Science, technology, and life politics beyond the market

ABSTRACT

Arguments in Science & Technology Studies for public participation in decision-making regarding science and technology and for responsible innovation have not adequately addressed the obstacles posed by the economic relations of the market. This paper argues that participation and responsibility are incompatible with the uncontrolled dynamics of the market and with what Gerald Doppelt calls the ‘Lockean code’ of private ownership of the means of production. Responsible innovation aims, in part, to facilitate the expression of what Anthony Giddens terms ‘life politics.’ Without challenging the mediation of the relationship between science, technology, and society by the market, arguments for participatory science and technology and responsible innovation remain within the political framework of Giddens’ Third Way. This paper makes the case for looking beyond Third Way politics toward socialist democratic planning as the future for participatory and responsible innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• responsible innovation
• neoliberalism
• Third Way
• life politics

Introduction: forces of production and democratic ideas

The academic field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has had significant influence on science policy thinking and practice through the project of extending participation in dialogue, deliberation, and decision-making regarding science and technology beyond experts to the broader public. Ana Delgado, Kamilla Lein Kjolberg and Fern Wickson refer to STS’s ‘age of engagement’ in which

STS has also entered a new situation of political influence, where STS scholars have increasingly begun to play an active and influential role in science policy, not only by producing (and contesting) meanings in theoretical debates, but also by acting as practitioners, organisers and evaluators of participation/engagement exercises. (Delgado, Kjølberg, and Wickson 2011, 826)

The case for upstream engagement in science and technology follows from STS scholars’ critique of the hitherto dominant conception of ‘value-free’ science and technique. Sociological studies of science have suggested that values not only arise in ‘application’ but are embodied in epistemic choices, material practices, and designs at much earlier stages in the research and development process (Wynne 2003, 409). In opposition to the eternal deferral of value-considerations, advocates of ‘upstream engagement’ seek to establish a reflexive process whereby values carried within technical programs are opened up for discussion and technical agendas can be re-shaped as part of a public dialogic process (Stirling 2008). The argument for upstream engagement entails opening up debate so that what is at stake is not simply ‘risk’, defined in a technical way, but goals and values. Nick Pidgeon and Tee Rogers-Hayden suggest that ‘the purpose of upstream engagement is less risk characterisation or communication, but a more fundamental exploration of values and visions of the future informed also by the best science available at that point in time’ (Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden 2007, 206).

Exactly how this dialogic process should be translated into transformations of technoscientific agendas has been unclear, however, in much of the literature on public engagement. Efforts at participation have run into significant political limits (Elam and Bertilsson 2003; Wynne 2006, 2014; Lezaun and Soneryd 2007; Thorpe and Gregory 2010). A desire for greater clarity and specificity regarding how participation can be translated into policy has spurred the articulation of the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In RRI, public participation in upstream dialogue is embedded and justified within a broader normative framework with the goal of integrating responsibility, ethics and public value throughout the entire innovation process. Richard Owen, Phil Macnaghten, and Jack Stilgoe write: ‘It is the institutionalised coupling of such integrated processes of anticipation, reflection and inclusive deliberation to policy- and decision-making processes – i.e. the dimension of responsiveness – that is an important, if evolutionary, contribution that RRI makes’ (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012, 755; see also Stilgoe and Guston 2017). RRI represents an advance in making explicit the ethical stakes of participation and analyzing the institutional context of participation. RRI has illuminated how participation is positioned in relation to the institutions and networks involved in the innovation process and innovation policy. But it has not found a way to overcome the material and ideological constraints that arise from this context of institutions and networks.

This paper takes a skeptical position in relation to the possibility of democratizing technology through public participation as pursued within STS. The paper argues that the field of STS is caught in the intractable dilemma of Third Way politics. The Third Way is here understood as a project of attempting to realize progressive political ideals through the transformation of culture, without challenging the economic relations of private property and the market. Its chief intellectual exponent is the sociologist Anthony Giddens and politically it has been associated with the New Democrats of the Clinton Presidency in the US, New Labour in Britain, and Gerhard Schröder as Chancellor of Germany (Giddens 1998, 2007; Finlayson 2003; Ryner 2010). The Third Way, in this form, may be regarded as a post-Cold War phenomenon involving a fundamental acceptance by the left of the closure of political possibilities by the dominance of the global market (Fisher 2009). But the Third Way also represents political optimism about the possibility of achieving progressive goals even within the framework of globalized capitalism. For that reason the term is used as ‘shorthand for the policy mix perceived to be best suited to reconciling economic performance and social justice in a transformed international economy’ (Classen and Clegg 2004, 89). While the Third Way sees a role for the state in shaping markets and in seeking to create social inclusion and preserve social cohesion, nevertheless the primacy of the capitalist market in the ordering of economic life is accepted as setting the parameters of political possibility (Kolarz 2016, 127–128; Callinicos 2001). The Third Way may be regarded as ‘second-wave neoliberalism’ (Steger and Roy 2010, 50–75).

