Robert Braun
Assoc. Prof. Habil.
Senior Researcher, Deputy Head
Science, Technology and Social
Transformation
November 11
@Masaryk University
2022/2023
Social
Responsibility:
Business,
Research and
Innovation
2
Learning outcomes and delivery
2
Technical/admin
issues
Learning outcomes:
- Have a general awareness of what the relationship of
technology and society
- Understand the concept of
o CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
o pCSR (Political Corporate Social Responsibility)
o STS (Science and Technology studies)
o SCOT (The social construction of technology)
o Sociotechnical imaginaries
o RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation)
- The relationship of these concepts to the philosophy of
science and sociology
- Understand the concept and methodology of social
phenomenology
- Have sufficient knowledge of different conceptualizations of
technology, of automobility, of research and innovation
- Have practice in theoretical argumentation, understanding
complex sociotechnical problems and conceptualizations.
3
Completion
Students will have to (a) do a
presentation; (b) write one academic
blog post and (c) a final course paper.
➢ Group presentation: should reflect
on a current theme analyzed from a
critical technology/responsibility point
of view (15 mins);
➢ Academic blog: should reflect some
current sociotechnical challenge,
addressed via learnings acquired in
the course (250-500 words);
➢ Final paper: will address a specific
question within the realm of STS and
analyze it according to general
academic practice, based on literature
review and secondary research (but
not independent primary research)
(2500-3000 words).
Responsible Innovation
Session 1: Society, responsibility &
technology
10:00-11:30
Introduction, general concept, theme,
administrative issues
11:45:13:15
Business, Responsibility & Innovation
13:45-15:15
What is CSR/pCSR?
15:15:16:45
What is STS (Society and Technology
Studies)?
4
Session 2: Responsibility &
Technology: the case of
automobility
10:00-11:30 Recap
11:50-13:20 Sociotechnical systems
13:20-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Automobility
15:45-16:45 Automobility violence
16:45-17:00 Wrap-up
Session 3: The future of technology
and society
10:00-11:30
What is responsible research and
innovation?
11:45:13:15
What would a post-car world look like?
13:45-15:15
The trouble of artificial intelligence
15:15:16:45
Biotech and biopolitics
Closing & summary
○ “[Engineers] are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world. By designing
and constructing new structures,
processes, and products, they are
influencing how we live as much as any
laws enacted by politicians. Would we
ever think it appropriate for legislators to
pass laws that could transform our lives
without critically reflecting on and
assessing those laws? Yet neither
engineers nor politicians deliberate
seriously on the role of engineering in
transforming our world. Instead, they
limit themselves to celebratory clichés
about economic benefit, national
defense, and innovation.”
Carl Mitcham: The True Grand Challenge for Engineering: Self-
Knowledge
➢ https://issues.org/perspectives-the-true-grand-challenge-for-
engineering-self-knowledge/
5
Engineers as legislators
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 4408 2287
6
Work in pairs
➢ Pls explain what this means via an
example:
➢ What would deliberating seriously the
role of engineering in transforming our
world in that specific case be?
➢ How could we/they avoid celebratory
clichés about economic benefit, national
defense, and innovation?
1. Recap
Business, Innovation, Responsibility
STS gaze
The 17th-century “Quest for Certainty”
○ a timely response to a specific historical
challenge-the political, social, and theological
chaos embodied in the Thirty Years' War;
○ Cartesian program for philosophy that swept
aside the "reasonable" uncertainties and
hesitations of 16th-century skeptics in I favor
of new, mathematical kinds of "rational"
certainty and proof;
○ Build a secure body of human knowledge
using "rationally validated" methods.
○ Framing basic theories around ideas whose
merits were clear, distinct and certain and
using only demonstrable arguments, having
the necessity of geometrical proofs.
8
The (his)story of
responsibility
What “is” science?
9
From transcendental space to spatialized
transcendence
The new “way of
seeing”
A new world emerged populated by the knowing
subject and knowable objects; a machinistic
operation with laws and regularities; the world as
process and evolution; rationality as value.
