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1.
The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Ryan Meyer 《Minerva》2011,49(1):47-70
This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefitted from a public investment of more
than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency
program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional
structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated
by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the “profit as progress” assumption) at the
root of public values failures, this case shows how “science values” (“knowledge as progress”) may serve as an inadequate
or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic
linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental
values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must
avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research
and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. 相似文献
2.
Niels C. Taubert 《Minerva》2012,50(3):261-275
This article analyzes the transformation of Minerva from an intellectual towards a scholarly journal by making use of bibliometric methods. The aim is to provide some empirical insights that help to understand what properties of the journal changed in the course of this transformation process. Minerva was one of the first journals that reflected on science and its role in society and science policy in particular. Analyzing the development of the journal sheds light on the emergence of science (policy) studies and on Minerva’s role as a forerunner in this field. In a first step, the methods will be described. The second section provides some empirical results of the publication output of Minerva and its relations to other journals in the field. The empirical findings are put into a broader perspective in the concluding third section. 相似文献
3.
Rustum Roy 《Minerva》1984,22(3-4):316-328
Conclusion The questions of scientific choice which were left unresolved when the rapid expansion of academic science in the United States began in the early 1960s have come back to trouble the scientific community. There is now widespread dissatisfaction with the process of review by peers as one of the major systems for the allocation of public funds for research. While earlier criticisms had been brushed off by the assertion—unsupported by facts—that no other systems existed, the present situation cannot be so easily dismissed.A serious examination of other national and international arrangements shows that a wide variety of procedures are in use and there is no research which shows that one system is either more productive scientifically, or more cost-effective in bringing about valuable scientific research. New systems which may be considered should avoid the major defects of the system of peer review as now practised: the enormous waste of scientists' time, the great potential for conflicts of interest, and the inherent bias against innovation.The principal system which I have proposed here combines the best elements of peer review with the simplicity and efficiency of the use of a formula. Moreover, this formula based on peer review of performance incorporates all the elements for which the academic scientific establishment should be accountable to its patron, which is the public treasury. A final virtue of the proposed system is that it provides simple and convenient procedures through the use of numerical weighting factors for the policy-maker to guide the support of scientific research as a whole. 相似文献
4.
Mark William Neff 《Minerva》2014,52(2):213-235
Studies of how scientists select research problems suggest the process involves weighing a number of factors, including funding availability, likelihood of success versus failure, and perceived publishability of likely results, among others. In some fields, a strong personal interest in conducting science to bring about particular social and environmental outcomes plays an important role. Conservation biologists are frequently motivated by a desire that their research will contribute to improved conservation outcomes, which introduces a pair of challenging questions for managers of science and scholars of policies governing science: 1) How do scientists integrate that goal into their processes of research priority evaluation, and 2) How can managers and funders of science utilize that knowledge in designing and administering funding programs? I use Q method to uncover four distinct schools of thought amongst researchers and knowledge-users about the merits of possible research priorities for coral reefs; one of the axes along which these schools of thought differ is in their interpretation of how science can and should interact with policy. The results reveal that perceived severity of reef stressors plays a role for some participants. Disciplinary training does not appear to be a major influence on research priority evaluation, but individual participants indicated professional expediency does prevent some researchers from pursuing or advocating that others pursue topics outside of that disciplinary specialty. Influences on and processes in research prioritization uncovered in this study have the potential to lead to counter-productive disciplinary path dependencies. From these results and building on outside literature, I conclude that better coordination and communication about research priorities across disciplines and with broader stakeholders – including knowledge users – could improve the research enterprise’s ability to contribute to meaningful societal and conservation goals. These findings are relevant to researchers and research administrators across disciplines that seek to conduct or fund science that is useful in addressing specific goals. 相似文献
5.