The inherent contradictions of the Third Way were revealed ever more sharply under the pressures of the great financial crisis of 2008 (Jordan 2010; Ryner 2010; cf. Foster and Magdoff 2009). While the limits of the Third Way also gave rise to new left populist movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados protests and Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and a democratic socialist resurgence in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign, the hopes of a left turn have not been realized. Instead, the demise of Third Way governments has been followed by the upsurge of authoritarian populism, cultural and political reaction, and the weakening of international bodies and international law (Slaughter 2016, 5–9, 110–124; Cusset 2018, 51–64; Brown 2019; Norris and Inglehart 2019; Heideman 2020).

STS arguments for public participation and dialogic democratization of science and technology have a strong affinity with the Third Way (Thorpe 2010; Thorpe and Gregory 2010, 282–285, 294–295). STS advocacy of public participation expresses what Giddens termed ‘life politics,’ embodied and articulated in new social movements, bringing what Ronald Inglehart calls ‘post-materialist’ questions of qualitative value to bear on what might otherwise have been treated as unproblematically technical and economic questions (Giddens 1994; Inglehart 1997). As in the Third Way, STS uses the language of democratization, participation and engagement, resonating with the opportunity to express qualitative life-political concerns. However, the qualitative demands of new social movements come into contradiction with the ideology of neoliberal free-market fundamentalism and private control of the means of production. This may be seen, for example, in the way in which corporate interests in the US have funded climate-change denial, deliberately undermining the scope for societal reflexivity as a response to ecological crisis (McCright and Dunlap 2010; Oreskes and Conway 2010).

The concentration of economic power and its unfettered exercise across all domains of life comes into direct conflict with aspirations toward reflexivity. This conflict translates into the inability of globalized capitalist industrial production to regulate itself at the global level and therefore the momentum toward total catastrophic breakdown of civilization that is manifested in climate change and other dimensions of the global ecological crisis such as biodiversity loss (Foster, York, and Clarke 2010; Klein 2015; Thorpe 2016, 53–91; McBrien 2016; Spratt and Dunlop 2019). In this way, life politics in Giddens' (1991, 223; Giddens 1994, 212; Thorpe and Jacobson 2013, 104–106; Bowring 2015, 164) sense of qualitative questions of ‘how should we live?’ translate into a material, biological and ecological sense of ‘life politics’ in the form of the question ‘how can we live?’

The momentum of carbon-based economy, hurtling toward climactic catastrophe, is an expression of the out-of-control character of production organized on the basis of the market. This may be seen as an expression of the fact, as Frederick Engels put it, that ‘every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations’ (Engels 1978, 63). Capitalist production involves authoritarian control by management in the workplace, but absence of control over the totality of the social division of labor, which is organized blindly through the market. Christopher Caudwell writes, ‘Evidently, therefore, there is a contradiction between the organized centres of production and the disorganization of social labour as a whole due to the interposition of the “free” market’ (Caudwell 1965, 203). This contradiction is an expression of the fundamental contradiction identified by Engels ‘between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation’ (Engels 1978, 62–63). Capitalist relations inherently produce a contradiction between, on the one hand, the tendency of capitalism to socialize production (in other words, for production to become increasingly cooperative and for the division of labor and the chains of human interdependency in the production process to become increasingly complex) and, on the other hand, private ownership, privatized appropriation of the product and of profit, and private control by capitalist management over the labor process. To the extent that science has become central to the means of production (Bernal 1939; Marx 1973, 699; Levidow and Young 1981), the call of STS scholars for democratization of science and technology is, at least potentially, far more radical than tends to be acknowledged, because democratization necessarily comes into conflict with private control and with the primacy of the market.

The impetus toward public participation in scientific and technological decision-making may be regarded as the expression of the advanced socialization of production in late capitalism. In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx noted that the incorporation of science into the productive forces of capitalism meant the harnessing by capital of ‘the general productive forces of the social brain’ (Marx 1973, 694). He wrote that the development of ‘fixed capital’ i.e. machinery and technologies of production,

indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and have been transformed in accordance with it. (Marx 1973, 706)

Marxists in, or influenced by, the Italian autonomist tradition have written in particularly interesting and far-sighted ways about how post-Fordist production and new information technologies have expanded the reliance of production on general intellect, such that the boundaries between economic production and consumption, culture, and politics are broken down and even erased (Dyer-Witheford 1994, 1999; Hardt and Negri 2000; Bowring 2004; Virno 2004). Paolo Virno argues that these developments have practically merged what Habermas (1970) posited as separate spheres of labor and interaction:

Today, however, wage labor (employed, surplus-value producing labor) is interaction. The labor process is no longer taciturn, but loquacious. ‘Communicative action’ no longer holds its privileged, even exclusive, place within ethical-cultural relations or within politics, no longer lies outside the sphere of the material reproduction of life. To the contrary, the dialogical word is seated at the very heart of capitalistic production (Virno 2004, 107).

The post-Fordist mode of production breaks down boundaries between spheres of life that capitalist societies had constructed as institutionally separate. Hardt and Negri write that ‘Inside and outside are becoming indistinguishable,’ manifesting an ‘omni-crisis of the institutions’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 196–197; see also Thorpe and Gregory 2010, 276).

The legitimation problems facing science, that have spurred public engagement and RRI, may be understood as following from the crisis of the institutions. The collapse of institutional boundaries should be understood as an expression of the advanced socialization of production, so that specific technical domains of knowledge become highly interpenetrated with diffuse social knowledge, or general intellect, and politicized in the process.