❖ Cogito ergo sum: a new human(ist) ontology;
❖ Euclidean geometry not as abstract system, but
representation of the world (including social
relations);
❖ The “nomos” as the West and the Rest;
❖ Land as terra nullius and its people as steps in
evolution (the ontological other);
❖ The Book of Nature written with moral certainty.
What is science?
Kjetil Rommetveit, Roger Strand, Ragnar Fjelland & Silvio
Funtowicz (2013). „What can history teach us about the
prospects of a European Research Area?” Ispra: JRC
10
Thirty Years‘ war
Destitution and
devastation
Religious
conflicts
Insecurity of
knowledge
Disorder &
superstition
Witchcarft and
‘alternative’
knowledge
trajectories
➢ The grand book of the universe
written in the language of
mathematics.
➢ To avoid precipitancy and
prejudice, and to include
judgements nothing more than
what presented itself.
➢ Continual fear and danger of violent
death and the life of man solitary,
poor, nasty: covenants, without the
sword, are but words.
Science as ideology
Science as political hierarchy
11
Innovation &
Responsibility
Key words:
✓ Giving back
✓ Strategic goals
✓ Cradle to cradle
✓ Management of impacts
➢ Innovation is generally conceived as the basis for
a competitive economy: to develop new market
segments, improve the quality of their products or
reduce the costs of production.
➢ A constant race for novelty and improvement only
those that constantly reinvent themselves and
their products can win. An innovation’s success is,
however, measured in terms of its uptake on the
market and its generation of economic profit for
the owner of the innovation. Societal benefit may
arise as positive externalities of innovation but are
not per-se decisive for action.
➢ Innovation management in companies is mostly
concerned with creating fruitful environments for
new ideas and deciding which of these ideas will
be pursued further and which are to be discarded.
How is (one) responsible?
• Do no harm
• Anticipate impacts
• Do good business
• Bring better solutions
• ….
12
Corporations have an economic orientation;
management is attending to stakeholder risks
and claims.
Marketing: focuses on the effective facilitation
of processes of (product) exchange.
Stakeholders express needs and wants and
assumed corporate utility informs managerial
processes.
CSR: focuses on effective social processes that
balance said exchange with social value creation
based on stakeholders’ social wants and needs.
Stakeholders are invited to public deliberations,
collective decision-making and joint activities in
order to balance economic utility with social
value-creation.
pCSR+: engages in social value creation to
anticipate, respect and be responsive to values of
stakeholders when providing public goods or
restricting public bads in managing exchange of
products.
Stakeholders may force firms to engage in public
deliberations on social values and stakeholder
risks and claims.
13
What is STS?
It deconstructs processes and
terminologies of science in order to
help understand how science works,
both internally and within society at
large.
A large body of scholarly work has
examined historical, social,
technological, and political contexts
shaping different modes of scientific
inquiry and how scientific knowledge
is shaped and circulated in particular
places at particular times.
Science and Technology
○ is focused on organizations, networks,
and assemblages and approached
human and non-human actors. STS
considers how technology and society
co-produce each other.
History of STS
A criticism of traditional science
Scientific Revolutions
Tomas Kuhn on normal vs.
revolutionary science and the
invention of the concept of
“paradigm”
Actor Network Theory
Latour and Law defining the
material semiotic web of actants
Sociotechnical Imaginaries
Sheila Jasanoff on institutionally stabilized, and
publicly performed visions of desirable futures
14
Against method
Fayerabend: Radical
questioning of Western
Rationalism
15
STS on science as
politics
Scientific/engineering practices and methods
(data collection, sampling, calculating, charting
results, and modeling) are inscription
devices.
➢ They seem stable and graspable (or they
stabilize and grasp), but they
simultaneously may serve to erase the
complex materiality of the reality being
studied.
