Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research

Abstract

The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of ‘collaboration’ stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, ‘folk theories’ of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual ‘nano’ cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved.

Keywords:

• Nanotechnology
• collaboration
• industry
• policy
• discourse analysis
• folk theories
• specificity

Acknowledgements

This paper is the outcome of a three year research project supported by the Center for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technologies, Cornell University, a NanoScience and Engineering Center of the National Science Foundation under Award # EEC-0117770, 0646547, jointly with the Department of Science & Technology Studies (S&TS) also at Cornell. The author is very grateful to Stephen Hilgartner and Trevor Pinch for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. She would also like to thank Les Levidow and Kean Birch, and two anonymous reviewers of Science as Culture, for their editorial support. Special thanks go to Rolland Munro and other participants in the ‘Unsettling Technology and Accountability’ sub-panel of the European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in July 2008, where the first draft of the paper was presented.

Notes

President Clinton's Address to Caltech on Science and Technology (2000), The White House Office of the Press Secretary (Los Angeles, California), for Immediate Release, 21 January 2000. Remarks by the President at Science and Technology event, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

Such as the ‘hype–disappointment cycle’ adopted in conversations between IT industries, analytical firms and investments as in Rip (2006).

This definition can be found at the NSF's National Nanotechnology Initiative website, available at http://www.nano.gov/html/facts/faqs.html (last accessed 17 March 2009).

In a similar vein, a recent study by Thurs (2007) examines the ways in which nano has proliferated into public discourse as an entity amenable to commercialisation as opposed to being solely a matter of academic pursuit. As such, nano found its place in the stock exchange markets.

Hilgartner's (2007) analysis of the use of analogies in the policy effort to promote and institutionalise bioeconomy is illustrative of these processes. See also Wyatt (2004) for an insightful discussion of the roles of metaphors in the public construction of meanings in economics, geophysiology and the Internet.

Compare Goffman (1961) and Grint and Woolgar (1997) for discussions of the forms of social ordering performed by such accounts.

Non-disclosure agreement.

Looking at similar problematics in the area of arms control, Rappert offers an analysis of socio-technical relations which ‘instead of seeking to identify a point of resolution between the two … advocates and exemplifies the need to attend to the dilemmas associated with the movement between the general and the specific’ (Rappert, 2007, p. 693).