Post-Fordism exacerbates and brings to a new level contradictions inherent in capitalism as a system, producing an omni-crisis of the institutions that can only be resolved by the transition to a post-capitalist global society. The interconnected crises of nation-state based social-democratic, Keynesian, and Stalinist forms of planning since the 1970s make evident that the potential for national planning is highly constrained by the globalization of production and the global mobility of capital (Brenner 2006). The possibility of institutionalizing reflexivity therefore immediately runs into the contradiction between global economy and the nation-state. The constraints that global competition imposes on national governance are brought out extremely clearly by Mónica Anzaldo Montoya and Michelle Chauvet in their study of Mexican nanotechnology regulation as ‘subordinated governance’ (Montoya and Chauvet 2016).

This contradiction between nation-state and global economy was recognized by Giddens in his sociological theory of modernity and is important in his understanding of globalization (Giddens 1981, 197, 202). Giddens concluded that globalization creates legitimacy problems for existing nation-state institutions by creating pressure for ‘double democratization’ (Giddens 1998, 31, 71–73, 75; Loyal 2003, 155). This means democratization of everyday life (for example, the transformation of intimacy into democratic relations of equality) and democratization of international institutions. Giddens is here addressing precisely the kinds of problems which were becoming increasingly central to the burgeoning field of STS in the 1990s and continue to be so in new millennium. What characterized Giddens’ Third Way project was the idea that the new ethical dimensions of life politics could be addressed through the innovation of new political forms to match the increasing interconnectedness of the local and the global, but that these new political forms should be compatible with the global market. What Giddens called the ‘juggernaut’ of modernity could be ‘steer[ed]’ (Giddens 1990, 154) and controlled if the risks generated by global technology and global economy could be translated into opportunities for extending democratic institutions, in a sense enabling Habermasian lifeworld to recolonize system (cf. Habermas 1987).

What is striking about contemporary STS as well as the field of RRI, however, is the way in which they have erased ‘system’ even conceptually. In the editorial for the first issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation, David Guston et al. describe how, in the field of the social studies of science, in contrast with mid-twentieth century thinkers such as Lewis Mumford who characterized technology as an out-of-control power, ‘we social scientists and humanists have largely changed our tune’ (Guston et al. 2014, 1). RRI and STS scholars today portray technology in terms of complexity and agency. They write:

A host of historians, sociologists, ethnographers, philosophers and others have come to a consensus that technologies evolve and become socially embedded (or not) in a way deeply influenced by human values, preferences and choices, rather than one reliant solely on the internal logics of those technologies or determined entirely by the most efficient pathway (Guston et al. 2014, 2).

This begs the question, if technology and society are co-produced, why is technology experienced as out of control and why is modern capitalist civilization confronted, at a planetary level, with its own inability to control its technological productive relationship with nature?

Why, if technology is co-produced with society, is society seemingly locked into what Ingolfur Blühdorn and Ian Welsh call ‘the politics of unsustainability’? (Blühdorn and Welsh 2013). This cannot be adequately understood unless the social relations which co-produce society and technology are understood as alienated social relations. István Mészáros writes ‘The alienation of humankind, in the fundamental sense of the term, means the loss of control: its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power’ (Mészáros 2005, 8. Emphasis in original). Marxists understand the source of alienation to be found in the property relations of capitalism. It is these relations of alienation that underly and explain the existence of what Ulrich Beck calls the ‘organized irresponsibility’ of the contemporary risk society (Beck 2009, 24). The term was earlier used by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite in which he wrote,

Contemporary men of power … are able to command without any ideological cloak, political decisions are made without the benefit of political discussion or political ideas, and the higher circles of America have come to be the embodiment of the American system of organized irresponsibility. (Mills 1956, 338)

This irresponsibility was, Mills argued, ‘today the most important characteristic of the American system of corporate power’ (Mills 1956, 342). That system of corporate power is even more entrenched now, with weaker opposition due to the decline of the countervailing power of organized labor and the capitulation of the social liberalism of the mid-twentieth century to neo-liberalism and the unfettered power of money over politics (Wolin 2008; Domhoff 2020). Structural irresponsibility is bound up with structural inequalities of wealth and power, which follow from the structures of capitalist private property and market relations. Hence, the struggle for responsibility, requiring, what Guston et al. (2014, 2). characterize as, the ‘self-conscious’ reflexive, democratic shaping of technological development, necessarily comes into conflict with those alienating property relations and the market dynamics through which they operate.

Conditions in which the problems of science and technology are problems of the very survival of civilization require STS scholars to extend their sociological imagination beyond the tacit acceptance of capitalist society. If it is to be possible to imagine different material configurations of technology as expressive of different sets of values, it must be possible to also imagine a different political-economic reality, socialism rather than capitalism. In the midst of civilizational crisis, it must be possible to imagine a different form of modern civilization.

This paper will argue that the realization of life politics entails a system of democratic socialist planning. This would be a new kind of political order, radically different from past models of top-down planning by nation-states, not only because it would need to be radically participatory but also because democratic planning would have to operate across scales from the local to the global, something made possible by the new information and communication technologies that underpin global capitalist production (Phillips and Rozworski 2019).

