific expertise and institutional structures, whether of
government, industry or the professions. Experts must now extend their knowledge - which is
not simply an extension of the ones that arise in their specialist field - to widely disparate
areas, and try to integrate what they 'know' with what others want to, or should, 'do'. Since
expertise now has to bring together knowledge which is itself distributed, contextualised and
heterogeneous, it cannot arise at one specific site, or out of the view of a specific discipline or
a group of highly respected researchers. Rather it must emerge from bringing together the
many different knowledge dimensions involved - which increasingly includes the knowledge
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 11
and competencies of lay people and the confidence they have in them. Third, since society is
not only an addressee of science any longer, but an active partner who is participating in the
production of 'social knowledge' underlying the implications of scientific innovations, such
knowledge is less likely to be contested when it is not merely reliable, but has actually been
made socially robust.
In part, the mood of public contestation is a reflection of more general conditions that
prevailed under modernity. These conditions do not point to a rise in anti-science sentiments;
to the contrary, they have served science well and have been well served by science. The
proneness to contest is integral to 'speaking back' to science. It reflects a more critical stance
that comes with higher levels of education. The process of democratisation legitimises and
induces a pluralism which admits its own conflictuality. Science may indeed be the last
bastion of high culture, while all other forms of cultural creativity and their expression have
become thoroughly mixed and hybridised. One of the 'package deals' in which Enlightenment
ideals came to dominate the cultural norms of modernity was to accord highest priority to
'rationality' as guiding value to scientific inquiry. As the Romantic movement never ceased to
insist, other values subsequently lost out. The scientification, rationalisation and technisation
of the West was achieved at a price of an entrenched polarity: it entailed the diminution of
other, competing social values which, at the time, were no less rooted in society. The polar
split within cultural modernity between its rational Enlightenment branch and its darker,
Romantic, side to which subjectivity, aesthetics, the imagination and emotions were relegated,
has only lately been mitigated, when it became syncretised under postmodern conditions.
Even if syncretism and hybridisation, so prevalent in contemporary societies, can be
interpreted as another assault on the ideal of 'pure' science, they are the cultural expression
emerging from and engendered by novel forms of interaction between technology, science
and social life forms. This is one of the key ingredient that underlies the recent 'science wars',
sadly missed - like so many other points - by a scientific elite that is only all too keen to
preserve its political monopoly to speak in the name of Science.
Conventional arguments about a context-free, universalistic and 'objective' science are
unlikely to have much appeal in the future. The basis on which the authority of science rests is
increasingly becoming decoupled from its foundations. While the monopoly of science to
define the 'reality' of the natural and, increasingly, the social world is loosening none of its
grip, this 'reality' too is becoming increasingly infused and invaded by human interventions
and intervenors and therefore, by its social dimensions. Inevitably, the authority of science
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 12
becomes more closely tied to concrete practices, their outcomes and impacts, and the
credibility and trustworthiness of institutions with which science is seen as being closely
allied. If one is ready to accept the fact that the image of a universal, invariant and context-
independent science is becoming irrelevant for most practical purposes and that it is the
specific context, in which knowledge is produced, taken up and transformed, which matters,
the context-sensitivity of science must be heightened and awareness of it must be spread. The
necessary changes pertain to the ways in which problems are perceived, defined and
prioritised, which has implications for the way in which scientific activities are organised.
Criteria of scientific excellence no longer stand alone, but must become integrated with social
robustness. If the image of a universal science can no longer be maintained, a greater context-
sensitivity also implies admitting a greater diversity of scientific practices, which takes place
in specific settings, evolving over time. A fresh view on this diversity is not only part of the
social reality, but also a strength to be exploited.
