STS Perspectives on Public Policy
The sophistication, diversity, and complexity of contemporary society means that we no longer have the luxury of debating policy decisions in terms of forces of light versus forces of darkness; we must now consider the balance of virtues that will affect all of our people and institutions. STS offers a more complex and thoughtful analysis of policy options than the reductive fiscal, legal, and ideological “bottom line” explanations that tend to dominate policy debates.
STS Considers Indirect Influences on Policy and Public Opinion
Direct influences on policy and popular support include legal precedent, fiscal cost, and constituent support. Such influences can be measured or proven through records and documents, and are vital to the policy process, but they do not provide a complete picture of the considerations that policymakers and the public should take into account. STS considers indirect influences, such as the role of metaphor to frame scientific information, and how that can have a direct impact on attitudes toward scientific disciplines, as well as direct impacts on policy and funding decisions; deconstructions of the assumptions that underlie policy debates; cultural and ethical perspectives that should be considered in policy decisions; interpretation of and allowances for variations of a scientific fact; and other approaches that combine history, philosophy, and sociology to provide policy insight from the outside.
Metaphor
Lakoff and Johnson describe the cognitive process that allows the human mind to map new ideas to prior knowledge, and how this fundamentally determines how we conceive innovative ideas and perceive concepts that are new to us. George Lakoff used his embodied mind theory to find mainstream success in his later work, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, which is pretty straightforward as an STS approach to policy. While Lakoff not an STS scholar, per se, his work and theories have been adopted into the STS “canon,” alongside Kuhn, Schön, Boyd, Mayer, and others who have studied the role of metaphor in science and society.
With respect to science policy issues, Richard Mayer offers a practical guide to science instruction that is especially relevant in this age of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and creationism. His instructive metaphor hypothesis should be required reading for every policymaker and science communicator that is fighting the battle against populist science. Although his essay is somewhat technical in nature, his method is really quite simple: use apt metaphors to describe complex scientific concepts. This approach alone might help the layman think about science in a more structured manner, and in any case, it certainly can’t hurt to communicate with the public in terms that they can understand and deal with.
Brendan Larson studies how metaphor might influence environmental policy by explaining how environmental metaphors create a feedback loop between our view of ourselves and our view of nature. Feedback metaphors are scientific metaphors that harbor social values and circulate back into society to bolster those very values. Larson’s theory supports Mayer’s method: When scientific concepts are expressed in daily language …people will interpret them in the context of their lives and carries that lesson over to the political world: Frames trump the facts: political and religious views better predict concern about climate change and other scientific controversies than scientific knowledge. In this way, Larson offers a very specific STS approach to policy participation. While other policy advisors might advocate the use of “spin” or even “framing” an issue, the STS perspective is more nuanced and thoughtful, and considerate of the larger culture, rather than the immediate issue at hand.
Donald Schön digs deeper into this line of inquiry with his theory of generative metaphor, and uses it to analyze the shortcomings of viewing social policy as a “problem-solving enterprise,” and how society might be better served by awareness of the framing of social problems — specifically, who frames them, how they are framed, and what solutions emerge from such frames. Ultimately, he decides that bureaucrats (well meaning civil servants, no doubt) approach problems in their purview within the confines of jurisdiction and resources available to them to solve that problem. That is their job, after all. But in essence, this results in a policy implementation and enforcement position that is limited by a job description. So problem setting matters, and it happens at the generative metaphor stage when the components of the problem are identified within the parameters of available solutions. But Schön has a pretty good normative solution here: frame awareness. That is, just be aware of this dynamic. And that, in a very tidy manner, is one precise way that STS scholars provide valuable input to the policy debate: standing outside of the circle of stakeholders, and deconstructing the issues, point by point.
Deconstruction of Policy Assumptions
Joseph Ben-David’s early work in the sociology of science is actually a brilliantly conceived polemic against authoritarian rule and central planning. Although he describes it as a study of the role of the scientist in society, he manages to frame a seemingly straightforward comparative history of scientists and their institutions as an expression of freedom and democracy. By today’s standards, the framework of this 45-year-old work may seem fairly obvious, but still, he makes a convincing case that a nation’s research portfolio (projects, investments, goals, etc.) reveals that society’s values. And of course, he has history on his side because in the end, he was right.