The political economy of the sociology of science

David Hess has suggested the close historical relationship between the emergence of STS as an academic field and the political-economic crisis of Keynesianism. The hitherto dominant sociological approach of Robert Merton was an intellectual expression of American social liberalism. This political framework, which shaped the social compact of the early post-war era, was expressed sociologically in the Mertonian tradition in its functionalist conception of social relations and also in its primarily distributive concerns. Hess writes of Merton himself:

His habitus was consistent with the dominant political ideology of social liberalism, in which distributive issues of the rights of labor, women, the poor, ethnic minority groups, small businesses, communities, and the environment were legitimate areas for state intervention in the economy. But such issues were addressed within a framework of reform that enabled both equality of opportunities and inequality of outcomes through regulated competition (Hess 2013, 181).

Hess argues that the displacement of functionalism in the sociology of science and the rise of agency-based approaches, especially ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, reflected the transition from Keynesian social liberalism to neoliberalism. Latour’s image of the scientist in his celebrated case study on Pasteur ‘is a model of the scientist as entrepreneurial capitalist’ (Hess 2013, 188). Especially since the sociology of scientific knowledge abandoned its earlier Marxist and conflict-theory influenced approach of interests-explanation, structural theories of society, especially those having to do with class, have been marginal to STS and micro-sociological case studies have been the predominant methodological approach (Klein and Kleinman 2002). As science was becoming a highly commercialized enterprise, and universities were being remodeled along corporate-business models, this political-economic reality tended not to be given direct attention by sociologists of science. Rather this new world was reflected ideologically in the marginalization of the kinds of structural sociological approaches that could illuminate and explain it. Hess suggests that the replacement of social liberalism and the postwar compact with neoliberalism was reflected in skepticism toward normative order and the adoption of a neoliberal conception of the scientist as a self-interested strategic agent, a version of homo economicus (Hess 2013).

Both the social-liberal idealism of Merton and the entrepreneurialism of Latour stand in opposition to the political-economic focus which arguably, in the Marxist tradition, provided the original formulation of the question of the social relations of science and technology. Marxists treated the question of the social organization of science as inextricable from the social organization of production (Sheehan 1985; Werskey 2007; Edgerton 2018, 22–23). Writing in the 1930s, J. D. Bernal understood the problem of science as a social phenomenon as bound up with the question of the organization of society’s productive forces for the benefit of society, through economic planning (Bernal 1939). Michael Polanyi’s attention to the social order of the scientific community was bound up with his counter-argument against planning and his defense of market capitalism (Fischer and Mandell 2009; Thorpe 2009). The question of whether a society based on socialist planning or the capitalist market could most effectively pursue the promise of scientific and technological modernity was a central theme of Cold War ideological conflict (Wolfe 2018). This also reflected the cultural prestige of science in this period. The association between science and human progress was reflected and reinforced by the uses of science in political legitimation.

The capacity of science to operate as a symbolic resource for political legitimation (Ezrahi 1990) was a reflection, in part, of what Giddens calls ‘simple modernization,’ in the sense of the modernizing project of achieving human progress through the advance of the scientific and technological control over nature (Giddens 1994, 5, 42, 80–7; Thorpe and Jacobson 2013, 100). Giddens points to the way in which overall social progress seemed to follow from the simple increase in technological capacity (Welsh 2000, 34, 43–44).

Under reflexive modernization, scientific and technological development is rendered problematic as the producer of new risks, from the atomic bomb to climate change. The undermining of the legitimation function of science (Ezrahi 1990) is a feature of the shift from simple to reflexive modernization. The two world wars were the beginning of reflexive modernization in the sense that they radically undermined the western faith in progress. The atomic bomb was especially significant insofar as it could be understood as the epitome of scientific and technological modernity but threatened the very survival of humanity. Unlike earlier romantic critiques of modernity, scientists were now asserting, on the basis of fact and expertise, that science had itself become a threat to humanity (Egan 2000; Thorpe 2006; Rip 2016, 291).

The mid-twentieth century period that saw the emergence and development of the systematic study of the social relations of science was also the period in which the liberal assumption of the market as the engine of human progress had been undermined by the Great Depression. Bernal’s argument for the planning of science was part of a much broader intellectual and political shift away from the liberal faith in the operations the unfettered market and toward the embrace of forms of planning (Werskey 1978). This was undoubtedly influenced by the Russian Revolution and the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The experiences of the New Deal and the wartime economy seemed to demonstrate the power of economic planning or at least some form of state intervention. Keynesianism could be construed narrowly as demand management through activist monetary policy. But it is also possible to treat the term as referring more generally to the attempt to use the state to regulate capital and the social and economic relations of capitalist society so as to achieve a stable capitalist civilization (Mann 2017).

The broader conception of Keynesianism goes along with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of Fordism as developed further by the autonomist Marxists. Fordism is not just a mode of mass production but is also a broader organization of society. Hardt and Negri (2000, 243, 274) write of the ‘factory-society’ in which society is organized for the purposes of mass production. Massimo de Angelis, in this tradition, discusses ‘the social micro-foundations of Keynesianism’ (De Angelis 2000). The combination of Fordism and Keynesianism characterized a period in which a regulated, lastingly stable, capitalist civilization appeared possible. As the structures of social discipline of the Fordist social factory became unglued in the 1960s, this widened the scope for questioning the prevailing way of life and for making lifestyle (in a deeper sense than the colloquial expression) a matter for conscious choice. In Giddens’ terms, one can say that the crisis of Fordism uncovered existential problems formerly suppressed by post-war affluence and growth.

