Taking the “Soft Impacts” of Technology into Account: Broadening the Discourse in Research Practice

Abstract

Public funding institutions are able to influence what aspects researchers take into account when they consider the future impacts of their research. On the basis of a description of the evaluation systems that public research funding institutes in the Netherlands (STW and SenterNovem) use to estimate the quality of engineering science, this article shows that researchers are now predominantly required to reflect on the intellectual merit of their research and on the usability and marketability of the technology it contributes to. In addition, SenterNovem also mandates reflection on sustainability. Here it is argued that these requirements do not suffice. Funding institutions should also do more to enhance reflection during the research process on the “soft impacts” of technologies, which refer to the alterations that technologies may bring about in the quality of human life. To do this it is suggested that it is helpful to engage a specifically trained ethicist to monitor the research process and create a feedback loop from the ethicist to the funding institution.

Keywords:

• Research Funding
• Soft Impacts
• Good Life
• Institution
• Embedded Ethics

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Bob Frodeman and Britt Holbrook for discussions about the theme of this article, which were very inspiring and helpful. The author would also like to thank Adam Briggle as well as two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on this paper. Finally, the author thanks representatives of STW and SenterNovem for their cooperation and NWO for funding the research that has lead to this article.

Notes

[1] Available from http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_6EYCLQ; INTERNET.

[2] In 2006, €83 million came from subsidies and investments of “third parties”, the yearly report mentions. That is, for example, from the European Commission or other ministries. The yearly report is available from http://www.nwo.nl/files.nsf/pages/NWOA_744GJ5/$file/jaarverslag2006.pdf; INTERNET.

[3] In 2007 FOM had a yearly budget of €86 million, of which €68 million stems from NWO. The rest of the budget comes from investments from companies, universities, the ministry of economic affairs and the European Union. Available from http://www.fom.nl/live/overfom/jaarboek.pag; INTERNET.

[4] See the yearly report available from http://www.stw.nl/Over+STW/Jaarverslagen.htm; INTERNET. In the report it is hard to see what the yearly budget is that is spent on research. I have my information from employees at STW, which is confirmed by the folder available from http://www.stw.nl/NR/rdonlyres/B70051C1-7FEB-4CAD-A5AC-D72D8F62DEE8/0/folderSTW.pdf; INTERNET.

[5] See the yearly report available from http://senternovem-jaarverslag.metrodc-dev.nl/verkorte-jaarrekening.asp; INTERNET.

[6] These numbers are not provided by the yearly report, and they are hard to estimate because the different parties—companies, research institutes, policy‐makers—are often so intimately connected in a research project. The numbers given here are the product of an estimation by the accountant of SenterNovem.

[7] The European Commission is also considered an important source of public funding for research, but I left this out of scope here for reasons of space limitations.

[8] There is no extensive discussion as to who is a “user”. In the case of a medical technology, for example, users include most often physicians, but not the patients, radiologists, anaestheticians, and so forth. Questions could be asked, however, as to who should be included in the company of users in order to be able to acquire a correct view into the usability of the technology.

[9] This is made explicit in a document “Handreiking beoordeling duurzaamheid”, which is distributed among the members of the evaluation committee.

[10] I thank David Strong for these examples of how technologies are able to mediate human being’s experiences of nature.

[11] The initiative was taken by EO&B, a subdivision of NWO that concentrates on Ethics, Organization and Policy. Three of the pilot projects were already completed. I am still working on the last project. See for my approach van der Burg 2009. Not all ethical parallel researchers have filled in their task in the same way. Soft impacts, for example, do not play a role in the way other ethical parallel researchers determine what is ethically relevant about a technology that is being researched. But interesting work has been done on the development of a network approach to ethics, in which the ethicist is part of a network of agents who shape technologies. See van de Poel (2008) and Zwart et al. (2006).

[12] The initiative of the four pilot projects of ethical parallel research fits well into international endeavours such as the model of Ethical, Legal and Social Implications or Aspects (ELSI in the USA or ELSA in Europe) research as it takes shape in the National Nanotechnology Program (Fisher 2005). However, it has been rare until now to engage ethicists in such work. It is more habitual to engage social scientists, who have more experience with empirical research. One of the criticisms on this type of research has however been that it avoids normativity (Grin and Grunwald 2000; Grunwald 1999). Ethicists are able to offer a normative approach. Ethics of engineering, however, has not been attuned to the specific characteristics of technology, or of the context in which it is developed. The initiative of STW and NWO to engage ethicists in the pilot projects of ethical parallel research therefore would also imply a theoretical innovation. Here I cannot say much about what such an innovation would involve. I just want to remark that I think it would be good if such an ethic would be a normative type of vision assessment that focuses on soft impacts of technologies, involving ethicists who see it as their role to assist scientists during research, rather than to judge them.