➢ Scientific knowledge is constructed not by
individual scientists or by science as such
but by specific established practices that
are widely accepted and practiced among
groups of scientists and institutions.
• Technological determinism
was taken to comprise two
basic claims: (1) technology
develops autonomously and
(2) technology determines
societal development to an
important degree.
• Development, stabilization,
and even working of
technology are socially
constructed, with the
emphasis on social. Key
concepts are ‘relevant social
group,’ ‘interpretive flexibility,’
‘closure,’ and ‘stabilization.’
The unit of analysis was the
single artifact (that is, a tool,
a device, or a machine).
• Imagined forms of social life
and social order that center
on the development and
fulfillment of innovative
scientific and/or technological
projects.
Society/Technology confluence
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(social) Construction
Weak programme – decentering the object that is the artefact
Criticism of determinism (social) Co-production
• The world as consisting of
networks: these networks can
include humans, things, ideas,
concepts - all of which are
referred to as "actants" in the
network.
• The sum of non-social
phenomena can account for
something that is social as a
result of constellations of human
and non-human actors
constituting the network.
• Humans are viewed as always
imbricated within networks of
other humans but also with
nonhumans.
• Living things as well as non-living
matter or things possess agency
that can work with – or indeed
against – the agency possessed
by humans, and together
generate new forms of agential
capacities.
• Inspired by quantum physics,
thinking of becoming (beingin)
as phenomena of
entangled timespacemattering
events: a rejection of
anthropocentric ways of
thinking ’about’ and ‘acting’ in
the world.
Society/Technology confluence
17
Vital materialism
Strong programme – decentering the subject that is the human
Actor-network Theory Agential realism
2. Sociotechnical
systems
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19
One key word
➢ Pls remember one key word from
the Bijker text and explain:
➢ What is the key to sociotechnical
change?
➢ Why?
20
What is a
sociotechnical
system?
❖ The term socio-technical systems was originally
coined by Emery and Trist (1960) to describe
systems that involve a complex interaction between
humans, machines and the environmental aspects
of the work system.
❖ Technology plays an important role in fulfilling
societal functions
❖ Socio-technical systems consist of a cluster of
elements, including technology, regulation, user
practices and markets, cultural meaning,
infrastructure, maintenance networks and supply
networks
❖ Socio-technical systems are actively created,
(re)produced and refined by several social groups,
for instance, firms, universities and knowledge
institutes, public authorities, public interest groups
and users. These social groups have their own
vested interests, problem perceptions, values,
preferences, strategies and resources (money,
knowledge and contacts).
The bycicle
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The social construct
22
The urban construct
23
One quick example of a sociotechnical system
○ Think of an example of a sociortechnical system
and address it critically deconstructing the social in
the technical.
○ (5 mins)
24
Automobility as sociotechnical system
25
26
Emergence of the
automobile
A sociotechnical perspective
Meet Mr. Carl Benz
Benz Patent Motorcar from 1885 is considered
the first practical automobile. He received a
patent for the motorcar in 1886
Ontology
What should he do different?
Epistemology Politics
27
Or
Mary Anderson
Inventor
The inventor of the
windshield wiper
Ransom Eli
Olds
Engineer
The inventor of the first
assembly line
Henry Ford
Engineer
Creator of the Ford T
model
28
Pair work
○ What should have they done different if they knew
what we know (the social in the technical)
29
Automobility
30
In plain language
31
❖ What is Science Technology and Society (STS) Studies?
❖ The „world“ is socially, epistemically or even ontologically
constructed.
❖ Critically reflecting on the role of science as underpinning and observing
a world “out there”, populated with fixed, unchanging, preexisting
entities; that human knowers can discover foundational truths through
the application of reason.
❖ What is the order we live in?
❖ The „world“ that is constructed by forms of power.
❖ A specific construct of „conditions of possibility“ (for life/being) (by
multiple forms of violence [physical, slow, epistemic, infrastructural])
❖ What kind of things are created and how? Maybe not „what we see is all
there is“…
❖ What is automobility?
