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The Transformation of Society
Science has spoken, with growing urgency and conviction, to society for more than half a millennium. Not only has it determined technical processes, economic systems and social structures, it has also shaped our everyday experience of the world, our conscious thoughts and even our unconscious feelings. Science and modernity have become inseparable. In the past half-century society has begun to speak back to science, with equal urgency and conviction. Science has become so pervasive, seemingly so central to the generation of wealth and well-being, that the production of knowledge has become, even more than in the past, a social activity, both highly distributed and radically reflexive. Science has had to come to terms with the consequences of its own success, both potentialities and limitations.
In The New Production of Knowledge, changes in the constitution of science and in research practice were attributed to the growing contextualization and socialization of knowledge. One of the characteristics of Mode-2 science, we claimed, was that knowledge was now being generated ‘in the context of application’, and our book contained frequent references, appeals even, to the ‘social’. The implication of our argument was that science could no longer be regarded as an autonomous space clearly demarcated from the ‘others’ of society, culture and (more arguably) economy. Instead all these domains had become so ‘internally’ heterogeneous and ‘externally’ interdependent, even transgressive, that they had ceased to be distinctive and distinguishable (the quotation marks are needed because ‘internal’ and ‘external’ are perhaps no longer valid categories). This was hardly a bold claim. Many other writers have argued that heterogeneity and interdependence have always been characteristic of science, certainly in terms of its social constitution, and that even its epistemological and methodological autonomy had always been precariously, and contingently, maintained and had never gone unchallenged. In a recent essay in Science, Bruno Latour wrote about the transition from the culture of ‘science’ to the culture of ‘research’ in the past 150 years:
Science is certainty; research is uncertainty. Science is supposed to be cold, straight and detached; research is warm, involving, and risky. Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies. Science produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology, passions and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry familiar. (Latour 1998: 208-9)
Latour goes on to argue that science and society cannot be separated; they depend on the same foundation. What has changed is their relationship. In traditional society science was ‘external’; society was – or could be – hostile to scientific values and methods, and, in turn, scientists saw their task as the benign reconstitution of society according to ‘modern’ principles which they were largely responsible for determining. In contemporary society, in contrast, science is ‘internal’; as a result science and research are no longer terminal or authoritative projects (however distant the terminus of their inquiry or acknowledgement of their authority), but instead, by creating new knowledge, they add fresh elements of uncertainty and instability. A dialectical relationship has been transformed into a collusive one. In the sub-head in another article Latour sums this up as ‘a science freed from the politics of doing away with politics’ (Latour 1997: 232).
So much is common, and uncontroversial, ground. But, even in this more ‘open’ description, much of the attention remains focused on science rather than society. The latter impinges on the argument only when it touches the former – for example, when controversies about nuclear power or environmental pollution draw in a wider range of actors whose presence and significance cannot be ignored. The perspective is still mainly that of the scientific community(ies) – its composition more heterogeneous, its values more contested, its methods more diverse and its boundaries more ragged, of course, but still distinguishable from other domains such as culture, economy and society. In other words the relationship is viewed principally from one, still dominant, perspective. Indeed, it is possible to read into this more ‘open’ description of science (‘research’ in Latour’s term) a restatement of traditional accounts of the scientification of society. Science’s success has made the world more complicated and scientists must wrestle with the consequences of this complication. But science is still in charge.
It is more unusual to view this changed relationship from the perspective of society. The transformation of society is regarded as predominantly shaped by scientific and technical change. In other words the socialization of science has been contingent on the scientification of society. There are now extended scientific communities and more urgent socio-scientific controversies because society as a whole has been permeated by science, although it is accepted that in the process the culture of science – autonomist, reductive and self-referential – has been transformed into something different: in Latour’s phrase, a culture of research which is more populist, pluralistic and open. The ‘social’ has been absorbed into the ‘scientific’. It follows, therefore, that those other aspects of social transformation that appear initially to have owed less to scientific and technical change, even if subsequently they have helped to shape Latour’s culture of research, must be regarded as inherently less significant. As a result, changes in the affective and aesthetic domains, so dominant in our definitions of modernity, have rarely been given prominence in analyses of the changing science-society relationship – except, perhaps, to be dismissed as irritating irruptions of irrationality.