Elena Aronova 《Minerva》2012,50(3):307-337
The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the “cultural cold wars.” In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote “science studies” as a distinct – and politically relevant – area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for liberalism. By means of its Study Groups, international conferences and its periodicals, such as Minerva, the Congress developed into an influential forum for examining the ways Big Science impacted the relations between science, society, and politics, thus constituting a semi-institutional niche for Science Studies before its professionalization within academia during the 1970s. I argue that the Congress contributed to the construction of public space in which the relations between science, society and politics were debated, and science was reconceptualized as a social activity. The vision of “science studies” the CCF-associated intellectuals promulgated was different from the science studies we know today. Yet, this alternative vision, in which the issues of science politics appeared inseparable from those of science policy, science organization, and science governance, constituted the “pre-history” of science studies today. 相似文献
6.
David Kaldewey 《Minerva》2018,56(2):161-182
This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers. 相似文献
7.
Martín Tironi 《Journal of Cultural Economy》2018,11(4):330-347
This article presents an empirical reflection on how the prototyping of an environmental enrichment device for chimpanzees at the National Zoo of Chile precipitates a cosmopolitical encounter. Using material produced by design students, zookeepers and the chimps Judy and Gombe, we describe how prototyping iterations establish open processes of dialogue and encounters among humans and nonhumans. The case will demonstrate how prototyping can go further than the generation of models of an original. On the contrary, the cosmopolitical encounter emerging from the prototyping process makes evident a truly ontological vocation, acknowledging humans and other-than-human beings as singular entities. Its provisional and malleable nature turns this device into a privileged locus for the exploration of interspecies entanglement. Although zoos are scientifically organized institutions, in this case we observe how its anthropocentric hierarchy was performatively reshuffled at certain moments of the prototyping process. The cosmopolitical qualities of the prototyping process analyzed derive from its capacity to deploy an ethics of attention and care between the agencies at play, that is, for unfold gestures of mutual vulnerability. Finally, we propose prototyping as a device for moving from cosmopolitics as a way of understanding the world to cosmopolitics as a matter of design. 相似文献
8.
In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift ‘from deficit to dialogue’ in conceptualizing the relationship
between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been
influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political
ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a politics suited to post-Fordist conditions was put forward in the
magazine Marxism Today in the late 1980s, developed in the Demos thinktank in the 1990s, and influenced policy of the New Labour government. The
encouragement of public participation and deliberation in relation to science and technology has been part of a broader implementation
of participatory mechanisms under New Labour. This participatory program has been explicitly oriented toward producing forms
of social consciousness and activity seen as essential to a viable knowledge economy and consumer society. STS arguments for
public engagement in science have gained influence insofar as they have intersected with the Third Way politics of post-Fordism. 相似文献
9.
In recent years questions concerning the impact of public research funding have become the preeminent site at which struggles
over the meanings and value of science are played out. In this paper we explore the ‘politics of impact’ in contemporary UK
science and research policy and, in particular, detail the ways in which UK research councils have responded to and reframed
recent calls for the quantitative measurement of research impacts. Operating as ‘boundary organisations’ research councils
are embroiled in what might be characterised as the ‘politics of demarcation’ in which competing understandings of the cultural
values of science are traded, exchanged and contested. In this paper we focus on the way the UK’s ‘Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council’ (EPSRC) has responded to contemporary policy discourses concerning the impacts of public research
expenditure. We argue that, in response to the shifting terms of contemporary science policy, the EPSRC has adopted three
distinct strategies. Firstly, in collaboration with other research councils the EPSRC have emphasised the intellectual and
metrological challenge presented by attempts to quantify the economic impact of public research expenditure, emphasising instead
the cumulative impacts of a broad portfolio of ‘basic science’. Secondly, the EPSRC has sought to widen the discursive meaning
of research impacts – specifically to include societal and policy impacts in addition to economic ones. Thirdly, the EPSRC
has introduced a new framing into the ‘impact agenda’, preferring to talk about ‘pathways to impact’ rather than research
impacts per se. In responding to government priority setting, we argue that the EPSRC has sought to exploit both the technical fragility
of auditing techniques and the discursive ambiguity of notions of impact. 相似文献
10.
