Introduction: Technoscientific Productivity

Abstract

The title of this and the following special issues of Perspectives on Science, “Technoscientiac Productivity,” refers to two closely related social activities and institutions: arst, the alliance of modern science, technology and industry; and, secondly, the technical shaping and production of scientiac objects within the experimental sciences. Most historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology agree that in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries a close interdependence, if not convergence, of science, technology and industry, including agriculture and the military, emerged. Research on atomic energy, gene technology, biomedicine and nano technology are manifestations of increasingly powerful, stable technological-scientiac complexes that now shape industrial societies. The term “technoscience” has become a shorthand to denote that constellation and to focus research on it. Less agreement exists, however, when it comes to the question of the historical emergence and development of technoscience. Is technoscience—in the sense of an interdependence and local convergence of science, technology and industry—a comparatively late product of historical developments, restricted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or did forms of that interdependence exist and evolve earlier? What kind of social, economic and political conditions promoted the development of technoscience, or of various forms of it? These kinds of questions are tackled in nearly all of the papers assembled in the two special issues. A second group of questions relates to technoscientiac productivity within the experimental sciences. In the history of experimentation, experimenters often have questioned