In The New Production of Knowledge, despite the importance of the ‘social’ in its account of Mode 2, wider social transformations went largely unexplored. This may have been excusable in the light of the interminable academic literature on modernization and modernity (and post-modernity). The book was never intended to be an essay in social theory – any more than it was conceived of as a tract on science policy. Only in the chapter on the humanities, because of the need to engage wider cultural themes which made it essential to acknowledge other dimensions of social transformation, and in that on higher education, because massification and democratization mean that universities are no longer so intimately associated with the production of scientific and professional elites or the dissemination of a scientific culture, was there any attempt to explicate ‘society’.
In retrospect this avoidance of any substantial discussion of the ‘social’ was a weakness – in three senses. First, it allowed the argument to be assessed purely in narrowly empirical terms, as a more or less accurate account of recent trends in scientific production. For example, Diana Hicks and Sylvan Katz (Hicks and Katz 1996) used bibliometric data to test claims about the growth of networking and collaboration made in The New Production of Knowledge. Revealingly their tentative explanation was that this trend was probably an ‘internal’ phenomenon, the consequence of the end of institution building and budget growth during the 1970s, rather than an ‘external phenomenon’, the result of the changing dynamics of research itself (in scientific as well as professional and organizational terms), not to say of the emergence of a new relationship between science and society. Second, it made the argument unclear at crucial points. As a result the book was read by some critics as an endorsement of applied science and an apologia for relativism. For example, Paul David characterized our argument as ‘a post-modern vision’ in which ‘mission-oriented R&D is well on its way to displacing discipline-based scientific practice, and becoming an ubiquitous and institutionally decontextualized activity’ (David 1995: 14). John Ziman has offered similar criticisms (Ziman 1996). Third, this avoidance of the wider social picture made it difficult to differentiate our argument from those of others like Latour who readily acknowledge the changed relationship between science and society. That difference may lie not simply, or perhaps especially, in more radical notions of the new articulations between them, but in a more radical vision of society. This is important because whether the idea of contextualized science is perceived as substantially different from earlier ideas of science and, consequently, more threatening to the rigour of scientific method and robustness of scientific practice depends on how this ‘context’, that is, society, is defined. If the evolution of society is defined in terms of benign continuity, the difference and therefore the threat are less. If it is defined in disruptive and disjunctive terms, they are greatly increased. The argument that will be presented here, at its simplest, can be reduced to the assertions that (to borrow the terminology used in The New Production of Knowledge) Mode-2 science has developed in the context of a Mode-2 society; that Mode-2 society has moved beyond the categorizations of modernity into discrete domains such as politics, culture, the market – and, of course, science and society; and, consequently, that under Mode-2 conditions, science and society have become transgressive arenas, co-mingling and subject to the same co-evolutionary trends.
The Growth of Complexity
Certainly there appears to have been a remarkable coincidence between the development of more open systems of knowledge production on the one hand and on the other the growth of complexity in society – and the increase of uncertainty in both. The climax of high modernity with its unshakeable belief in planning (in society) and predictability (in science) is long past, even if the popularity of ‘evidence-based’ research demonstrates the stubborn survival of the residues of this belief. Gone too is the belief in simple cause-effect relationships often embodying implicit assumptions about their underlying linearity; in their place is an acknowledgement that many – perhaps most – relationships are non-linear and subject to ever changing patterns of unpredictability. A good example is the development of chaos theory in the 1970s and its enthusiastic reception by a wider public previously unfamiliar with the phrase and certainly not able fully to understand its technical details or appreciate its scientific significance. For this wider public, chaos theory was a powerful metaphor which vindicated its long-held belief that not everything was predictable – either in science or government or in daily life. The popularization of chaos theory had a double significance, political and scientific. First, because ‘experts’ who previously had pretended to know (almost) everything were shown not to know as much as they claimed, the political distance between governors and governed was reduced; traditional hierarchies of deference were eroded. Second, in epistemological terms chaos theory, in its metaphorical much more than its technical aspects, appeared to suggest that the link between determinism and predictability had been broken.
