Is it useful to think of green chemists and engineers in terms of social movement theory?The authors provide an overview of the field of green chemistry and draw on concepts from social movement theory to analyze the developments in green chemistry. They then probe some of the problems that political progressives would face in trying to cooperate with green chemists. They close by linking their analysis to questions concerning governance of technological innovation. They find that green chemistry may be closer to business-as-usual than to a radical departure. Environmentalists might investigate the prospects for cooperation with green chemists in pushing toward a benign chemical regime. Whether green chemistry constitutes the elite movement that the authors have been investigating in this article is less important than whether those with expertise in benign chemical synthesis have insights that the rest of the environmental movement ought to be pursuing more diligently.

Might a rapprochement be desirable and possible between the more academic and the more activist wings of STS? What can each learn from the other? A promising trajectory for this purpose may be to reinterpret and extend research in the constructivist tradition, building on recent work that appears to constitute the beginnings of a reconstructivist scholarly tradition.Some of the necessary work would be explicitly prescriptive: given that technology and society are mutually and reciprocally constructing, how should technologies be constructed, which social groups deserve inclusion in which processes, and how should closure be reached? But other issues might be taken up by scholars motivated exclusively by curiosity, or by the intention of building a subfield: what factors slow or prevent the emergence of entire subfields of technoscientific endeavour, as arguably has occurred with 'green chemistry', 'alternative health', and alternatives to weaponry-oriented national defence?Our intention is not to prescribe, but to help catalyse a next round of friendly discussion in STS about these and related matters, encouraging greater reflexivity of the field as a whole.

The cycle of social movement mobilization over the past generation moved theorists to make claims about the novelty of student, peace, ecology, and women's movements of the period. It has not been determined whether such characteristics apply to the anti-nuclear weapons movements of the 1980s. This article reviews the theoretical underpinning of "new social movements" and assesses the extent to which it accurately describes the action, identity, and organization of recent peace movements, with special attention to the West German antimissile movement. The author argues that anti-nuclear weapons efforts, in both Europe and the United States, evinced a distinctive blend of borrowed and innovative features but had more in common with their predecessors than previously recognized.

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