Abstract
Despite many insightful, sophisticated and engaged inquiries into the interrelation of science and society, particularly in the 1920s and early 1930s and again in the 1960s and early 1970s, the void of a theory of society which captures the dynamics of science, technology and society remains to a significant extent. The fundamental issues of “the modes of interplay between society, culture and science are with us still” (1). Of course, we cannot hope to significantly reduce the need for such a theory here; however, we are convinced that a new approach is required. Our effort can only be seen as preliminary rather than exhaustive. Like some previous approaches, it too is based on the assumption that social change in industrial society and therefore the makeup of its social relations are increasingly tied to “advances” in scientific knowledge.
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Notes and References
Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 175.
One of the first authors to employ the term of a “knowledgeable society” is Robert E. Lane. He justifies his use of the concept by pointing to the growing societal relevance of scientific knowledge and defines a knowledgeable society as one in which its members “(a) inquire into the basis of their beliefs about man, nature, and society; (b) are guided (perhaps unconsciously) by objective standards of veridical truth, and, at the upper levels of education, follow scientific rules of evidence and inference in inquiry; (c) devote considerable resources to this inquiry and thus have a large store of knowledge; (d) collect, organize, and interpret their knowledge in a constant effort to extract further meaning from it for the purposes at hand; (e) employ this knowledge to illuminate (and perhaps modify) their values and goals as well as to advance them.” Robert E. Lane, The Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society’, American Sociological Review 31 (1966) 650.
Cf. Norbert Elias, ‘The Sciences: Towards a Theory’, in Richard Whitley (ed.), Social Processes of Scientific Development, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 21–42.
Cf. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955; Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton: Princeton Unversity Press, 1962.
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 212.
Radovan Richta, et al., Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, p. 216.
However, the precision with which the contribution of certain factors, in this case scientific and technical knowledge, can be factored out is far from certain in most instances: For example, as the economist Heertje concludes, “empirical analyses of the quantitative contribution of technical change to (economic) growth are indeterminate, partly because of the diversity of technical development and the difficulty of separating the development of technical possibilities from the expansion of technical knowledge... Empirical observations in this field form a complex that cannot be unravelled without introducing arbitrary assumptions.” Arnold Heertje, Economics and Technical Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977, p. 203.
Typical of the contributions to the discussion of the nature and the emergence of a knowledge society some 15 to 20 years ago then is an elaborate apparatus of empirical, often census type information about observable shifts and trends, e.g. in the occupational structure, which are intended to show, using the preferred means of a knowledge society that it is indeed emerging and can therefore be documented in a quantitative (rational) manner. Today, we are able to take this documentation for granted and can concentrate on what is, in our view, largely undocumented, unanalyzed in these theoretical approaches.
Cf. Victor Basiuk, Technology, World Politics and American Policy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, pp. 266–274.
Cf. Emil Küng, Steuerung und Bremsung des technischen Fortschritts, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1976; Radovan Richta, The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’, in Ralf Dahrendorf, et al. (eds.), Scientific-Technological Revolution: Social Aspects, London: Sage, 1977, p. 27.
Heertje, op. cit., p. 1977.
C. von Weizsäcker, Zur ökonomischen Theorie des technischen Fortschritts, Göttigen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969.
Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 245–252.
György Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, Die Intelligenz auf dem Weg zur Klassenherrschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968.
Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York: Seabury Press, 1979.
Lane, op. cit., p. 650.
Richta et al., Civilization at the Crossroads
Merton, op. cit
J.D. Bernal, Science in History, London: Watts, 1954.
Michael Polanyi, ‘The Republic of Science, its Political and Economic Theory’, Chicago: Lecture at Roosevelt University.
Daniel Bell’s theory of post-industrial society to be discussed here in some detail exemplifies these features quite well. One of his assertions reads for example: “The decisive social change taking place in our time — because of the interdependence of man and the aggregate character of economic actions, the rise of externalities and social costs, and the need to control the effects of technical change — is the subordination of the economic function to the political order.” But the question of who and how the political order is managed is an open one (Bell, op. cit., p. 373; cf. p. 374).
Bell is correct when he observes that the cautions expressed here, represent a retreat from theory, “if by theory one means a model of social structure that specifies the determinate interaction of the crucial variables of a system, establishes empirical regularities that predict future states of relation, and provides an explanatory principle of its history and operation.” (Ibid., p. 112).
Bell indicates that he could have substituted “knowledge society” for “post-industrial society” because either term and others are apt in describing at least some salient aspects of the emerging structure of society he attempts to describe in his study. Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid.