The Place of People in Our Knowledge
One way of how to make science more context-sensitive, is to bring in people (Nowotny
1999b). What is the place of people in scientific knowledge? What place is accorded to social
knowledge - knowledge and competencies that people hold, but also knowledge about social
processes as produced by the social sciences and humanities - in the making of knowledge in
the natural and engineering sciences? This invites, first, a fresh look at the social sciences and
humanities and what they have to offer to strengthen interdisciplinary efforts and policy-
making. The social sciences became institutionalised at the turn of the 20th century, but an
institutionalised dialogue between the natural sciences and the social sciences has become
possible only in recent years. At the turn of the last century, the social sciences were
essentially faced with the overarching problem of how to understand and help to maintain a
viable social order which would allow the integration of the masses in the processes of
modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. These integration processes proceeded on
the political level, where the concept of citizenship became more inclusive, both in terms of
social groups who were admitted as in terms of obligations and rights connected with it.
Economically, industrial workers, in themselves a novel category, eventually became
integrated as workers in the system of mass production; later they were integrated as
consumers. In an electronic age, we shall all become 'users'. Cultural integration proceeded
through an educational system which homogenised the ethnic and national identities of people
living within the territorial boundaries of the nation state. The rising welfare state had to
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 13
provide mechanisms for warding off the uncertainties and vulnerabilities that came with the
disruptive effects of the industrialisation and modernisation process. At the turn of the 21st
century, some of these problems are still with us, but their scale and nature has been
transformed, pertaining now to an emerging global order, migration and multi-ethnicity, as
well as the altered relationship between citizens and the state. Within industrialised societies,
the issues of work and employment have taken on central importance, linked as they are to
technological change and new demands for skills and qualifications. Questions of choice of
life styles; the future of learning and education; a knowledge-based economy as well as the
shift from state to market; from centralisation, as one of the hallmarks of modernity, to
decentralisation. All these shifts suggest that perhaps a deeper change is taking place
undermining the concept of order as modernity had defined it. The life sciences have
emphasised the pervasiveness of self-organisation at work and the physical sciences have
discovered that disordered atoms can give the consistent responses needed for the modern era
of electronics. Seeming disorder may reveal new patterns of order - when it can be understood
and managed.
What then is the place of people in contemporary society and how is this reflected in our
knowledge? Do people appear as passive subjects or as active agents? Are they represented at
the micro-level or at the macro-level? When do they appear as mere statistical aggregates,
when as some kind of 'average'? How are these conceptualisations of people related not only
to their actual behaviour, attitudes and values, but to concrete policy questions? What are the
conceptions that engineers, climate modellers, molecular biologists and others have about
people - as individuals and as collectives - who will utilise or be affected by the knowledge
they produce? How far does the context of application of knowledge extend forward into the
context of implication and how can the latter be reflectively built into the research process?
What is the place assigned to human agents, both conceptually and in actual practice?
Certainly, not all fields of knowledge lend themselves equally well to put people in, although
all knowledge must in the end somehow relate to people.
Science in the agora
How can these issues be addressed concretely? If it is true that modernity's grand narratives
have evaporated, it cannot be expected that the consensus that has sustained science and
technology in the past, will ever be restored again. Science and technology played a crucial,
and highly successful, part in the project of modernity. They opened and sustained a future
horizon of expectations of social, as well as scientific and technological, progress. They
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 14
functioned effectively to help glue together the consensus between otherwise divergent social
groups, in providing substance and actual proofs of improved living conditions, thus defining
a common outlook and a common future project. The 'promissory notes' were partly
delivered, partly transformed and continue to await reform. They still reach out towards a
future that is more uncertain, volatile and promising than ever. Actively engaged in
supporting and building the modernisation process through practical and theoretical expertise
and through bolstering the education system as one of the important cultural and
homogenising foundations of the nation-state, science has provided a unique kind of
legitimacy for the project of modernity. Now it is itself in need of new legitimation which can
only come from being actively engaged in the agora (Nowotny 2000a).
