Perspectives on Science

The title of this and the following special issues of Perspectives on Science, "Technoscientific Productivity," refers to two closely related social activities and institutions: first, the alliance of modern science, technology and industry; and, secondly, the technical shaping and production of scientific objects within the experimental sciences.

Most historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology agree that in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries a close interdependence, if not convergence, of science, technology and industry, including agriculture and the military, emerged. Research on atomic energy, gene technology, biomedicine and nano technology are manifestations of increasingly powerful, stable technological-scientific complexes that now shape industrial societies. The term "technoscience" has become a shorthand to denote that constellation and to focus research on it. Less agreement exists, however, when it comes to the question of the historical emergence and development of technoscience. Is technoscience—in the sense of an interdependence and local convergence of science, technology and industry—a comparatively late product of historical developments, restricted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or did forms of that interdependence exist and evolve earlier? What kind of social, economic and political conditions promoted the development of technoscience, or of various forms of it? These kinds of questions are tackled in nearly all of the papers assembled in the two special issues. A second group of questions relates to technoscientific productivity within the experimental sciences.

In the history of experimentation, experimenters often have questioned [End Page 139] existing boundaries of scientific objects and created new classifications, forms of understanding, and modes of representation. This epistemic and representational reconfiguration of scientific objects has long been familiar to philosophers, historians and sociologists of science. It is also well known that scientists exploit technology in their research. They use instruments, materials and techniques to unravel natural things and processes and to measure and analyze them. The productivity of experimentalists, however, is not exhausted by the creation of experimental data and phenomena, and by analysis, epistemic transformation, and representation. Experiments are not merely a method (the "experimental method") for the acquisition of natural knowledge. In so-called "pure" research, too, scientists technically shape and often literally produce their objects of inquiry. Their experimental production of novel effects may conclude with the stabilization of reproducible, maneuverable things and processes. Historical examples of this are: stable electric currents and artificial chemical compounds in the eighteenth century, electromagnetic waves in the nineteenth century, and atomic energy in the twentieth century. All of these objects became stabilized and transformed into working processes and applicable things in the course of scientific research; in all cases technology was as constitutive of the scientific objects as concepts, intentions, and symbolic representations; and all of these objects eventually left the boundaries of the scientific laboratory to proliferate in the mundane social world. Even in their "pure" research, scientists have not only asked what exists in the world and how the world is structured, but also what it is possible to produce. This kind of technoscientific productivity that is internal to many, or all, experimental sciences—and rather different from scientists' efforts to understand and explain the existing world—has been largely neglected in recent science studies. A major question discussed in the two special issues is whether there are any historical connections or similarities between the internal technoscientific productivity of the experimental practices and the technoscientific networks in which scientific research is deliberately submitted to industrial and economic needs.

The absence of memories of technoscientific cultures and the neglect of technoscientific productivity within scientific research may be significant for what they reveal about our ways of conceptualizing the past and present histories and practices of science and technology. Therefore, a third group of questions discussed in the special issues concerns approaches and conceptual tools available for analyzing technoscientific networks and technoscientific productivity. All of the questions concern, in one way or another, the complex relations between social institutions and the material culture of science and technology. How is emergent novelty in technoscientific [End Page 140] networks and scientific research to be analyzed? How can we grasp the interactions of the various strains of social, material, and epistemic activity involved...