Here we have a polemic against ‘the academic left’, or at least those who mount ‘postmodernist’ critiques of science. The polemic is directed against diverse targets. They include cultural constructivists who analyse how science embodies social biases; feminists who attack science for imposing patriarchal domination; and environmentalists who implicate science in technological threats to nature’s fragile equilibriums.

In their response, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt do not simply reiterate the pretence that science is value-free; they acknowledge that it may well be influenced by culture and politics. They insist, however, that a detailed knowledge of science is a prerequisite for making valid criticism, and that the postmodern critics simply substitute a ‘moral one-upmanship’ for the necessary professional competence. In particular, Gross and Levitt resent the claim that the methods of critical social theory ‘are equal in epistemic power to those of science’.

In the authors’ view, the general public lacks the scientific knowledge needed to take part in science-related political debate. Moreover, what they characterise as the academic left reinforces such popular ignorance and disenfranchisement. In this way, Gross and Levitt blame the postmodernist critics for perpetuating the political impotence of oppressed people, who become ‘ironic victims’ of their would-be champions.

Taking the moral high ground, Gross and Levitt ask, ‘How do we demo-cratise scientific and technological decision making?’ Their remedy is to ‘educate the great mass of citizens so that thinking accurately about science is possible’. This simple answer reveals their own ideological commitments on at least two counts. First, they imply that the value-laden character of science cannot be debated meaningfully by anyone lacking a formal science education. Secondly, they ignore the capacity of people who are not scientists to engage critically with scientific artefacts and processes, such as automation, medicine or chemical hazards. Indeed, they forget that conflicts between the scientists and technologists and lay people have often forced changes in the experts’ own world view.

Such everyday experiences provide a common reference point for various ‘post-modern’ critiques, whatever their faults. By contrast, Gross and Levitt reassert ‘the fundamental methodology’ of science; they assume that some neutral universal method can offer privileged access to higher truths. What lies behind this fervent belief?

Les Levidow is researching the safety regulation of biotechnology at the Open University.

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity by Ulrich Beck, Sage, pp 260, Pounds
Sterling 35 hbk/ £12.95 pbk

Hazardous industrial systems, risk regulation and even scientific
rationality have been under attack recently.

Social Theories of Risk presents diverse attempts to provide theoretical
explanations for that crisis in public confidence. According to early
psychometric studies of how we see risk, people tend to emphasise its
qualitative aspects, whether it is involuntary, catastrophic or unfamiliar
rather than how great a risk is. Here, for example, Paul Slovic urges that
regulatory policy incorporate these ‘legitimate, rational considerations’,
which usually get excluded by labelling their proponents irrational. As
Harry Otway notes, whoever defines the limits of the technical risk system
in public discourse, also defines who is being rational.

Another essay, describes how the perception of risk changes as it is
communicated to the public. Here Roger Kasperson emphasises that risks may
even become amplified through this process. But he also claims that
society’s responses show much rationality because mass-media coverage is
roughly proportional to the direct, physical consequences of risks. Thus he
defers to expert assumptions about reducing ‘real’ risk to numbers.

Other theories in the book make the connection between how individuals
(including scientists) perceive risk and their socio-cultural groups.
According to cultural theory, each group selects risks which seem useful for
maintaining its own social organisation. But as Steve Rayner elaborates on
the rationalities behind these choices, he somehow omits to considers
corresponding ‘myths of nature’. For example, people who regard nature as
essentially resilient have different ideas of what constitutes a risk from
those who see nature as inherently vulnerable. Taking these background
assumptions into account could be useful in dissecting risk controversies.

Brian Wynne analyses how risk, not simply risk perception, is constituted by
its social context. Scientific knowledge always depends upon particular
conditions, but risk regulation often naively assumes that large-scale
institutions can be controlled as simply as an experiment in a laboratory.
Thus institutionalised scientific rationality can obstruct reflexive
learning and negotiation and, as a result, ‘science is inadvertently
delegitimating itself with publics . . .’

Wynne also suggests that risk is not only uncertain, but indeterminate, as
are the social values embedded in risk assessment. Instead of judging
acceptable risk, we could ask what would count as an acceptable and
plausible social control over potentially hazardous activities. And if risk
management is people management, as Rayner reminds us, then how should
society evaluate both the aims and means of that management?

‘Theories of risk have yet to develop a satisfactory conception of
‘scientific objectivity’,’ point out the editors. By drawing on perspectives
in this book, we can begin to analyse how objective risks contain and
conceal institutional power relations, which risk regulation has difficulty
legitimising.