Nathaniel Logar 《Minerva》2009,47(4):345-366
How does the research performed by a government mission agency contribute to useable technologies for its constituents? Is it possible to incorporate science policy mechanisms for increasing benefits to users in the decision process? The United States National Institute of Standards &; Technology (NIST) promises research directed towards industrial application. This paper considers the processes that produce science and technology at NIST. The institute’s policies for science provide robust examples for how effective science policies can contribute to the emergence of useful technologies. To progress towards technologies that can be years away, the agency uses several means for integrating the needs of eventual information users into the prioritization process. To accomplish this, NIST units, such as the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory, incorporate mechanisms for considering user need and project impact into different stages of its scientific decision processes. This, and other specific strategies that the agency utilizes for connecting the supply of science to information demand, provide lessons for generating useable science. 相似文献
11.
Science and technology (S&T) policy studies has explored the relationship between the structure of scientific research and the attainment of desired outcomes. Due to the difficulty of measuring them directly, S&T policy scholars have traditionally equated “outcomes” with several proxies for evaluation, including economic impact, and academic output such as papers published and citations received. More recently, scholars have evaluated science policies through the lens of Public Value Mapping, which assesses scientific programs against societal values. Missing from these approaches is an examination of the social activities within the scientific enterprise that affect research outputs and outcomes. We contend that activities that significantly affect research trajectories take place at the levels of individual researchers and their communities, and that S&T policy scholars must take heed of this activity in their work in order to better inform policy. Based on primary research of two scientific communities—ecologists and sustainability scientists—we demonstrate that research agendas are actively shaped by parochial epistemic and normative concerns of the scientists and their disciplines. S&T policy scholarship that explores how scientists balance these concerns, alongside more formal science policies and incentive structures, will enhance understanding of why certain science policies fail or succeed and how to more effectively link science to beneficial social outcomes. 相似文献
12.
Realising the societal gains from publicly funded health and medical research requires a model for a reflexive evaluation precedent for the societal impact of research. This research explores UK Research Excellence Framework evaluators’ values and opinions and assessing societal impact, prior to the assessment taking place. Specifically, we discuss the characteristics of two different impact assessment extremes – the “quality-focused” evaluation and “societal impact-focused” evaluation. We show the wide range of evaluator views about impact, and that these views could be conceptually reflected in a range of different positions along a conceptual evaluation scale. We describe the characteristics of these extremes in detail, and discuss the different beliefs evaluators had which could influence where they positioned themselves along the scale. These decisions, we argue, when considered together, form a dominant definition of societal impact that influences the direction of its evaluation by the panel. 相似文献
13.
14.
In the context of more and more project-based research funding, commercialization and economic growth have increasingly become rationalized concepts that are used to demonstrate the centrality of science for societal development and prosperity. Following the world society tradition of organizational institutionalism, this paper probes the potential limits of the spread of such rationalized concepts among different types of research funders. Our comparative approach is particularly designed to study the role and position of nonprofit research funders (NPF), a comparison that is relevant as NPF could potentially be shielded from such rationalized pressures given their lack of profit gaining motives. By making a qualitative interview-based investigation we are able to describe how research funders rationalize their contributions to society at large, as well as their obligations to the researchers they fund. Four types of research funders are compared—independently wealthy philanthropists, fundraising dependent nonprofits, public agencies, and industry. We find that NPF, and especially philanthropists, are the least commercially geared type of funder, but that philanthropists also express least obligations to researchers funded. This is in sharp contrast to public research funders who, even more than industry, employ commercially geared rationalizations. We also find that both public and corporate funders express obligations to the researchers they fund. Our results indicate that there are limits to the spread of commercially tinted rationalizations among NPF, but that this does not necessarily mean an increased sense of obligations to the researchers funded, and by extension to the integrity of scientific pursuit. 相似文献
15.
《Journal of Cultural Economy》2013,6(1):103-119
In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.'s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment. 相似文献
16.