In the post-industrial society, production and business decisions will be subject to or will be determined by other sectors in society; more specifically, “the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government, but they will be based on the government’s sponsorship of research and development, of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis”, and “the making of decisions, because of the intricately linked nature of their consequences, will have an increasingly technical character” (Ibid., p. 344). The image of the role of science and technology in political decision-making is here somewhat tempered whereas in the “end of ideology” debate of the fifties and early sixties (cf. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, New York: Collier, 1960; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960) the idea that “political criteria decline in importance relative to more universalistic scientific criteria” (Lane, op. cit., p. 659) was quite prominent as an expectation or statement about states of political affairs.
More specifically, we are cautioned that “there is no specific determinism between a ‘base’ and a ‘superstructure’; on the contrary, the initiative in organizing a society these days comes largely from the political system. Just as various industrial societies — the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, post-World-War II Japan — have distinctly different political and cultural configurations” (Bell, op. cit., p. 119).
Radovan Richta’s response to this kind of analysis is to argue that Bell’s contention about the rise of a “new class” is in essence designed to contend “with the Marxist findings concerning the crucial role of the working class in our epoch”. Richta, ‘The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’, p. 54. Moreover, as the size of the scientific and technical class increases under capitalism, it will in some ways at least, move closer to the working class and its interests and hence contribute to conditions which may lead to its own abolition. In short, the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution have not, at least according to Richta, diminished the leading role of the working class. Ibid., pp. 57–59.
Bell, op. cit., p. 386; cf. also Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; Lane, op. cit.; Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, New York: Seabury Press, 1979.
Bell, op. cit., p. 26. Radovan Richta calls perhaps even more optimistically “for a science-based control of social development, a science-based revolutionary reconstruction of society”. Richta, The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’, p. 26.
Bell, op. cit., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 119; cf. Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Observations on Science and Technology in a Changing Socio-Economic Climate’, in Ralf Dahrendorf, et al., op. cit., pp. 79–82.
As far as we can see, Bell does not mean to suggest that the process of inventing technologies may be subjected to rigorous planning and to control but only the process of implementing “technological advance” as his reference to technology assessment and the reduction of deleterious effects of the use of technologies implies. Bell, op. cit., pp. 26–27.
Ibid., pp. 33–40.
Not surprisingly, there are remarkable differences in certain crucial aspects of the political message between the so-called Richta Report (1969) or other statements of the same period (e.g. Radovan Richta, et al, Technischer Fortschritt und industrielle Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Makol Verlag, 1972, pp., 218–230). and post-1968 statements on the same set of issues (e.g. Richta, The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’). However, the general expectations about the impact of the scientific and technological revolution does not change dramatically. Yet, the stress on democratic pre-conditions for a most effective implementation of the scientific and technological revolution, in particular in socialist countries (e.g. Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 220, 229) is less evident later.
Richta reports on the extensive disillusionment and critical assessment of social change induced by technological inventions but ascribes the evaluation of technology as a dangerous development because it tends to follow its own logic as the necessary outcome of the “blatant absence of the human aspect in specific types of technological progress in capitalist countries”, presumably absent from or repaired in socialist societies. Richta, The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’, p. 38.
There is a considerable degree of ambivalence in this optimism to devise plans and programs to render the future of society transparent, “to steer the totality of society’s growth” (Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 271) because one of the constitutive attributes of the emerging society is that “the historical process ceases to bear the stamp of an inexorable course of civilization” and the predictability of the future is therefore diminishing (Ibid., p. 269). Perhaps it should be said that the pre-1968 statements on balance signal the conviction that any planning under the conditions of scientific and technological revolution are precarious instruments; for example, one encounters the observation that the “more we advance on to the actual ground of the scientific and technological revolution, the more diverse will be the ends to which its process lead, and the more unknown variants it will reveal” (Ibid., p. 277). The same ambivalence applies to Bell’s conception of a post-industrial society.
Richta, ‘The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Prospects of Social Development’, p. 26. While Richta claims that science and technology are capable of controlling their own consequences and development, he does suggest nevertheless that “society cannot control the scientific and technological revolution until such social relations are introduced that allow for an adequate development of man and society” (Ibid., p. 44). He therefore agrees with those critics of technology and science in capitalist countries who argue that the course of scientific and technological development is out of control. See also Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 271–273.
Richta, ‘The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Prospects of Social Development’, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 47. Science may also, Richta claims, prevent “wastage of this potential in fruitless and even harmful activities.” (Ibid.)
Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 266.
Bell, op. cit., p. 20.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid. p. 345.
Ibid., p. 344.
Richta, ‘The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Prospects of Social Development’, p. 30.
Ibid., pp. 30–31.
Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 212–213.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 34.
Compare in this regard the definitions of automation, e.g. in Georges Friedmann, Industrial Society, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955, pp. 174–175; Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, pp. 34–37.
Bell is cognizant of the possibility to examine knowledge more comprehensively because he refers to the sociology of knowledge and the questions it typically raises. However, he immediately relegates these questions to specialists or as outside the purview of his approach. Bell, op. cit., pp. 176–177.
Cf. Ibid., pp. 168–174; Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961; Derek J. de Solla Price, Big Science, Little Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963; Frederic Bon and M. Antoine Burnier, Les nouveaux intellectuels, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966; Ladislav Tondl, ‘Stellung und Aufgabe der Wissenschaft in der wissenschaftlich-technischen Revolution’ [1968], in Richta et al., Technischer Fortschritt und die industrielle Gesellschaft.
E.g. Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition, London and New York: Harper & Row, 1965; Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man [1942], New York: The John Day Company, 1965.
Cf. Alain Touraine, ‘Science, Intellectuals and Polities’, in Ralf Dahrendorf et al., op. cit., p. 114.
Although it is quite difficult to propose novel terms for each of these categories of knowledge the scientific community, in its broadest sense, now produces, the following might be appropriate: (1) meaningful knowledge. The knowledge produced by most of the social sciences and the humanities is a form of knowledge which in its social function affects mainly the (social) consciousness of members of society (Deutungsmssen). (2) Most of the traditional discipline in the natural sciences generate productive knowledge (Produktivwissen) in that such knowledge can be converted into ways of directly appropriated natural phenomena. (3) The most recent form of knowledge, as an immediate productive force, may be considered to be action knowledge (Handlungswisseri) because such knowledge is already a form of action.
Cf. Konrád and Szelényi, op. cit.; Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals.
In as much as we attempt to stress the greater ability and range of social action as a constitutive feature of knowledge society we reject of course the idea that such a society is necessarily a “technocratic” enterprise; that is, a society which witnesses helplessly the inversion of technical means into social ends as sketched e.g. by Helmut Schelsky (Helmut Schelsky, Der Mensch in der mssenschaftlichen Zivilisation, Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1961; Helmut Schelsky, ‘Demokratischer Staat und moderne Technik’, Atomzeitalter) and others (cf. Hans Freyer, Über das Dominantwerden technischer Kategorien in der Lebenswelt der industriellen Gesellschaft, Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960; Hans Freyer, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1958) as the “general law of scientific civilization” (see also Sybille Krämer, Technik, Gesellschaft und Natur: Versuch über ihren Zusammenhang, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1982.
In the Richta Report certain analogous observations may be found when the authors of the report underline that “the scientific and technological revolution is essentially a part of the process of constituting the subjective factor, that is to say, the subjectivity of society, and then of man, who through its medium comes to master the processes by which the productive forces of human life are created ... these subjective factors discover that their own development offers radically new opportunities to intervene in the march of history.” Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 244.
Theoretically at least, the increased ability of society to act upon itself should minimize the convergence of knowledge societies toward some common model. But the increased capacity of social action brought about by the advances in science is filtered through social, political and economic mechanisms which may reduce the possible variety of societies. (On the issue of convergence cf. Bell, op. cit., pp. 112–115; C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958; Jan Tinbergen, ‘Do Communist and Free Economics Show a Converging Pattern?’ Soviet Studies 12 (1961) 333–341; Marion Levy, Modernization and the Structure of Societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966; Alfred G. Meyer, Theories of Convergence’, in Chalmers Johnson (ed.), Change in Communist Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970.
Science and technology are therefore not merely an emancipatory force as has been their prevailing romantic image throughout history but also a socially constraining force.
Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, p. 257.
Ibid.,p. 213.
The conception about knowledge in a knowledge society advanced here does not imply therefore that the expansion of knowledge encroaches somehow on “ideology” and produces a society less affected by ideological thinking.
Ibid.,p.214.
Ibid., pp. 70–71.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Scribner’s, 1958.
Bell, op. cit., p. 26.
Richta, ‘The Scientific and Technological Revolution’, p. 48; also Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, pp. 75–81.
Ibid., p. 216.
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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Böhme, G., Stehr, N. (1986). The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations. In: Böhme, G., Stehr, N. (eds) The Knowledge Society. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4724-5_2
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