Eclectic, random, intuitive? Technology assessment, RRI, and their use of history

ABSTRACT

Technology assessment (TA) allows deliberate and anticipatory governance of sociotechnical transformation processes. Which bodies of knowledge TA practitioners typically use for their work has been discussed for some time now. Relatively little attention has been paid so far to the use of historical knowledge in TA. This might be even more astonishing as the knowledge about futures that TA provides is substantially based on analyzing and abstracting past developments, discovering similarities to current processes and finally drawing conclusions therefrom about possible futures. Typically, producers of anticipatory knowledge randomly employ an intuitive handling of the historicity of their subject matter; when it comes to the selection of literature they proceed eclectic. In this paper, we describe which kinds of historical representation appear in TA and responsible research and innovation (RRI) practitioners’ line of vision and how historical knowledge could be used to assess enactor–selector games. With this conceptual contribution to the ongoing debate of orientation for TA and RRI, we call for a more deliberated treatment of ‘historical knowledge’ in both fields.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• responsible research and innovation
• technology assessment
• enactor–selector games

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the editor for their valuable comments. They helped to add additional perspectives and to strengthen a number of our arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Silke Zimmer-Merkle studied European Culture and History of Ideas in Karlsruhe and is doing her PhD project there at KIT’s Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS). Her research topic – a case study on the history of (automotive) driver assistance systems – is a first attempt to apply academic history for the purpose of technology assessment.

Torsten Fleischer is head of the research area ‘Innovation processes and impacts of technology’ at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is interested in the interdependence between societal change and technological change in the areas of transportation, energy and materials technologies, methodological questions of technology assessment as well as in the governance of innovation processes. Over the years, he served as Project Manager for several TA studies for ITAS and the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Parliament (TAB).

ORCID

Silke Zimmer-Merkle http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8642-9067

Notes

1. For instance, due to budget reductions, the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University was not able to include an historical approach in their implementation of RTTA (cf. Guston 2014). At KIT, on the other hand, after many years of discussion an Institute for Technology Futures has recently been established. A chair for the history of the techno-scientific civilization is part of this new academic institution which is expected to closely collaborate with the already existing Institute for Technology Assessment.