Integrating Ethicists and Social Scientists into Cutting Edge Research and Technological Development

The EPSRC’s Policy of Responsible Innovation from a Trading Zones Perspective

“…This is illustrated by the way that Professor David Delpy committed EPSRC to RI in 2011. In a sense this helped to establish the ‘common goal’ for the TZ discussed by Gorman et al ( 2013 ). Recognising contexts and conditions in this way also means, however, that in some situations it will be hard (if not impossible) to advance RI.…”

“…Research-intensive universities may be one of the most important settings for this. They could, for example, create RI units tasked with progressing the agenda in many different ways (see Guston 2007 ) and in so doing avoid some of the risks associated with implementing RI on a project-by-project basis – such as failure to change institutional culture or ethicists and social scientists losing a sense of their role – ‘going native’ – when they are embedded in laboratories (Gorman et al 2013 ; Calvert 2013 ). There may also be opportunities to open up the infrastructure of research to a wider range of actors and their perspectives, particularly when new buildings and laboratories are being designed.…”

“…In fact, a number of scholars have already extended TZs theory as we do. For example, Fuller ( 2006 ) and Jenkins ( 2010 ) focus on environmental policy and management, and Gorman et al ( 2013 ) focus on the normative introduction of ethicists and social scientists into scientific laboratories. The latter is particularly interesting because it links successful normative use of TZs to the existence of a ‘common goal’.…”

“…For example, Nerlich ( 2014 ) has argued that: Once widely spread, buzzwords [like responsible innovation] establish something like a ‘trading zone’ in which people from different backgrounds… can communicate without however having to be too explicit about what they are saying. With a somewhat more normative agenda, Gorman et al ( 2009 : 185) examine the role of ethicists in nanotechnology research and argue for “The establishment of a trading zone coupled with moral imagination” to facilitate collaboration and effective communication (see also Gorman et al 2013 ). We build on these and other contributions below.…”

Enhancing Socio-technical Governance: Targeting Inequality in Innovation Through Inclusivity Mainstreaming

“…Midstream policy-making processes affect scientists, engineers, and policy-makers during the research, design, and development stages. In science and engineering laboratories, midstream modulation points towards the potential for social scientists to work together with engineers and natural scientists to intervene in research design and development for social impact (Fisher, Mahajan, and Mitcham 2006;Fisher and Schuurbiers 2013;Gorman et al 2013;Schuurbiers 2011). The streams metaphor of sociotechnical governance with three overlapping and interrelated phases of upstream, midstream, and downstream directs attention to a more complicated model of innovation.…”