Scientific objectivity and the reliable knowledge it engenders were part of these hallmarks of
modernity. But just as the universality of the nation-state turned out to be an illusion, despite
the fact of its formal spread around the world, so has it been impossible for science and
technology to maintain the social function of providing social consensus within liberal
democracies. In the eyes of many citizens, science and technology are equated with the
products and results they deliver. They have become goods, access to which should be
democratically regulated and allotment of which should also be fairly distributed. What
should be produced and how, especially in view of potential risks, is therefore also seen to
underlie democratic decision-making. It is difficult to see how in the face of this widespread
utilitarian-instrumental relationship to science and technology, which is reinforced by a
similar attitude on the part of political leaders who value science mainly for its value-adding
capacity, the claims to a special epistemological status of science can be maintained in the
future. Autonomy of science as a rallying cry will not carry far in the agora, nor will the
insistence on its inherent universalism and on an objectivity which deems itself beyond
reproach. Citizens are interested in the concrete embodiment that science and technology
assume in their daily life and concerns: unending desires for medicine and proper medical
care, a functioning and efficient technology that has come to be taken for granted and which
so much shapes life-styles and expanding or shrinking opportunities, an environment which
does not threaten to further pollute and undermine health, sustainability and whatever remains
of 'nature' as an 'imagined other'. There are additional, wider concerns, whose links to science
and technology are somewhat more indirect: work and employment, education and the
opportunity it offers for the life chances of children or the containment of violence, both near-
by and in the world at large.
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 15
In all these and many similar instances, science is still seen as the trouble-shooter par
excellence. There is no problem which at some point does not escape an appeal for a
scientific-technical solution - even if such solutions are nowhere yet on the near horizon. It
should be clear by now, that the modern times of Big Projects, Great Narratives, Universalism
and Unification, of Big Problems and Big Solutions, are over. Also trouble-shooting has to
assume more modest, localised and realistic position and proportion. It too is part of that
interactive network of knowledge and practices that are distributed over universities,
laboratories, governmental offices, non-governmental organisations, media rooms, electronic
networks and individuals in many different sites in society. Hierarchies in decision-making
have not disappeared, but they have become somewhat more flat. In this interactive and
heterogeneous sea of changes, once more local clusters stand out. Scientific autonomy needs
to be preserved, since it is a sine qua non precondition for the formation and preservation of
scientific identities, but it will be a highly localised autonomy - to be argued and fought for in
every instance and to be maintained in every research project worth its name. Scientific
objectivity will need to be preserved, because it too is a sine qua non condition for reliable
scientific knowledge to be produced. But it will not suffice in itself because there is no global
scientific objectivity, no set canon of rules to be followed which will guarantee the truth or
reliability of the outcome. Scientific objectivity will have to become localised and
contextualised, fitted into the peculiarities of each case in which it might be and most likely
will be challenged. It will succeed, if the outcome is socially robust knowledge - robust also
in view of the many heterogeneous factors, expectations, challenges and contestations, which
are now, wrongly, labelled non-scientific.
The changes that a new mode of knowledge production, described as Mode 2, bring with it,
enable a historically unprecedented openess on the part of science. Rather than merely adding
up to a supposedly hard scientific core an ever increasing number of outer layers, consisting
of softer institutions, committees, regulatives and regulations, designed to take care of
economic and societal relevance, of value-added wealth creation, of ethical concerns and of
societal acceptance of outcomes, science has to reorganise itself in accordance with the fluid
and dynamical structure under which it already operates. If it is as heterogeneous and
disunified as argued by Peter Galison and others and if its disunity provides for internal
strength and coherence, this insight has to be taken one decisive step further (Galison and
Stump 1996). The hard epistemological core of science which is repeatedly invoked as the
sole guarantee for its continued delivery of the goods that society so highly values (but also
feels free to contest), arguably has turned out to be crowded with a variety of norms, and
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 16
practices which cannot readily be reduced to a single generic methodology, or, more, broadly,
to privileged cultures of scientific inquiry. Rather, there are many different, local and
heterogeneous clusters of shifting scientific beliefs and practices, which value and combine
different elements of objectivity, of proof and demonstration. They are robust and reliable in
different degrees and yet they succeed in bringing creatively together heterogeneous
conditions under which these local clusters can operate. They can be opened further to what
already shapes their specific contexts. But this openess remains a partial openess. It too is
heterogeneous and temporary, it keeps changing shape and content. It is a pulsating openess,
depending on the timing and phasing of the problems under investigation as much as on their
interaction with the wider context.
Where is the agora?