In Risk Society, Ulrich Beck locates the growing legitimisation crisis in an
epochal shift, called ‘reflexive (or secondary) modernization’. Science
increasingly attempts to handle the risk it produces, even as it becomes
more elusive. Scientific knowledge becomes more transparently contingent
upon its choice of criteria for selecting and interpreting facts. Thus
‘science becomes more and more necessary, but at the same time, less and
less sufficient’ for socially validating claims of truth.

Moreover, disagreements over assessing secondary consequences always presume
an agreement on how the technological development is carried out, yet that
social consensus on progress is faltering. Political institutions have
become administrators of developments which they neither have planned nor
are able to structure, but must somehow justify. And risk assessment also
fails policy makers as a justification. As Beck demonstrates, scientific
rationality encounters a series of contradictions: paradoxically, only by
abandoning its claims to be neutral may regulatory science regain social
credibility.

Les Levidow is based at the Open University and has been researching the
regulation of risks from biotechnology.

How can society bridge the gap between scientists’ and lay people’s
perceptions of risk? In 1983 a Royal Society report acknowledged some difficulties
in quantifying risk, in setting an ‘acceptable level’ of risk, and in handling
different public perceptions of risk. The latest Royal Society report on
risk reveals deeper methodological divisions among risk researchers themselves.
Although natural and social scientists have gained some mutual understanding,
‘the bridge with social sciences has not been put in place’, as Frederick
Warner laments in his introduction.

Indeed, the preface implicitly distances the Royal Society from the
latter part of its own report, written mainly by social scientists. That
disclaimer serves to highlight disciplinary divisions: for example, between
those who would refine the attempt to put numbers on risk, and those who
would deconstruct its latent assumptions. While the former approach privileges
the quantitative assessment of risk on the basis of scientific rationality,
social scientists challenge two of its underlying dichotomies – between
real and perceived, or objective and subjective, risk, and between risk
analysis and its management.

Risk assessment has generally sought a single measure of objective risk,
while treating contrary public perceptions as subjectively mistaken, although
perhaps expressing valid concerns. By contrast, social science has investigated
how subjective perceptions always enter risk assessment, as well as its
acceptability.

Various theoretical models have suggested how all perceptions of risk,
even ‘scientific’ ones, involve some sociocultural bias. Surveys have revealed
how the public perceives the qualitative characteristics of hazards, not
simply the magnitudes measured by scientists. Given such divergent biases,
wider public participation becomes more important for achieving any political
consensus; but it also becomes more difficult, especially if regulators
deploy quantification as objective reality.

Similarly, while risk management takes a prior assessment of risk as
its objective baseline, social science has also challenged that dichotomy.
Critical studies have emphasised the value-laden aspects of both. Indeed,
methods of risk management influence the definition of risk.

If an engineering model treats crowds as physical structures, for example,
then it defines risk in terms amenable to quantification but downplays the
human aspects. Such examples illustrate several ‘doctrinal contests’ in
risk-management policy. Moreover, the report presents critical perspectives
that undermine reified versions of risk, by which cost-benefit analysis
normally quantifies ‘risk reduction’ as a trade-off with money costs (as
uncritically expounded in the appendix).

Providing a helpful survey of contending approaches to risk, this report
proposes an ambitiously broad definition of rationality: a ‘rational’ design
for risk management chooses appropriate organizational types, regulatory
instruments and institutional rules. For example, the report proposes that
managers incorporate ‘risk-bearing groups’ into procedures for identifying
risks.

However, the report does not ask some important questions. Why do our
technological systems relegate most of us to the role of passively bearing
risks beyond our control? Why does risk assessment naturalise the power
relations embedded in those systems? Why do social relations so readily
take the form of a thing – risk – measured and evaluated by experts? If,
and when, protest groups pose those questions, social science may need an
even broader version of ‘rationality’.

Les Levidow, based at the Open University, has been researching the
regulation of risks from biotechnology.

How can we explain the public unease about biotechnology? It has been
tempting to attribute the problem to public ignorance, misunderstanding
or irrationality. Educators could solve it by making scientific knowledge
more accessible, enlightening the public with a truly scientific, rational
understanding. This collection of essays, partly based upon recent research,
both supports and challenges this view.

A leading proponent of biotechnology, Mark Cantley of the European Commission,
hints at motives that may lead its critics to make self-interested, rather
than objective arguments. He says: ‘There is a temptation also for the (public)
interest groups to follow and profit from the excited state of public opinion,
rather than seek to educate and lead it in a ‘rational’ direction, and who
is entitled to claim a monopoly on the definition of rationality?’ There
might also be rational arguments both for and against biotechnology.

According to the Eurobarometer poll, presented here by Eric Marlier,
most people trust environmental organisations – far more than government
– to provide reliable information about biotechnology. There is a strong
correlation between those countries whose population is most aware of the
applications of biotechnology, those most concerned about risks, and those
least favourable towards biotechnology research. Yet a statistical analysis
of individuals suggests that knowledge of biotechnology correlates with
support for its applications. It is not clear how to reconcile these results.