Paradoxically, it was Fordism, in the sense in which it was a mass consumption society with broadly increasing standards of living, that enabled the expression of qualitative concerns of life politics or what Inglehart (1997) calls ‘post-materialist values.’ It was now possible to make demands above and beyond quantitative questions of survival. The qualitative relationship with nature, intimate life in the family, and the qualitative experience of the patient could come to fore only when a certain level of affluence had been achieved. But these qualitative demands often came into contradiction with the rigid structures of Fordist economy and society and with the massive pollution of nature that was an unacknowledged cost of Fordist growth. The Fordist period of capitalism could not satisfy the qualitative demands to which it gave rise.

As the legitimacy of demand management and the economically active state was undermined by stagflation in the 1970s, the cultural basis for the interventionist state was also undermined by mounting social challenges to expert authority. New social movement challenges to technocracy were an aspect of a wider cultural delegitimation of notions of neutrality and disinterestedness that underpinned expert authority. As a result, states were less and less able to draw on science and technology in order to legitimize state action based on the claim to neutrality (Ezrahi 1990).

Democratization of technology or managed participation?

Paradoxically, while STS scholars have advocated public participation as a response to the legitimation problems facing scientific and governmental institutions, Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes argue that ‘these moves designed to encourage forms of democratization are undergoing their own legitimation crises in a “post-truth” era’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2020, 349). Pat Gehrke likewise perceives ‘a legitimacy crisis for public engagement’ (Gehrke 2014). A persistent problem with forms of public participation in science policy is that, while the arguments for them involve the need to counter the power of experts in order to open up decision-making, the formulation and implementation of engagement has created new kinds of ‘experts on community voice’ (Felt and Fochler 2008, 492; see also Rose 1999). According to Gehrke, proponents of public engagement sought to decenter the authority of the scientific expert in these dialogues, but ‘the current crisis emerges from a corollary problem of control by a growing body of public engagement experts who govern the conditions of engagement’ (Gehrke 2014, 78). Alexander Bogner has argued that formalized public participation initiatives in relation to science and technology create a quasi-laboratory space of participation (Bogner 2012; see also Krzywoszynska et al. 2018). He emphasizes the artificiality of these proceedings which are abstracted from public political contestation and hence reinforce the technocratic framework they ostensibly seek to challenge. Bogner writes,

This kind of participation is realized not as protest, expressing genuine pressure from below but as an experiment which is frequently conceived as a research project and carried out under permanent observation by a team of researchers who are present throughout. (Bogner 2012, 521; see also Repo and Matschoss 2019).

We should understand these participatory ‘laboratory experiments’ as experiments in the legitimation not only of emerging technologies, but emerging forms of relationship between institutions and publics framed within the hegemonic structures and goals of neoliberalism (Levidow 2007).

At the same time, as Arie Rip has argued, advocacy and implementation of public engagement fulfills a legitimation function for the academic field of STS. He observes, ‘RRI … is a source of financial and symbolic resources for social scientists and humanities scholars’ (Rip 2016, 294). When the purpose of universities is framed in neoliberal terms as being the creation of economic value through technological development, STS itself is subsumed within the domain of science-society relations that it seeks to analyze. As the legitimacy of STS, like other academic fields in the UK, is framed in terms of external ‘impact’, public engagement, especially insofar as it is understood to contribute to the commercialization of science and technology, registers as evidence of STS’s own instrumental efficacy and therefore its utility in relation to the hegemonic value-framework of the neoliberal knowledge economy (Watermeyer 2012).

The difficulty of truly decentering technocratic authority in public engagement and, therefore, the way in which engagement is too often instrumental, managed, and restricted in dialogic scope, has to do with the fact that the situation of the engagement and dialogue cannot be abstracted from the hegemonic power relations that structure society and, in a very real way, set the conditions of possibility. The broader economic context of the innovation process is indicated by Long, Blok and Coninx when they write:

A key barrier well represented within the literature is the role of financial or cost factors. Simply, the cost of many technological innovations is prohibitive, especially early on in the diffusion process due to difficulties in initial commercialisation efforts. The expense of establishing production facilities, as technology developers transform themselves into technology producers, often means that profits are hard to obtain and increase the costs of the innovative product or service (Long, Blok, and Coninx 2016, 12).

Capitalist competition drives innovation but the contradiction between exchange-value and use-value also constrains and channels innovation in certain directions. What is useful to humanity is not necessarily what makes the greatest profit. Scholars in responsible innovation have suggested the need, as Erik Fisher puts it, ‘for RRI policies to go beyond the project-level in order to address the “competing logics of the various governing regimes, such as professional, institutional, and funding regimes” that influence scientists’ experiences of having so little “room to maneuver” in the first place’ (Fisher 2019, 116; see also Åm 2019).