In retrospect the coincidence between the degree of order, control and predictability thought to be found in the physical and in the social and political worlds is remarkable. The search for control and the belief in predictability had guided the project of modernization from the beginning. The Clock, and later the Machine, had become the guiding metaphor and dominant iconography of the political order. At first regarded as the worldly embodiment of a cosmic order, later this political order was reflected in, and also celebrated, the machinelike operation and technocratic efficiency of welfare-state capitalism and liberal democracy. In its smooth and predictable functioning, the process of modernization in the highly industrialized Western countries reached its climax during the quarter century after 1945. Moreover, modernization was no longer attributed to the ‘hidden hand’ of the market or other apparently impersonal forces; instead it was publicly on display for all to see, a powerful affirmation of man’s control over nature and society. Any remaining errors or malfunctioning systems could be rectified by more and better science and more ingenious and detailed social engineering. The future, an open-ended horizon, seemed to promise wealth and health for all who remained true to these underlying principles of order and liberty.
Of course, in its early days at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries modernity had been a much more tormented, and ambiguous, phenomenon. In its cultural manifestations, at any rate, it was plagued by doubts about promises of a progress that had yet to materialize for the majority of the population. But with mass consumption succeeding, and complementing, mass production, these fears eased. In Western Europe and North America, at any rate, the years after 1945 produced unprecedented economic growth, full employment and material wealth for a population that quickly became accustomed to its twin role as producers and consumers. Predictability and control became the hallmarks of an accomplished modernization arrogantly characterized by assertions of universalism, openness, rationality and efficiency. Science and technology also became powerful metaphors for the transformation of politics; the latter came to be seen as potentially as efficient, predictable and orderly as the former. For a brief period in the 1960s the social sciences, in their capacity as advisers to the political ‘Princes’ of the democracies of the West, were swept up by the same unprecedented euphoria and naively came to believe they could emulate the triumphant progress of the natural sciences. This period coincided with the Cold War – although it was far from actually being a coincidence. The enemy of the open society, like disorder generally, had to –- and could – be kept outside the realm in which control and predictability had been successfully installed. Cartesian dualisms, not only of mind and body, but of right and wrong, of good and evil, of rational and irrational, and of sharp differentiation between modern and pre-modern, were justified by the bipolar configuration of the Cold War world. The reputation and funding of science flourished, as did that of technology, for strategic reasons, partly because scientific and technological success was seen as a key guarantor of national security and partly because the wider scientific and technological enterprise benefited from the spin-off from military uses.
This exceptional conjunction of order and freedom, which produced a fleeting, and misleading, coincidence between the (assumed) regularity of society and the predictability of a progressive science, was destroyed by two great events. The first was the oil crisis of 1973-5. Unexpected and without previous warning, it brought home the vulnerability of a highly industrialized technological civilization to sudden changes in its political and natural environment. It had both political and cognitive consequences. First, a new confrontational discourse was created within Western societies as the hitherto uncontested primacy of economic growth was questioned in the light of the rapid depletion of natural resources and degradation of the natural environment. An international commission set up through an initiative of Norwegian Prime Minister Brundlandt coined the word ‘sustainability’. Limits suddenly appeared – first to economic growth and then, in the wake of environmental protest movements against nuclear power, to the feasibility of unrestrained scientific-technological developments more generally.
The state, until now seen as the embodiment of political modernity and technocratic efficiency, also began to run up against its own limits. Decentralization in political authority and administration came to be regarded as a requirement of good governance, and citizens ceased to be seen as passive recipients of public goods to be distributed or re-distributed according to expert systems. Consumers became individualized, as did their ability (and right) to maximize their individual preferences, which were now defined according to models of economic rationality and of utilitarian welfare functionality. These developments, of course, were not uniform. National variations and different types of welfare states persisted. Although after the oil shock nearly all post-war welfare states started to evolve in a similar ‘market’ direction, their actual trajectories were determined by their previous histories, and their detailed configurations shaped by specific, and even unique, ‘local’ value conflicts and organizational and professional structures.
