People, persons and publics

At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S; Denver, USA, 11–14 November 2015), Matthew Kearnes of the University of New South Wales and Jason Childers of the University of East Anglia co-chaired a pair of panels promoting their about-to-be-released, multi-authored volume, Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (Taylor & Francis). The book and panels collected a group of scholars with extensive experience in public engagement in science and technology (PEST) and, through their recent experiences, attempted to offer a new agenda for research and practice in the field.

Among the PEST topics discussed at the panels were the evergreen, intertwined questions of the constitution and legitimacy of citizens’ panels and other participatory activities, which often exist outside the bounds of formal governing institutions. I have always chafed at the idea of the illegitimacy of such activities, and I would like here to explore briefly why my discomfort might, in fact, be appropriate.

As an American, I partake in a political culture – long-understood since we called ourselves into being as a people with the performative Constitutional cry, ‘We the people of the United States' – that holds that publics can create themselves. It took us a while, perhaps, to understand the constructivist corollary that policies, too, constitute publics and that policies can constitute people and persons as well. That policies construct publics is a more subtle point than the conservative's belief that welfare policies create dependencies. It is, rather, that welfare constructs the category of a dependent class, just as tax incentives construct the category of a deserving class. In a more straightforward way, perhaps, policies toward abortion rights or rights of the unborn construct people. Policies toward limited liability corporations that can exist independently of the people who created them but can still, in the United States these days, have the rights of speech and the exercise of religion construct persons under the law.

What does the construction of publics, people and persons have to do with responsible innovation? As I mention above, an always-fashionable critique in PEST is pointing out that public engagement activities invariably constitute the publics that they purport to give voice to and study. This critique is meant to be normative, to demonstrate that the so-constituted public that engages in the particular episode is illegitimate in some way – usually because the researchers themselves constructed it, that it never existed until it was brought into being by the researchers, and thus that the researchers have engaged in some untoward intervention by inventing something that would otherwise not have been invented.

Perhaps publics do spontaneously arise on some occasions, but I would like to suggest here that the construction of publics is a natural and appropriate thing for social science researchers to do, particularly in a democracy. Natural science and engineering researchers – who construct material objects and processes as inventions – are also in the process of constructing publics because their inventions when adopted are not merely material objects and processes but are hybrid elements of socio-technical systems. Remembering Winner's (1977) dictum that technologies are not just like legislation but that they are legislation, it is simple to say that innovations create publics, just as policies do. We don't say that the creation of publics by knowledge-based innovators is illegitimate or that the publics they create are illegitimate. But we do say that we hope that such innovators will be responsible so that these innovator-constituted publics will be well-served.

We should hold the social scientific innovators of publics to the same standard of responsibility and not presume that the constitutive act is somehow suspicious. We should ask if their methods are sound, if their intentions are public-regarding, if they are behaving reflexively and thinking about the ramifications of their work – and of course if they are treating the public they are constituting with respect and serving them well.

The four pieces in this somewhat more petite issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation variously partake in the constitution of publics. The first article focuses on this last point about treating the publics we constitute with respect during PEST. In their research article, Canadian scholars Capurro et al. (2015) depart from one of the standard operating procedures of public engagement – seeking consensus among participants – to instead implement a process that ‘invites and incorporates dissention from participants and external expert presenters alike. Participants are free to reject processes, agendas, and even the deliberative topic posed by the research team' (Capurro et al. 2015, Z). Focused on the need for advanced lignocellulosic biofuels in Canada, the deliberative process they implemented instead involved a mini-public of 26 persons who were exposed to a wide array of expertise, organized into sub-groups to identify issues in advanced lignocellulosic biofuels production (including stakeholder analysis and prospective benefits and concerns), set the whole group's agenda (including a vote on the proposition that Canada needs advanced lignocellulosic biofuels), and propose recommendations as well as elaborate persistent disagreements. Indeed, prior to formulating the recommendations, the group chose to hold a session that vetted the perspectives of those who voted against the proposition. The process uncovered many ‘value-laden trade-offs' (Capurro et al. 2015, Y) that suggested how the mini-public expressed and documented both its hopes for the emerging technology as well as its concerns. In this way, the authors argue, respect was extended further across the participants.

Public opinion research probably receives the most pointed criticism about constructing its public, and yet survey research can certainly abide by norms of responsibility. Li et al. (2015) describe a survey that ‘examines how stakeholders with specialized knowledge and professional experiences develop their attitudes toward public participation as a function of institutional identity, perception of public opinion, and media use' (Li et al. 2015, P). That is, they constitute an elite public and query it about its potential constitution of a lay public. In particular, the authors dwell on expert stakeholders in the domain of nuclear energy, a domain in which the conflict between experts and lay publics has frequently been drawn as stark and uncompromising. Using a mail survey of 557 nuclear power elites in the United States with 137 respondents, the authors found that while there is overwhelming support for including members of the public in decisions about nuclear energy among government, nonprofit, and scientific stakeholders, support for this position is importantly influenced by perceptions of the split in opinion within the public only on the part of government stakeholders. That is, it is only for government stakeholders that the presence of divergent opinions among the public increases the perceived need for public engagement (and thus, along with respect for divergence above, such stakeholders might be more responsible actors). With modesty and reflexivity, the authors acknowledge some shortcomings in the approach of the study, and they conclude that the range of social, cognitive and communicative factors that mediate experts’ perceptions of the value of public engagement should be further explored.

The third research article, by Miller (2015), investigates the ethical status not of constituting publics but rather of re-constituting people. Miller (2015, Q) calls this re-constitution ‘volitional evolution', after E. O. Wilson's use, and it means ‘for humanity to take the reins of evolution into its own hands and dictate to nature what it wants to become'. Tracing aspects of this perfectionist line of thinking back to original evolutionary theorists like Darwin and Huxley, Miller argues that its tie to a specific and durable scientific agenda makes volitional evolution a more appropriate and tractable concept for inquiry than the more general and mushy ‘human enhancement' – even though the former still ‘is fraught with conceptual and ontological problems' (Miller 2015, D). In investigating its ethical status, Miller argues that should it be too weighted down with such problems, volitional evolution might be charged as a fraud; but if it is not fraudulent, it is most certainly irresponsible. Perhaps it is dubious to construct a public from the raw material of a person.

Finally, in this issue's Perspectives section, Frankel (2015) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) describes another elite survey, this time of scientists, engineers and health professionals solicited to offer their views on the social responsibilities of scientists and engineers beyond the less controversial responsible conduct of research. While Frankel acknowledges the inherent bias of the online, convenience sample through which the data were collected, the more than 2100 responses offer some interesting contours of scientific opinion about scientific responsibility, including a high level of support across a diversity of possible kinds of responsibility (e.g., from reporting suspected misconduct to publicly disclosing risks of their work, to taking steps to assure that their work is not misused by others); a lack of influence of the gender of the respondent on the ranking of the importance of socially responsible behaviors; and a tendency of younger respondents to emphasize public communication and older respondents to emphasize reporting misconduct. In the near future, AAAS plans to conduct a more rigorous survey that will not only explore why scientists and engineers hold the views they do regarding the variety of social responsibilities explored here, but also how they establish priorities among those responsibilities and what opportunities and challenges they identify to their ability to fulfill these responsibilities. That is, it will try to more precisely and responsibly constitute a normative scientific public.