Analyzing these regimes and the structural constraints they embody and enact is key to understanding the problem identified by Eveleine de Hoop, Auke Pols, and Henny Romjin that the option not to innovate is tacitly excluded in most of these dialogues. They write:

EU-based innovation takes place in the political neoliberal modernisation paradigm that assumes that innovation in general is good for economic growth and societal welfare. However, both the neoliberal and the modernisation aspects of this paradigm have been challenged, and it has been noted that ‘the “gains of progress” also claim many casualties’ (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016, 129).

What they describe is not a quirk of EU bureaucracy, but a structural feature of the political economy of capitalism, pointed to by Marx and Engels when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto that ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production’ (Marx and Engels 1986, 37). Environmental sociologists have more recently analyzed the growth imperative of capitalism’s ‘treadmill of production’ (Schnaiberg 1980; Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiburg 2008). The managed, instrumental, and constrained character of public participation is due to the existence of real constraints that lie in the background of the engagement situation. It is the abstract power of the market and of money (Thorpe and Jacobson 2021) that determines the constraints and limitations of engagement and the limits of responsible innovation (cf. De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016). Researchers in RRI, STS and science policy are reflexive about difficulties that they face in creating grassroots public deliberation. However, their theoretical perspectives, influenced by the agency theories criticized by Hess, often render structural constraints invisible.

The expert-driven, managed, socio-technocratic, and instrumental character of the forms of public engagement pursued from the intellectual position of STS and increasingly adopted in science policy, especially in Europe, reflects the fact that they really are for something. There is purpose running through the funding and institutional legitimation of these exercises by institutions connected with capitalist states: the research funding agencies and universities. The determination that pervades these agencies is what Dominique Pestre calls the ‘meta-power’ of the market (Pestre 2008, 105; Thorpe and Gregory 2010, 277). It is the real force of global economic competition and the drive for competitiveness under highly unstable financialized conditions and the political expression of these forces in neoliberalism (Birch and Mykhnenko 2010; Tyfield 2012a, 2012b; Birch 2016; Tyfield et al. 2018). It takes the institutional form of what Bob Jessop calls the Schumpeterian Competition State (Jessop 2002; Thorpe and Gregory 2010, 278–279). What the scholars and practitioners of engagement, participation, and RRI are experiencing as constraints constitute a finding. They are running up against the reality of power in a capitalist global system. The imperative to innovate (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016) is a real imperative, that indeed structures public participation. It is the imperial power of capital. This power enables and constrains innovation and sets the parameters of engagement. It finds its way into all aspects of contests over the legitimacy of policies, publics, and participations.

With this political-economic context, it becomes possible to understand the limitations of exercises in public participation in science and technology. The key problem in these public participation initiatives has been the fact that, as they have taken shape in policy, they have been framed in terms of rectifying a perceived deficit in public trust in science (Wynne 2006). There is a great deal of truth in the critique by opponents of synthetic biology, documented by Morgan Meyer, that the sociologists involved in facilitating participation and organizing debates are ‘sociologists of acceptability’ (Meyer 2017, 130). De Hoop, Pols, and Romjin state: ‘we think that the worst thing that can happen to RI is not that it fails, but that it is hollowed out and turned into a tool for “greenwashing” irresponsible innovations and unjustifiedly preserving companies’ reputation’ (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016, 112.) This is precisely what the anti-synbio activists perceive it to be.

That efforts at public engagement are instrumental is evident in the fact that engagement initiatives in nanotechnology have been motivated by a comparison with genetically modified (GM) crops and presented as necessary to anticipate and prevent a similar public backlash against nanotechnology to that which occurred against GM (Welsh and Wynne 2013; Seifert and Plows 2014). STS authors have criticized the ways in which ‘public engagement’ has been adopted by UK government and by scientific institutions primarily as a means for securing public trust in science. Wynne (2006) has been highly critical of the way in which talk of a ‘trust deficit’ has replaced the notion of a knowledge deficit from the earlier ‘public understanding of science’ agenda. Aimed at securing public trust, government programs for promoting engagement seem to be geared primarily toward legitimizing technological programs that the government has already decided to support. Matthew Kearnes and Wynne note that a science policy consensus has emerged, particularly with regard to nanotechnology, that by promoting public engagement, social scientists can help to secure public legitimacy for this technological program (Kearnes and Wynne 2007). They cite the example of the Ten-Year Investment Framework of 2004 which states: ‘The UK Government is committed to supporting the development of nanotechnology  …  It is vital that, as this technology develops, the public feels confident about it’ (quoted in Kearnes and Wynne 2007, 107).

Wynne suggests that ‘virtually all of the mushrooming commitment to public citizen engagement in “science policy” … is something of a mirage’ (Wynne, quoted in Wilsdon and Willis 2004, 28). For, there are no guarantees that the voices of those consulted or ‘engaged’ will be paid any official attention. Wilsdon and Willis write:

talk of engagement can backfire unless it has a demonstrable impact. Those whose engagement is being sought need to know that their participation will affect the policies and processes under discussion. They want assurance that trajectories of change and innovation will take meaningful account of their views. (Wilsdon and Willis 2004, 16)

Mairi Levitt observes that, in public consultations regarding the new UK ‘Biobank,’ ‘the public were involved “upstream” in the sense of being involved early on in the project’s progress but were not asked about the direction of the stream or its final destination’ (Levitt 2005, 80).