❖ Not a system of transportation operated by the car, but a political
and social order.
❖ This is the “world” in which we currently live. It is an enduring,
permanent global space of mobilityscapes. For the avoidance of doubt,
cycling, walking or, even, working and entertaining, is being-in
automobility (not moving with a different/better/sustainable
technology).
32
Please discuss
what the name
automobility
covers?
Pls define and discuss ist
constituent elements
Automobility
The ill-named thing
John Urry
“A self-organizing autopoietic,
nonlinear system that spreads
world-wide, and includes cars, cardrivers,
roads, petroleum supplies
and many novel objects,
technologies and signs.”
Stephen Böhm,
et al
“A regime shaping and producing
new types of people consistent
with [its] logics.”
Katharina Mandersheid
“[A]n apparatus of dispersed and
decentralized power, which
consists of automobile landscapes,
discourses, formation governance
of specific subjectivities and
mobility practices.”
Braun & Randell
A political order: a world; one
example, constituent element,
manifestation, of the political ontology
of the late-Anthropocene.
33
What is a
car?
“A road vehicle with an engine and four wheels
that can carry a small number of passengers.”
Oxford Dictionary
Ontology
A composite cyborg
Epistemology
A technoscientific actant
Politics
Agency in the order of
late modernity
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35
An imaginary/apparatus
The ostensibly real and the ostensibly
imaginary are indistinguishable:
➢ empirically, as referring to different
categories of objects that might be
available for analysis
➢ conceptually, to refer to ontologically
disparate entities.
“What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost,
a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions in
short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of
the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be
established between these elements ... “
Michael Foucault: Power/Knowledge
„It is not born, it is made.“
36
What is order?
Campaign: Jaywalking Next thing: smart
cities
Fight against speed Anti car protests
Automobility
violence
Multiple forms of
violence
Being in automobility
Physical
85 million dead & billions injured
that are referred to and analysed
as “accidents”
Slow
A violence that occurs gradually and out of
sight, of delayed destruction dispersed
across time and space, typically not viewed
as violence at all
Epistemic
Violence effaced and occluded; of
victims, bystanders, nonautomobilized
peoples
Ontological
The technoscientific actualization of settler
colonialism and of the modern “politics of
being” that had enabled it --“othering”
and the “enserfing” of non-automobilized
humans across the entire planet.
38
„When you invent the ship, you also invent the
shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also
invent the plane crash; and when you invent
electricity, you invent electrocution… Every
technology carries its own negativity, which is
invented at the same time as technical
progress.”
(Paul Virilio: The original accident, p. 10.)
➢ Violence as ‘the integral accident’
➢ Violence is constitutive of automobility
➢ Violence as a mode of
subjectification/objectification
39
Automobility‘s integral
accident
Integral accident
40
The political ontology
of the accident
Quick artefact analysis
➢ Private document made public
➢ Main actor: the vehicle
➢ Non-human agents as “Circumstances”
➢ Bodies as vehicle-objects
➢ Human injury as yes/no options
➢ Animals not present
➢ …..
An “accident” is (created as) a mobile
sociotechnical event enacted in fixed timespace; a
collision creating agencyless (degraded) inanimate
bodies and humans endowed with agency.
The political constitution of humans and nonhumans
is the very creation of these entities
in terms of mobile human and non-human:
➢ Violence is constitutive of the „world“ of
automobility
➢ Entities therein are cyborgs (technosocial
assemblages) enduring or meting out
violence
➢ Violence is transformed into ontological
violence
41
Meet Graham
The politics of
automobility
So what?
43
Thinking of
responsibility
critically?
Educated people
as economists
What is my
responsibility?
Educated people as
sociologists
What is my
responsibility?
Educated people
as legislators
What is my
responsibility?
Educated people
as STSers
What is my
responsibility?
Questions
Robert Braun
+43159991134
braun@ihs.ac.at
http://www.ihs.ac.at/
Thank you