Catherine P. Slade 《Minerva》2011,49(1):71-86
Public values failure occurs when the market and the public sector fail to provide goods and services required to achieve
the core values of society such as equity (Bozeman 2007). That public policy for emerging health technologies should address intrinsic societal values such as equity is not a novel
concept. However, the ways that the public values discourse of stakeholders is structured is less clear and rarely studied
through the lens of public interests. This is especially true in the health sciences discourse. Using the public value mapping
(PVM) model I present a case study of the intrinsic value of equity in nanomedicine for cancer and the imperatives for translational
research, an instrumental value to achieve equity. After reviewing and coding nearly 700 value statements from several hundred
public documents, I find that that the discourse on values varies between documents that address basic research and documents
that address the application of the knowledge produced in basic research, with some especially notable disconnections. This
paper demonstrates the importance of further refinement of methods for testing the PVM framework if the societal goal is to
improve consistency of the public value discussion by those involved in developing and applying new technologies. The paper
also demonstrates the value of a PVM approach for complex science policy analysis, especially for emerging technologies like
nanomedicine. 相似文献
17.
This paper examines the promise of science and its role in shaping research policy. The promise of science is characterized by expectations of science, which are embedded in promissory discourses that envision futures made possible through advances in promising science. Through a single case study of the origins of Genome Canada, the research was guided by the question: How did expectations of genomics shape the creation of Genome Canada? A conceptualization of discursive power and expectations of genomics storylines provide the theoretical and analytical basis for an in-depth examination of the ideational effects and material impacts on research policy decisions over three years (1997–2000) that culminated in the creation of Genome Canada. Expectations of genomics storylines functioned in a complex interplay of discursive practices and dynamics among diverse policy actors within a genomics discourse-coalition to produce a range of ideational and material impacts. The expectations of genomics storylines produced powerful genomics subject-positions from which policy actors perceived their interests, identities and preferences and gained agency, which led to various material impacts, such as mobilizing support and funding, coordinating activities and transforming Canada’s research policy framework. With the increasing importance of research policy to a range of broader policy priorities underpinned by expectations that science will resolve societal challenges and contribute to socio-economic benefits, this paper sheds light on how complex research policy decisions are made; it further contributes to understanding the role of promissory discourses in shaping those decisions.
相似文献18.
There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of “regimes of valuation” we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields. 相似文献
19.
The ways in which societies and institutions institutionalize and practice invention management reflects not only how new ideas are valued, but also imaginaries about the role of science and technology for societal development. Often taking the US Bayh-Dole-Act as a model, many European states have recently implemented changes in how inventions at academic institutions are to be handled to optimize their societal impact. We analyze how these changes have been taken up—and made sense of—in regions with different pre-existing infrastructures, practices and semantics of invention management. For doing so, we build on a comparative analysis of continuities and changes in infrastructures, practices and semantics of invention management in North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW, a former Western state) and Saxony (a former GDR state) to reflect on how academic institutions have been handling inventions along transforming socio-political contexts. Building on document analysis and qualitative interviews with research managers, we discuss ongoing differences in practices of invention management and the semantic framing of the societal value of inventions in NRW and Saxony, and discuss how this can be understood before the background of their ideological, political and economic separation until reunification in 1990. Joining the conceptual perspectives of path dependencies and sociotechnical imaginaries, we argue that two critical incidents in the history of these states (the reunification in 1990 and a legal change in 2002) allowed for wide-ranging institutional alignments, but also allowed path dependencies in practices and semantics of invention management to prevail. 相似文献
20.
《Journal of Cultural Heritage》2014,15(5):511-521
This article evaluates the compatibility of the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings in Egypt given that a growing number of projects featuring innovative building reuse are currently emerging nationwide. Accordingly, this research focuses on three objectives. The first objective is the evaluation of indicators drawn from literature, namely architectural integrity, public perception, form and new building function, with reference to the specific case of Alexandria National Museum. The second objective is the investigation of the sustainable adaptation of the Museum. The third objective is the assessment of the capacity of the heritage building to meet the criteria for reuse. The integration of the literature review and the case study is verified by examining research indicators. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, including laypeople and professionals are utilised in the assessment of Alexandria National Museum adaptive reuse project. Research results show that interviewees agree that the process preserved the building's architectural integrity and that its new cultural function (i.e. as a museum) represents the optimal reuse of the building. In addition, the research highlights diversity amongst the stakeholders and the drawbacks of the sustainable adaptation indicator, including the absence of community participation. 相似文献