https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6611-4583
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ABSTRACT
Previous studies aimed at understanding public responses to emerging technologies have given limited attention to the social and cultural processes through which public concerns emerge. When probed, these have tended to be explained either in cognitive social psychological terms, typically in the form of cognitive shortcuts or heuristics or the influence of affective variables, or in social interactionist terms, as a product of the micro dynamics of the social interaction. We argue for an alternative approach that examines how public attitudes are formed in relation to the interplay of wider cultural narratives about science and technology. Using data from recent qualitative research with publics on nanotechnology and other emerging technologies, we develop a typology of five cultural narratives that underpin and structure public talk. The narratives we identify within focus group talk are familiar stories that are deeply embedded in contemporary culture, and which provide cultural resources for navigating the issues posed by emerging technology. Substantively, they inform a ‘tragic’ mood on the prospects of emerging technology, reflecting the loss of belief in science, when coupled to neo-liberal logics, as guaranteeing social progress. The implications for policy-making are discussed.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following individuals for their comments and insights on earlier drafts: Larry Busch, Jason Chilvers, Peter Feindt, Robin Grove-White, Steve Hilgartner, Tom McLeish, Richard Owen, Luigi Pellizzoni, Jack Stilgoe, Bron Szerszynski, Brian Wynne and all the participants at the Freiburg workshop on ‘Discourse, Power and Environmental Policy: Two Decades of Discursive Policy-Making’. We would also like to thank excellent and constructive comments from the editors of the Special Issue and from two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Even though this paper focuses on the role of narrative in understanding public responses to emerging technology, our narrative approach has wider application, both in the analysis of the socio-technical imaginaries (i.e. narratives) embedded in the material practices of scientific and technological innovation (Fischer, Citation2003; Jasanoff, Citation2005; Marcus, Citation1995), and in the analysis of the narrative resources that mobilize action and practice in contemporary environmental politics and policy. Thus, while a narrative analysis could focus productively on other sites of cultural reproduction, such as media articles, government and industry reports and scientific papers, an analysis of how narratives are deployed in public talk is of particular interest for our purposes as it represents a key site to explore what cultural resources (i.e. narratives) are mobilized in the accomplishment of emergent public opinions.
2 While there are subtle differences in methodology across our research projects, and an evolution of approach over time, these are relatively minor and secondary to the common design principles described here.
3 Each of our focus group projects began with relatively open-ended conversations on issues that were deemed as contextually important for the issue at hand. For the project on genetically modified (GM) crop and food technologies, the key context was deemed to be everyday food practices; for the project on animal biotechnology, the context was people's wider experience of, and relationship, with animals; while for the project on solar radiation management, the focus groups began with an open-ended discussion on experience of the weather and the climate, designed to provide a context for future deliberations on geoengineering as a climate change modification technology.
4 It can be argued that by deliberately selecting participants who do not know each other, the researchers may be creating a public that may not actually exist (Marres, Citation2012), and that a more ‘naturalistic’ alternative would be to select participants based on their belonging to a particular pre-existing group or community. However, this would be to misunderstand the methodology which is designed specifically to examine the formation of public concerns in the making, and where the task of the analyst is to examine what factors, including those derived from the theoretically derived sampling strategy, best structure the formation of public responses. In addition, it could be argued that inviting groups of strangers to discuss unfamiliar topics is likely to produce a ‘thin’ variant of public discourse, largely devoid of context (see Lezaun & Soneryd, Citation2007). Yet, again, this has been shown demonstrably not to be the case. Building on shared topic-specific variables, we find that participants are able to enunciate remarkably rich and contextual discourse.
5 For Heller:
A master narrative can be termed an ‘arche’ of a culture in both interpretations of the Greek word. The ‘arche’ stories are stories to which we always return, they are the final, or ultimate foundations of a type of imagination. Yet as the guides of imagination they also rule, control, and are vested with power. Direct or indirect references to master narratives provide strengths and power to new stories or new images, they lend them double legitimacy: legitimacy by tradition and by charisma, for in case of master narratives tradition itself is charismatic. References to a shared tradition are not just cognitively understood but also emotionally felt, without footnotes, without explanation or interpretation. It is not even necessary for single men and women to be familiar with the master narrative itself, for they are living in a world where a host of memories and interpretations are imbued by their spirit. (Citation2006, p. 257)
6 We are grateful to Steve Hilgartner for elaboration of this point.
7 Interestingly, the ‘be careful what you wish for’ narrative was rarely deployed in discussions of other emerging technologies. The implied benefits of agricultural and animal biotechnologies (e.g. feeding the world, improved disease resistance), for instance, tended to be rejected as implausible under current conditions of political economy; thus, they rarely held a seductive character. Similarly, there was little seductive appeal in solar radiation management geoengineering technologies; at best these were technologies that would help prevent the further and possibly impending disaster of runaway climate change.
8 This narrative was also very frequently used in public discussions on agricultural and animal biotechnologies, and on solar radiation management, technologies that were frequently seen as likely to ‘get out of the box’, and to contribute to unforeseen and potentially irreversible harms.
9 In public discussions on animal and plant biotechnology, this narrative was also frequently deployed. Plants and animals had evolved over long timescales and to propose that one could ‘improve’ characteristics in the laboratory on a more or less ‘instantaneous’ basis appeared to many respondents as arrogant (hubris) and as likely to rebound on humans (nemesis), especially if the ‘speed’ and ‘direction’ of such developments are driven by commercial rather than ethical considerations. In discussions on solar radiation management, the ‘messing with nature’ was perhaps the core narrative resource structuring public responses. Since science was commonly seen as lacking the capacity to anticipate harms in advance, this pervasive experimentality was seen to be part of the new human condition.
10 This narrative was frequently deployed across all our research projects, speaking to a commonly felt lack of public agency in shaping science and technology innovation trajectory in line with public values.
11 This narrative was used to inform public concerns across all the research projects although it was most common in discussions of technologies that were seen to have most potential to concentrate power and wealth, such as nanotechnology and agricultural biotechnology.
12 Of course, neo-liberalism as a phenomenon in policy-making, with its emphasis on the state in enforcing ideals of market liberalization, has its own narrative and history that Busch (Citation2011) dates rather precisely to the 1930s.
13 We are not suggesting that notions of equality and of being ‘kept in the dark’ were not features of ancient thought. They were. Nevertheless, following Marx and Weber, we are suggesting that modern thought and practice are far more intimately connected to the trope of alienation (e.g. through processes of increased rationalization, secularization, specialization and the bureaucratization of social order), and that the modern idea of social equality (i.e. that individuals and groups of individuals are treated fairly and equally irrespective of gender, age, race, creed and class) was enabled in the modern age and only through the great revolutions of the eighteenth century in America and France.
14 We are grateful to Luigi Pellizzoni for elaboration of this point.
15 It can be argued that the ‘precautionary principle’ is not immune from this critique. The precautionary approach fits within this technocratic model of governance given that it relies on a scientific analysis of potential harm (even in the absence of scientific consensus) to avoid a particular action or policy from being taken.