Abstract
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with social responsibility. The article identifies what we call ‘deficit trouble’, when there is poor alignment of the deficits of different imagined scientists, which may lead to a stalemate in the communication between science policymakers and scientists. We argue that ‘the imagined scientist’ can function as sensitizing concept for further studies of science governance across a range of topics, bringing into view how different deficit logics operate in science policy.
Highlights
A new approach to study science governanceScience policy draws on representations of scientists and their practices, to shape governance efforts, incentive structures, allocation of resources, knowledge mobilization and more
Our refined main research questions are : How do science policymakers and scientists imagine scientists’ knowledge and agency in relation to the enactment of social responsibility in and knowledge about science-society relations? What suggested solutions follow from these problem framings? To what extent are these characteristics drawing on knowledge about the culture and practice of science? To what extent are the ensuing ‘imagined scientists’ aligned? In our analysis, we first explore our data by pursuing these questions, and discuss our findings by employing the deficit framework presented above
We chose to study these Research and Innovation (RRI) documents because they are official articulations of how the most prominent science policy-making institution in Norway constructs an image of scientists and simultaneously emphasizes a particular understanding of social responsibility through the identification of particular deficits
Summary
Science policy draws on representations of scientists and their practices, to shape governance efforts, incentive structures, allocation of resources, knowledge mobilization and more. Heidenreich, 2015; Maranta et al, 2003; Solbu, 2018; Walker et al, 2010; Welsh and Wynne, 2013) The premise of this scholarship is that imagined publics are performative in the sense that such conceptions may influence scientists’ research and forms of engagement. We take inspiration from a recent analytic framework of how deficit logics operate, developed by Pfotenhauer et al (2019) in their investigation of innovation policies Like us, they draw on studies of imagined publics, while arguing that a focus on deficit logics in the context of public policy does not raise the same problems as in the context of public understanding of science. Our refined main research questions are : How do science policymakers and scientists imagine scientists’ knowledge (or knowledge deficits) and agency in relation to the enactment of social responsibility in and knowledge about science-society relations? Our refined main research questions are : How do science policymakers and scientists imagine scientists’ knowledge (or knowledge deficits) and agency in relation to the enactment of social responsibility in and knowledge about science-society relations? What suggested solutions follow from these problem framings? To what extent are these characteristics drawing on knowledge about the culture and practice of science? To what extent are the ensuing ‘imagined scientists’ aligned? In our analysis, we first explore our data by pursuing these questions, and discuss our findings by employing the deficit framework presented above
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