A prominent idea about what can be achieved through engagement is consensus-building (Wilsdon and Willis 2004, 23). However, it is unclear how dialogue can overcome value-differences that are rooted in the structural position of people and organizations within the field of forces not only of institutional power but also of economic power. Vincent Blok and Pieter Lemmens point to the fact that the different values of private corporations and NGOs have their origin in their different institutional positions in relation to distinctions of profit vs. non-profit and public vs. private. They write, ‘While non-profit organizations are mainly motivated by altruistic motives for instance, profit organizations are mainly self-interested’ (Blok and Lemmens 2015, 22). Ultimately, these divisions have to do with the distinction between exchange-value and use-value and to what extent an organization or group of social actors is directly enmeshed in the market relations of exchange-value. But it should be noted that exchange value, the value-framework of capital, is the dominant over-arching framework, the ‘meta-power’ in which all organizations that require funding, including therefore NGOs, operate. Inequalities of wealth and power translate into different values, but also different material interests.

It is unclear how upstream engagement can handle differences of power. Problems of institutional power might be topics for dialogue. Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon write that

Upstream engagement, in this instance, may even provide a means of placing on the table topics that typically remain outside of traditional discussions of the trajectory and conduct of science: in particular the power relations a technology embodies, and the balance between corporate and civil society interests and control. (Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon 2007, 357)

Even if it is possible to enter into dialogue about power relations, if these power relations cannot be transformed then such dialogue does not constitute democratization. Indeed, dialogue can be used to maintain the illusion of consensus, thereby contributing to, rather than remedying, the depoliticization of the public sphere (Swyngedouw 2010). Political theorist Carole Pateman has insisted that ‘“participation” and “democracy” cannot be used interchangeably: they are not synonyms’ (Pateman 1970, 73). She characterizes workplace participation schemes in which no decision-making was in fact taking place as being ‘pseudo-participation.’ Often, discussion serves as a ‘means for inducing acceptance of the goal’ (Pateman 1970, 69).

Similarly to sociological advocates of upstream engagement, philosopher Andrew Feenberg makes the case for democratization of technology based on the argument that technological design and development is a social process involving political contestation over interests, goals and values. ‘The design of technology,’ he writes, ‘is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences.’ Technical choices are never merely technical, but embody ‘civilizational alternatives.’ The apparently neutral ‘technical code’ in fact is value-laden and potentially contains social biases (Feenberg 1991, 3, 14, 80–81).

Assessing Feenberg’s philosophical project, Gerald Doppelt has argued that Feenberg’s account focuses on technocracy as the primary barrier to democratization, while paying insufficient attention to the undemocratic implications of private ownership. Doppelt writes that ‘non-democratic technology … rests on our society’s powerful Lockean moral code of private property, and not simply on the technocratic ideology of essentialism and value-neutral efficiency’ (Doppelt 2001, 158). Experts who ‘claim and exercise rights of exclusive control over technology’ do not just derive these rights as a result of their technical knowledge. These experts are also often

the designated agents of the will and rights of owners, and less directly the will and rights of consumers … In these contexts, challenges to technology based on workers’, users’, or impacted third parties’ participant interests involve challenges to the rights of private property and modern society’s powerful Lockean moral code. (Doppelt 2001, 163)

If workers in a factory seek to assert their participant interests in shaping the technologies of production, they run up against not only the technocratic discourse of efficiency, but also the rights of ownership of the means of production as capital (Noble 1984).

The notion of democratizing science and technology extends democratization beyond the boundaries accepted within classical liberal democratic theory (particularly in its Lockean formulation), taking in domains of civil society usually treated as beyond the scope of political democracy. Since technology constitutes the means of production, democratization of technology infringes on and undercuts the rights of private ownership. If upstream engagement in science and technology is to mean the democratization of technology, it means extending participation to the means of production and therefore challenging the dominant conception of the rights of ownership of the materials and processes of production. The notion that democratization of technology can be done ‘upstream’ while market forces take over ‘downstream’ is illusory. In a market system, the profit imperative requires upstream response to market conditions. There is an inherent conflict between deliberation and the market as determinants of technological decision-making and design (Pennington 2002).

Conclusion: globalization and the crisis of the institutions

Public engagement initiatives may be regarded as a response to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the ‘omni-crisis of the institutions,’ particularly as this affects, and is experienced in, the university (Hardt and Negri 2000, 197; Thorpe 2008, 78–79). This analysis resonates with a key strand of Giddens’ Third Way, which is the conflict between globalization and the nation-state and the way in which globalization undermines nation-state institutions, creating pressure for democratization. Giddens regarded the conflict between globalization and the nation-state as requiring what he called a process of ‘double democratization,’ meaning the creation of fora for democratic participation at the local level below the nation-state and at the international level. While the Third Way treats these contradictions as manageable within the context of post-Fordist capitalism, Hardt and Negri emphasize how post-Fordism and globalization come into conflict with the institutions of capitalist society in ways that render pressures for democratization unmanageable within prevailing power relations.