Some explanation may be found in a British survey of public groups by
Sam Martin and Joyce Tait. Of the two most knowledgeable, one group – environmentally
concerned technologists – were generally more suspicious of biotechnology
applications and more likely to trust environmental groups for information,
even more than the population generally.

Martin and Tait interpret their survey results as follows: when members
of a cohesive group are presented with a new issue, ‘they have a ready-made
framework within which to conceptualise it’. Any attempt to change that
attitude would have implications for the individual’s entire outlook. For
example, according to a Dutch study, people’s evaluation of bovine somato-tropin
(BST, the hormone fed to cattle to increase their milk yield) is linked
to their attitudes towards food and food policy.

Referring to wider research on the perception of risk, Gillian Turner
and Brian Wynne emphasise that ‘people rationally define risks in terms
of the trustworthiness and social demeanour of risk-creating and managing
institutions’. They argue that better communication on the risks involved
in biotechnology requires different relation-ships between technologists
and the public.

If people do evaluate technology, bringing to bear a prior conceptual
framework, biotechnologists have little prospect of handling public unease
unless they acknowledge plural rationalities for evaluating risks and benefits
of biotechnology.

Les Levidow is researching the regulation of risks from biotechnology
at the Open University, Milton Keynes.

The question: ‘Do current and anticipated developments in bioscience
require a new covenant between science and society?’ provided the theme
for the Schering Foundation Workshop in 1990. The result is Bioscience:Society,
made up of 23 essays and four reports from working groups.

One group report describes the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘society’
as ‘a conceptual convenience that can cause confusion’. More than confusing,
the distinction serves as a barrier against probing the social content of
science – crucial for answering, or perhaps rewording, the above question.
In that regard the introduction expresses ambivalence about whether or how
values enter the biological sciences by asking: ‘What authority science
can and should exercise over values?’.

Contributors describe science and nature through various social metaphors:
genetic programs, DNA data (and even brain) banks, ecosystem services, genetic
farming, genome libraries, biological bank accounts, protein robots and
so on. Yet they provide little analysis of how those financial and industrial
concepts are being invested in nature, through the choice of R&D paradigms
for ‘discovering’ inherent properties of genes and biological systems. Indeed,
bioscience is reconceptualising natural processes, from human reproduction
to agriculture, as deficient mechanisms whose components, such as, DNA,
must be fixed or replaced to enhance operational efficiency. The concepts
and forces underlying bioscience, however, barely figure in the book’s discussion
of how to renegotiate its relation to society.

As the book does acknowledge, especially for human biology, some innovations
can threaten our sense of self-identity, while raising unrealistic hopes
for miracle cures. Perhaps less obvious is that bioscience tends to do so
by representing social problems as technical ones. For example, in discussing
the question, ‘Does bioscience threaten human integrity?’ the participants
examined technical advances that will allow us to eliminate more and more
genetic defects shortly after (or even before) conception. Such techniques
could help parents to choose whether to attempt or abort a pregnancy; they
would make the choice, not a state-controlled eugenics board.

Yet the contributors separate the social and technical aspects of such
choices. They overlook the subtle pressures that already lead parents to
abort a fetus if the resulting ‘imperfect’ child would burden them and/or
social services. They also ignore the pressures to broaden the definition
of a ‘genetic defect’. Also, despite caveats against labelling people as
‘genetically deficient’, some contributors speculate about a genetic basis
for manic depression or schizophrenia, which they treat as a property of
individuals while ignoring social sources of mental stress.

In the Nazi era, doctors (especially psychiatrists) welcomed and carried
out the labelling as ‘inferior’ of individuals destined for extermination.
Benno Muller-Hill of Koln warns that a more diffuse ‘genetic segregation’
might be imposed today through cost-benefit analysis by insurance companies,
employers, parents and others. That scenario could arise from the genetic
reductionism that another contributor celebrates, saying ominously, ‘With
the discovery of the genome, patients can be treated as individual beings’.
Thus individual needs and potentials become reduced to genetic properties.

Other participants acknowledge that overt conflict arises from ‘the
tension between recognized social values and the unstated values embedded
in scientific developments’, including the commercial interests guiding
them. It is suggested that bioscience can make such conflicts visible, so
that other social institutions can mitigate them; thus conflict could serve
as the ‘pathway to a robust agreement’ – a lasting covenant. If that is
to happen, the debate will have to go much further in identifying the implicit
values involved, as bioscience deploys particular social metaphors in redefining
nature and human nature.

Les Levidow, based at the Open University, is researching into the regulation
of risk for biotechnology.