One outcome of this is that the site of problem formulation and negotiation of solutions move
from their previous institutional domains in government, industry and universities into the
agora. The agora is the public space in which 'science meets the public', and in which the
public 'speaks back' to science. It is the domain (in fact, many domains) in which
contextualisation occurs and in which socially robust knowledge is continually subject to
testing while in the process of becoming more robust. Neither state nor market, neither
exclusively private nor exclusively public, the agora is the space in which societal and
scientific problems are framed and defined, and where what will be accepted as 'solution' is
being negotiated. The range of perspectives found in the agora together with the ability of
their proponents to articulate their wishes and concerns as well as to mobilise resources for
research activities implies a more complex role for scientific and technical expertise in the
production of socially robust knowledge.
The move of science into the agora has several consequences. One is the need for strategies to
incorporate already at an early stage the implications of knowledge production into the
research process itself (Rip, Misa and Schott 1995). This might be done by identifying areas
in which significant implications of research are likely to arise without being pinpointed
exactly, making it necessary to 'prospect' for these (presently unknown) implications. Such a
process might, for example, involve consulting other knowledge producers and users, as well
as wider social constituencies, in order to carry out a form of 'triangulation' survey. Perhaps,
every research proposal and project should include a deliberate strategy for identifying its
'context of implication'. Inevitably, this would reflexively bring to the fore the many implicit
assumptions that researchers hold about 'the place of people' in their knowledge that could
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 17
then be tested against 'real' people's likely behaviour or reactions. It might be best achieved by
including those likely to be implicated - perhaps unknowingly - as well as the conscious
carriers of social knowledge.
A second need is for the process of contextualisation, and hence the requirement of making
knowledge production socially more robust, to be internalised. While the 'context of
application' to some extent can be managed from the outside, the 'context of implication'
needs to be internalised by researchers if it is to become effective. It is expressed through
routes, often informal, that cannot easily be incorporated into administrative procedures. It
cannot be left to journalists or public relations experts, nor to social scientists alone.
Moreover, social robustness is not an absolute, but a relative concept. It must be tested and re-
tested under circumstances that can hardly be anticipated from the outside, since they rely
upon, and incorporate, the more narrowly scientific and technical knowledge of the
researchers. An important point is that the more open and comprehensive the scientific
community, the more socially robust will be the knowledge it produces. This is contrary to the
traditional assumption that there is a strong relationship between the social and intellectual
coherence of a scientific community and the reliability of knowledge it produces. Reliable
knowledge may have best been produced by such cohesive (and therefore restricted) scientific
communities. But socially robust knowledge can only be produced by much more sprawling
socio/scientific constituencies with open frontiers.
Socially robust knowledge is superior to reliable knowledge both because it has been subject
to more intensive testing and anticipating the 'context of implication' as much as possible
while incorporating the context into the research process - which is why it is 'socially robust' -
and also because of its malleability and connective capability. Its context is not predetermined
or fixed, but open to ceaseless renegotiation. Instead of achieving a precarious invariance by
establishing strict limits within which its truthfulness can be tested, as reliable knowledge
does, socially robust knowledge is the product of an intensive and continuous interaction
between 'speaking in the name of nature' and 'speaking in the name of society'; between
people and environments, between applications and implications.
The vision developed here is processual and open-ended. It is an invitation to re-think science
while emphasising that even the best of 're-thinking' is not yet accompanied by the changes
that depend on 'science re-thought'. It is the precise opposite of a blueprint which sets out the
new arrangements between science and society which are, to some extent at least,
conceptually closed, awaiting only implementation. That the authority of science in the future
Helga Nowotny: Re-Thinking Science 18
will be established in an on-going process that needs to be worked out again and again in the
agora, is clear to us. The prevailing 'contract' between science and society is governed largely
by the rules of bureaucratic rationality, with society linked to 'people' primarily through
representative institutions. A new contract will require more open, socially distributed, self-
organising systems of knowledge production that generate their own accountability and audit
systems. Under the prevailing contract, science was left to make its discoveries and then make
them available to society. A new contract will be based upon the joint production of
knowledge by society and science. The process of re-thinking science has scarcely begun -
and there is much work yet to be done, also for social studies of science.
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