At the same time, the sources of scientific and technological knowledge were reshaped by the processes of internationalization and, more radically still, globalization, largely (but not solely) supported and stimulated by the development of new information and communication technologies. Knowledge production ceased to be the nearmonopoly of a handful of Western industrialized countries. The configuration of scientific and technological knowledge in the context of concrete application became at times as important as its primary production. Control over geographically widely diffused networks of a partly ‘immaterial’ quality inherent to the new technologies became ever more difficult to enforce. Moreover, new materials and new production processes began to affect the production system itself, which now became ‘flexible’, organized ‘just-in-time’ and around principles dictated by ‘lean’ organizations.
As has already been pointed out, the popularity of chaos theory in the mid-1970s – the cognitive analogue of the oil shock perhaps – marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of modelling using linear and incremental analytical tools based on a paradigmatic calculus. The use of models, of course, increased and spread into new fields where modelling is less obviously applicable. But modelling no longer provided complete answers; problems eluded its grasp. Many of the insights of chaos theory were made possible by the same impressive advancements in computer technology that encouraged globalization. Non-linearity became the catchword of the day. The enthusiastic reception of chaos theory can be seen as one of the subtle shifts from a culture that valued homogeneity to one that braces itself to live in a world of heterogeneity. Chaos theory captured the imagination of Western intellectuals and, more widely, of an intelligent public. The claim that a butterfly’s wing over the Pacific could give rise to a tornado over Texas appeared to support their instinctive view that dynamics – of all kinds, individual, social, political and scientific – were essentially non-linear. And the once robust epistemological link between determinism and predictability was also undermined.
The second event was the equally unexpected collapse of the Communist regimes and the end of the Cold War fifteen years later in 1989. No political theory had been developed that could help to explain the rapid, and disorderly but initially peaceful, transition from Communism to free-market capitalism. Few had anticipated the internal contradictions, and consequently erosion from within, of the Communist regimes. Indeed theories that emphasized the contrast between stable totalitarian regimes, which for that reason had to be confronted and contained, and unstable authoritarian regimes, which might be ignored and excused, remained popular through the 1980s. The political repercussions of the collapse of Communism were felt in East and West alike, and were greatly magnified by its unexpectedness. In countries as different as South Africa and Israel their effect was generally positive, opening up new possibilities of political movement and social reform. In the West, and especially in the United States, their effect has been more negative despite shortlived talk of the ‘End of History’. The loss of an external enemy and the collapse of mentalities firmly grounded in a bipolar world have produced unexpected internal political fragmentation and contestation. But, in both East and West, the overall impact of the collapse of Communism has underlined the unpredictability of politics.
More fundamental consequences could also be observed. Although the Cold War embrace between scientific and military systems had encouraged some on the Left to demonize science and technology (already suspect on environmental and egalitarian grounds), these links had contributed more powerfully to science’s sense of solidity, utility and linearity. Politically contested (but only by a minority), science (despite – or perhaps because of – this contestation) seemed cognitively secure. But with the collapse of Communism this powerful source of support, political and cognitive, was lost. The half-century persistence of a bipolar Manichaean world had also sustained support for the social engineering of the post-war welfare state. However uncongenial to free-market capitalism and however unpromising as a tool of social-democratic reform, welfare states seemed the price that must be paid to maintain social peace and to ensure the loyalty of the working class. Full-employment policies, therefore, were rooted in Cold War political necessities as well as Keynesian economic theories. The forty-four years of armed peace not only stimulated scientific advance; they also fuelled economic growth. Before the spectre of inflation returned as a result of the oil shock and of the United States’ reluctance to raise taxes to finance what was initially seen as a local – and short – war in Vietnam, the economic impact of military expenditure, and its civilian spin-offs, had generally been regarded as a stimulus to growth as well as innovation, rather than as a distortion of the economy. Finally, the frightening certainties of the Cold War perhaps induced a cognitive security that was reflected in the intellectual regularities of that period.
The correspondences between the evolution of social and political contexts on the one hand and intellectual cultures on the other are too suggestive to have been merely accidental. The controlling imperatives of post-war welfare states and of pre-oil-shock economies in the West and the success of science, not only in terms of its political prestige but of its cognitive regularity, are too closely aligned. So the end of the Cold War, even more than the oil shock, represented a radical challenge not only to the political (and social) order that had prevailed in the West since 1945, a period which in retrospect can be seen as an age of equilibrium, although its normative stability was disguised by its ...