Fifteen years later, Derek de Solla Price’s strange and compelling calculus of science led him to conclude that that exponential technological growth could “break” civilization, and that people should be prepared for the realities of technologies that overreach social and environmental capacities. And he was right. We have now passed the point of no return and entered into a period of irreversible global warming; the Internet and telecom technologies have challenged cultural norms and institutions of power by playing key roles in protest, surveillance, espionage, privacy rights, and global terrorism; the casual overuse of antibiotics have led to the evolution of MRSA and other resistant infectious strains; ambitious engineering of GMO products has allowed crossover of transposon vectors into non-target species — possibly creating the conditions for the Zika virus to become far more virulent, and certainly affecting wild populations of plants and insects; fracking technology is poisoning groundwater, causing earthquakes, and flooding the global market with cheap oil that is depressing the stock markets; and the list goes on. Price advocated for the entry of scientists into politics and use that influence to make good political decisions, and though that advice has not yet caught on, he had a clear vision for the value and utility of the STS perspective in policy work.
Stephen Hilgartner’s dramaturgical device may prove to be the most entertaining critique of The National Academies’ advisory work to date, by dissecting a science controversy and providing a truly whimsical account of dietary guidelines and recommendations. NAS is routinely tasked with reviewing the value and effectiveness of national science policies and programs, but the selection process for its advisory committees is secret and its ad hoc volunteer members are under no obligation to the government or its people for a report’s recommendations. It is hard to imagine a subject more dull than a committee report that weighs the relative merits of dietary fiber and saturated fats, but Hilgartner’s uniquely STS treatment of the topic reveals some of the very serious implications of the science advisory process, not the least of which is lack of accountability.
Cultural and Ethical Perspectives
One way that STS explores culture and ethics is through the lens of technology. At the turn of the century, the Human Genome Project announced that it had completed its first sequence map. This testament to collaborative science and technological might carried staggering implications: it was very expensive; the commercial value of the information it produced was almost immeasurable; and there was serious public concern about the way that its information might be used. The Common Thread documents the power struggles between competing public and private research projects, the 20 international labs that would be dominated by the so-called “G5” group of five labs that did the bulk of the sequencing, and access to research findings by stakeholders on all sides. Although John Sulston and Georgina Ferry are not STS scholars (he was the lead researcher at Britain’s Sanger Centre, and she is a science writer), their treatment of science history as a crucible to explore the ethics of Big Data research is classically STS.
Political scientists Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas challenge the assumption that technological advancement translates into democratization by looking at the ways that authoritarian regimes use the Internet for surveillance and social control. Their highly structured framework draws out Internet use by the public and civil society organizations in Cuba, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Singapore, and Vietnam, and analyzing user impact. Written in 2003, their scholarship can be tested against international developments over the last dozen years, especially with respect to Cuba, now open to the US, but still famously underserved by the Internet, as predicted.
Kraft and Kamieniecki (eds.) delve into an area of inquiry that they claim is surprisingly thin and often neglected — a systematic analysis of what business is trying to achieve in the policy process, and how it measures success. The answer may seem obvious (less regulation, deregulation), but as with all STS scholarship, there is more to it than that. In a plot twist that Hilgartner would relish, this book reveals that, despite all the media attention, the conventional wisdom, and the perception of corporate power over Congress, the fact is that we just don’t know. In a way, this the most fundamental STS approach: take an assumption and question its validity.
Alternate Views on Scientific Facts
Central to the STS task of questioning assumptions is the body of scholarship dedicated to the production of scientific facts. In fact, despite Thomas Kuhn’s mildly deprecatory Foreword in the English translation of Ludwig Fleck’s 1935 monograph, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, it seems quite likely that this line of inquiry is what started it all. In any case, Fleck examined the origin of one well-known medical “fact” to demonstrate that (with respect to scientific facts) objective truth was impossible to determine because contemporary Denkstils (thought styles) imposed a body of collectively created “facts” in service of the prevailing gestalt.
Latour and Woolgar approached the production of scientific facts by undertaking a two-year anthropological study of a science lab at the Salk Institute. Their “ultimately unconvincing” findings confirmed that the old adage “publish or perish” was approximately true: facts exist because they are published.
The many ways of challenging scientific assumptions has earned all of these academics a place in the STS canon, but it takes a real STS scholar to elevate an examination of scientific facts beyond the philosophical and into the sublime. Karin Knorr-Cetina leapfrogs past the creation and establishment of facts to explore the phenomenon of negative knowledge. Her liminal approach describes the set of “known unknowns” in particle physics, which are neither dismissed nor ignored, but rather intensely studied as a specialization within the field, as with computation fluid dynamics. The point of which is not to pin down hard facts, but to describe the indefinable. Perhaps as much could be said of all scholarship of the construction and production of scientific facts, and certainly it can be said of STS scholarship on the whole.
