Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction

6. Conclusions

6 Conclusions What good is science studies, technology studies, or STS as a whole? What is the value of all the terms, concepts, schools, and frameworks ? In today's academy, this question has sinister undertones, particularly when it is asked in the context of science wars and budget cuts. All disciplines-and especially the very vulnerable interdisciplinary programs -are forced to justify themselves, and not merely in the philosophicalor Calvinist sense of the word. We are asked to provide a reason for our continued existence. It is the most brutal form ofjustification: budgetary justification. Perhaps the oldest answer to the question is that students need some appreciation of the history of science and technology. This has been the traditional justification for programs in the philosophy and history of science and technology. These programs are valuable because they provide all students, not only science students, with an understanding of the basic principles and history ofscience and technology. Presumably courses ofthis sort will help make students become better scientists or, if they do not become scientists, better supporters of science and more willing taxpayers. Langdon Winner (I996) appropriately calls this approach "HSTS," or the hooray for science and technology school. Another apparently uncontroversial approach is the scientometric study of science, which has policy implications for the management· of science. This branch of science studies is justified in terms of national policy goals such as making better decisions on which areas of science should receive public funding, rather than improving the public appreciation of science. Policy implications can also be fine-tuned to focus on local managerial issues such as organizing scientific work and workers in ways that enhance productivity. Scientometrics also looks familiar to scientists and engineers; it uses similar quantitative methods and styles of presentation. For the sake of a parallel, I will call this approach MSTS: managing science, technology, and society. However transparent their justification seems, both HSTS and MSTS Conclusions 149 ultimately will run into conflict with scientists, engineers, and physicians. As in any field that professionalizes, historical, philosophical, or managerial studies of science and technology will become increasingly autonomous from the sciences and technologies that they study. In the process, their researchers will come to have representations of science and technology that differ from those of the scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. Managerially oriented social science will become increasingly intrusive, just as the philosophy ofscience will become more irrelevant and the history of science and technology more sacrilegious. Those who are even more extreme-the purveyors ofSSK, cultural studies, feminism, radical science, or some version of a critical STS-will be seen as dangerous heretics who should be lined up and detenured in the science wars. A better way to justifY STS is to make the potential of conflict explicit, or even to capitalize on it by defining STS in terms of a widespread public concern with science, technology, and values. The concerned public includes many scientists, engineers, and physicians who themselves have developed organizations dedicated to ethics, values, and social responsibility issues. Thus, categories such as "scientists" and "STS scholars" need not be defined oppositionally. Instead, there are merely researchers and citizens who are concerned with preserving an institutional location for debate on science, technology, and values. From this perspective, STS is justified as the badly needed site where people who are concerned with the place of science and technology in a democratic society can debate these complicated issues. The issues may focus on the internal institutional dynamics of science, such as more equitable recruitment and retention of women and other historically excluded groups. Alternatively, the issues may involve the general place ofscience and technology in society: How can societies move toward a more "sustainable" ecological relationship? How can democratic principles be incorporated into the science policy process? How can the design of technology and urban space be reshaped in more equitable ways? The very phrasing of these questions requires an exit from the neutrality and relativism of the constructivist period, and also from the dead-horse debates such as relativism versus realism. However, unlike some of my colleagues I believe that much of the previous research ofSTS can be made relevant to debates on values. For example, the philosophers' concerns with developing good prescriptive evaluation criteria can be helpful for public debates on which research and development programs should be funded. The quantitative sociology of science provides a good empirical basis for discussions of how to reform institutions. Even the constructivists have left [52.14.150...