| Property | Value |
| Name | Re-Thinking Science Mode 2 in Societal Context - No Link |
| Description | Nowotny, H., P. Scott and M. Gibbons. 2004. Re-Thinking Science: Mode 2 in Societal Context In: Technology, Innovation and Knowledge. Management Book Series, Vol. 2.: Knowledge Creation, Diffusion and Use in Innovation Networks & Clusters: A Comparative Systems Approach Across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Greenwood Publishing Group Praeger Books, USA.Eight years ago the three authors of this contribution, along with three others, published The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (Gibbons et al 1994). Reviews were mixed. Some philosophers, historians and sociologists of science regarded the argument in the book as either simplistic or banal (or perhaps both), while science policy analysts worried about the empirical evidence for the trends identified in the book (or argued that these trends were not new). However, the book sold well. Its broad thesis, that the production of knowledge and the process of research were being radically transformed, struck a chord of recognition among both researchers and policy makers. It seemed to make sense of familiar but disparate policies and practices which they were either encouraging or experiencing.Of course, like all theses that gain a certain popularity (and notoriety) it was radically simplified, collapsed into a single phrase, almost a slogan - ‘Mode 2’. The old paradigm of scientific discovery (‘Mode 1’) characterised by the hegemony of disciplinary science, with its strong sense of an internal hierarchy between the disciplines and driven by the autonomy of scientists and their host institutions, the universities, was being superseded – although not replaced- by a new paradigm of knowledge production (‘Mode 2’) which was socially distributed, application-oriented, trans-disciplinary and subject to multiple accountabilities. Those with most to gain from such a thesis espoused it most warmly - politicians and civil servants struggling to create better mechanisms to link science with innovation, researchers in professional disciplines such as management struggling to wriggle out from under the condescension of more established, and more ‘academic’, disciplines and researchers in newer universities, other non-university higher education institutions or outside the academic, and scientific, systems strictly defined. Those with most to lose were most sceptical - researchers in those established disciplines and institutions who feared that the quality of science would be eroded if these levelling ideas gained political currency and that their own autonomy would be curtailed if more explicit links were established between research and innovation. Both reactions were predictable. A generation ago Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions aroused far more interest among social scientists, even humanists, who not only felt a shock of recognition in his account of paradigm shift but also saw that it could enhance the legitimacy of their disciplines, than among natural scientists, who saw Kuhn’s companion idea of incommensurability as a threat not only to universal, or ‘objective’, truth but also to progressive experimentally based research (Kuhn, 1962/1070). His own discipline, physics, was most resistant of all to his ideas. However, in the case of The New Production of Knowledge there was a new twist. The ‘Mode 2’ thesis, however simplified, was recognisably derived from the argument presented in the book. So as authors we could not object.Our critics may even have regarded us as hoist by our own petard, because inherent in the very notion of ‘Mode 2’, or socially distributed knowledge, is the idea that it cannot be authoritatively encoded in traditional forms of scholarly publication. If nurse researchers pounced on ‘Mode 2’ to reduce their subordination to medical research, or if global accountancy companies placed ‘Mode 2’ at the heart of newly established ‘Centres for Business Knowledge’, both of which are actual examples, who were we - the authors - to complain?It was partly to resist this collapse into relativism and over-simplification of the argument presented in The New Production of Knowledge, partly to answer the valid criticisms of that argument and partly to develop our broader thesis that the present three authors wrote a second book Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001). Yet the difficulty remains - how to describe and defend in traditional academic discourse (‘Mode 1’ in our own terminology) ideas that attempt to analyse how that discourse is being transcended (‘Mode 2’). ‘Mode 2’ is not only a concept, inherently open to manipulation or exploitation by others (even in ways of which we may disapprove); it is also a project, an example of the social distribution of knowledge which it seeks to describe. |
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