- The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications
This book is the product of a Nobel Symposium on "Science and Industry in the 20th Century," with contributors from several countries and a number of fields. It is divided into six major sections, all somehow focusing on science and industry. The topics range from the character of industrial research and the commercialization of academic science to the social responsibilities of historians of science and the problems of archival preservation of science-related documents. The essays run from descriptions based on careful archival work to deeply analytic explorations and the highly polemical.
I like edited volumes. They are often excellent starting places for work on a single topic. They can be like restaurant tasting menus, exposing readers to a wide range of perspectives on a topic or vastly different, but related, empirical work all in one place. That said, I very rarely read a book such as this from cover to cover. I pick and choose, and so the clichéd critique of such books—that the quality is uneven—seems almost always irrelevant. Instead, I ask: Is there something useful for me in this volume?
The Science-Industry Nexus includes a lot of work I found worthwhile. Perhaps the most provocative essay is David Edgerton's "'The Linear Model' Did Not Exist." Although understood in many different ways, a common version of the linear model is that basic research provides the foundation for applied science which ultimately leads to technology and commercial products. Edgerton contends that, in its assorted versions, the linear model was never a serious analytic tool for understanding the dynamics of technoscience or making policy, but instead is "a classic straw man," trotted out by scholars as a foil against which to develop their own more sophisticated arguments. According to Edgerton, all of the attention focused in the linear model has led analysts to ignore the host of rich models of innovation developed by scholars and policymakers.
Edgerton's position is powerfully critiqued in a brief commentary by David Hounshell. Drawing on his research on DuPont, Hounshell suggests that although central figures at the company did not use the term "linear model," their thinking was absolutely consistent with it. The same, says Hounshell, can be said for Vannevar Bush. While I come down on Hounshell's side in this discussion, the debate between the two scholars provides great material from which to contemplate the centrality of models in policymaking and history writing, to consider how we come to take for granted the prominent history-making roles of concepts, and to ponder whether we sometimes construct "straw men" with inadequate self-consciousness. These two essays could serve a very helpful role in graduate seminars. [End Page 467]
A second chapter that I found quite engaging was Steven Shapin's "Who Is an Industrial Scientist?" Shapin juxtaposes the mid-twentieth-century culture and practice of industrial science as portrayed by academic sociologists and industrial research managers. He shows convincingly that the normative strains which authors like Robert Merton and William Kornhauser saw as central facts of life for industrial scientists were almost certainly not the essence of industrial research. Instead, companies recognized the need to allow scientists space to do their exploratory work, and scientists understood that the companies for which they worked were driven by the need to show a profit. Shapin concludes his analysis by speculating that the scientizing professionalization project in which mid-twentieth-century sociologists were engaged very probably played a crucial role in their failure to come to an understanding of industrial science.
Surrounding these pieces by Edgerton, Hounshell, and Shapin are a host of interesting essays. Among them is Thomas Misa's discussion of the value of large, sweeping approaches to the history of science and technology and the necessity of collaboration to carry off such work. In addition, Jeff Hughes contributes a discussion of the possible public roles of historians, and there are several more focused historical studies such as...