Globalized information technology renders capitalist production dependent on global flows of information that undermine the control of information by the nation state and the institutions through which the nation state previously ordered society, including the university. The university exemplifies how boundaries around institutions are broken down and, with them, previous bases for institutional legitimacy are undermined. John Ziman argues that contemporary ‘post-academic science’ at all levels comes to be infused with the ‘norm of utility.’ The demand for usefulness ‘is being injected into every joint of the research culture’ (Ziman 2000, 74). Post-academic science responds to neoliberal pressures for the university to engage in the commercialization of science, which resituates the university in a network with government funding agencies, private companies, and venture capital. In this context, the ideology of pure science and Mertonian norms that emphasized the detachment of the academic from external social values and pressures, are rendered inoperable as legitimations for academic science (Etzkowitz 1989).

Instead, the legitimacy of the university comes to depend, explicitly, on its entanglement with external influences (Berman 2012). In this context, the relationship between science and values shifts from a problem of ‘two cultures’ (sciences and humanities) within the university and becomes a problem of the relationship of the university to value controversies diffused through the public sphere. The doctrine of neutrality and disinterestedness, through which academic scientists shielded themselves from broader societal value disputes, no longer carries legitimacy. It is an implication of this, Ziman argues, that science also becomes politicized – as research programs have to justify themselves in terms of the value of their proper ‘uses.’ ‘Utility,’ he writes, ‘is a moral concept. It cannot be determined without reference to more general human goals and values’ (Ziman 2000, 74; see also Ezrahi 1990). Neoliberalism, together with the emergence of new forms of political mobilization expressing life politics, has undermined earlier institutional and cultural supports for scientific authority and discourses of the legitimation of science which operated in terms of tropes of purity, autonomy, objectivity and distinterestedness, moralizing the institutional separation of science from publics. Today, the boundaries around professional expert domains are less clear and professional expert epistemic control over those domains is less taken for granted.

Chilvers and Kearnes write:

Established forms of public representation and participation are struggling to reflect, contain, and account for the ever-increasing multiplicity of diverse and emergent publics and their associated concerns, values, epistemic claims, and ontological commitments. This is fueled by the proliferation of new spaces of both online digital and off-line participation, material entanglements, and distributed patterns of issue formation. Seen in this light, contemporary crises of democracy and expertise, commonly rendered as matters of public deficits, can be seen as problems of too much (not too little) participation which lacks recognition by and overflows dominant institutions, methods, and ways of seeing (Chilvers and Kearnes 2020, 349).

Their description of ‘too much participation’ resulting in the over-spilling of issues and participation beyond existing institutional boundaries is precisely the situation which Hardt and Negri are indicating with their concept of the ‘omni-crisis of the institutions.’ STS is not only describing, but is itself inescapably embroiled in, this crisis.

In attempting to mediate the divide between experts and the lay public, STS is caught up in the contradiction between the imposition of monetary value as the overarching meta-power and measure of all social life versus the emergence of a multitude of movements and currents raising the question of ‘how should we live?’ The new demands for reflexivity, that emerge from the breakdown of the structures of the Fordist social factory and of simple modernization, come into contradiction with the anti-reflexivity (cf. McCright and Dunlap 2010) imposed by neoliberal capitalism’s reduction of all value to the quantitative measure of capital (Thorpe and Jacobson 2021).

The realization of the democratic aspirations associated with public participation in science and technology comes into contradiction with the Lockean code of the market and the prerogatives of private control over the means of production. It is precisely because of the way in which the principles of participation, deliberation, and social responsibility come into conflict with the invisible hand of the market that Robert Frodeman has said

Meanwhile, in America and elsewhere some circles will dismiss such efforts as ‘creeping socialism’. If by socialism they mean that responsible innovation is part of a long line of attempts to make profit-taking more responsive to societal needs, then broadly speaking, they will be correct. (Frodeman 2019, 256)

Precisely because the deliberative ideal and reflexivity imply bringing to consciousness, and therefore making controllable, processes that had been left to the unconscious determination of value-outcomes by the market, they run directly counter to the neoliberal doctrine that the market processes information and arrives at optimal outcomes more efficiently than can any conscious process (Pennington 2002; Mirowski 2014).

Neoliberal doctrine implies the primacy of money and exchange value. In contrast, democratic socialist planning would seek to extract the norm of utility from exchange value and resituate it within an economy directly oriented toward use-values, i.e. the satisfaction of human need. This marks a fundamental contrast with capitalist planning. Mészáros writes, ‘The socialist system of incentives is based on the primacy of needs over production targets, liberating itself thus from the tyranny of exchange value’ (Mészáros 1995, 835). This demands re-orientating science policy toward a moral economy based on the satisfaction of human need rather than the drive toward endless growth and the ever-intensifying domination of nature, driven by the pursuit of profit.

Democratic planning oriented toward need allows deliberatively formulated values expression against the imperatives of the market. But the contradiction between global economy and the nation state necessitates that democratic planning not be confined to national-state institutions. Rather, the globalized networks of information and communication that play a vital role in globalized production must be harnessed to extend democratic deliberation beyond the nation-state in order to mobilize what Hardt and Negri (2000, 410) call ‘mass intellectuality’ at a global level. The question of democratic deliberation in the governance of science and technology indicates the development of new modes of social control of the productive forces, operating beyond the nation-state. Global democratic planning, the self-regulation of the human interchange with nature at a global level, points beyond the institutional structures of capitalism toward a new global civilization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

Charles Thorpe is Professor in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Necroculture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).