Introduction

Emerging scientific and technological domains are accompanied by increasing policy interest in the engagement of “publics.” “Upstream engagement,” for instance, calls for the involvement of publics in science policy before controversies appear (Wilsdon and Willis 2004). Engaging publics is often based on the works of social scientists who study public expectations and concerns, or who engage publics in discussions about science and technology. This entwined involvement of publics and social scientists is particularly visible in the case of nanotechnology. In this domain, the “public” is a topic of interest for science policy and industrial strategy, which is often dealt with by calling for the intervention of social scientists (Bennett and Sarewitz 2006; Macnaghten et al. 2005). Such calls, however, can be ambivalent (Fisher and Mahajan 2006), and it is unclear whether public engagement and social scientific intervention efforts are meant to help shape public policy or merely to validate predetermined positions.

This article presents three examples of public engagement related to nanotechnology in France to illustrate the social scientific mobilization of publics for science policy. It posits that “publics” can be seen as the outcome of processes that employ instruments that are comprised of material elements, social practices, and expert knowledge. These instruments are expected to produce publics and topics of collective discussion. Following students of public participation who propose to study the politics of “devices” that are meant to somehow enable or even cause the public to play a role in democratic societies (Irwin 2006; Lezaun and Soneryd 2007; Lezaun 2007; Miller 2004), I label “technologies of democracy” the instruments that organize the conduct of democratic life, that is, the participation of various publics in the definition and treatment of public problems, and the oppositions among them.Footnote 1 Technologies of democracy might be independent from the issue to which they are applied (e.g. electoral system), others, on the contrary, might be intimately tied to it (e.g. ad hoc collective systems of nuclear waste management, cf. Callon et al. 2009). In both cases, they might be more or less stabilized, depending on their ability to face criticisms and oppositions. For instance, the electoral system in liberal democracies is well stabilized, thanks to collectively accepted practices and techniques, but also faces controversies when the machinery on which it is based is questioned (Miller 2004).

Analyzing “technologies of democracy” is a way to displace the question of the normative evaluation of public engagement. First, it does not seek to identify ex ante a domain of “public engagement” characterized by a specific deliberative or participatory format, or classify types of engagement mechanisms (Rowe and Frewer 2005). Rather, it considers within the same analytical gaze instruments routinely considered as “participatory” (e.g. consensus conferences or public debate) or those that are not (e.g. technical standards or industrial designs), in order to analyze devices that define public issues and ways to collectively deal with them. Second, rather than providing frameworks for the evaluation of participatory procedures (see e.g. Rowe and Frewer 2000, 2004), through which one could tell whether or not these instruments are “efficient” or “democratic”, the objective of the analysis of technologies of democracy is to make explicit the political constructions they enact. This approach does not identify participatory formats that would be “better” than others. Nor does it use political philosophy to promote deliberation or participation as goods in themselves.Footnote 2 As this paper illustrates, the political value of the analysis of public engagement is that it reveals conflicts, oppositions and potential alternatives that are in tension with otherwise stable dominant constructions of democratic order.

Such an empirical analysis can be undertaken with the tools Science and Technology Studies (STS) developed in order to analyze heterogeneous scientific apparatus (Latour 1988), technical objects (Akrich 1992) and, more recently, market devices (Callon et al. 2007). Technologies of democracy require material and cognitive investment to become stabilized and produce their intended outcomes: publics and collective problems. Only then can they allocate public roles for citizens, define rules for legitimate actions of public and private actors, and identify suitable public issues for collective examination. They are also based on political philosophies. But analogous to an STS analysis of market devices and economic phenomena, political philosophy is not the basis for the normative evaluation of technologies of democracy but one of their components, pretty much as economic theories are components of the construction of economic markets (Callon 1998; Callon et al. 2007; MacKenzie et al. 2007). Thus, as market devices produce economic realities through the use of economics and the involvement of economists, technologies of democracy organize democratic life through the intervention of expert knowledge in social science.

Two related modes of action involving technologies of democracy, which will be further discussed below, are experiments and demonstrations. These are two categories that STS has analyzed at length. Experiments are indeed central components of scientific activities based on complex arrangements comprising literary, material and social elements (Shapin and Schaffer 1985), which make their replications—an important part of scientific work—a difficult task involving knowledge and instruments not easily moveable (Collins 1975; Collins 2004). Demonstrations are both technical enterprises requiring sophisticated competencies (Rosental 2008) and political acts allocating roles to potential witnesses and demonstrators (Barry 1999). Experiments and demonstrations are also central activities for experts of technologies of democracy. The following three examples of technologies of democracy deployed in France on nanotechnology-related topics illustrate different types of experiments and demonstration.Footnote 3

Analyzing experiments and demonstrations involving technologies of democracy leads to describe controversies about them. Scientific controversies have been a long-term topic of interest for STS, which has shown that the contestation of scientific knowledge holds analytical interests (since it allows the student of science to explore the construction of knowledge) and political value (since it leaves room for alternatives and reveals the contingency of the scientific production) (Latour 1987). This trend is reflected in the examination of controversies in which the technologies of democracy are involved. STS has described how the construction of networks of human and non-human actors is the basis for the stabilization of scientific instruments and facts. Investments are also necessary to stabilize technologies of democracy and the political arrangements they seek to produce. As the three following example illustrate, this leaves room for alternate political constructions.

Three Technologies of Democracy

Each of the following three examples seeks to create publics that are expected to be involved in some way with nanotechnology. One is based in Paris and two are based in Grenoble, a city in the French Alps and a major hub for nanotechnology research, where nanotechnology has been supported by public and private organizations. Table 1 presents the three mechanisms.

Table 1 Three technologies of democracy
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  1. 1.

    NanoViv Debate Series: The Grenoble metropolitan area council was confronted with local opposition against nanotechnology. It had been advised by sociologists to organize a public dialogue on nanotechnologyFootnote 4 and for this purpose commissioned Vivagora, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that organizes public debates on science-society issues, to set up the NanoViv debate series. During the public meetings, speakers were invited to answer questions from the audience about the various domains of nanotechnology research and development programs. Vivagora’s objective was to facilitate the “formulation of competing interests” in order to “identify the stakes” and “formulate recommendations.Footnote 5” It sought the participation of interested citizens wishing to be involved in the making of local nanotechnology policy. Among the recommendations were the creation of a public agency to supervise nanotechnology activities, institutional changes aiming at introducing co-decision at the local level, calls for more control of industrial research, and calls for more research in risk evaluation.

  2. 2.

    Ile-de-France Citizen Conference: The Paris area (Ile-de-France, IdF) regional council sponsored a “citizen conference” (conference de citoyens) about nanotechnology in 2006. The conference was organized by the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique (IFOP), a polling company, and directly followed the model of a consensus conference (Joss and Durant 1995). IFOP selected a “panel of citizens”, who received training that consisted of lectures about nanotechnology. After two initial training weekends, the citizen panel questioned scientific experts during a 1 day public session. The panel eventually wrote recommendations, which asked for more funding in toxicology research, and raised concerns about the threat of nano-electronics application to privacy.

  3. 3.

    The Ideas Laboratory: The Ideas Laboratory, where scholars work closely with scientific research centers to help design applications of nanotechnology, seeks to construct users of future nanotechnology products. It has sought to integrate input from future users in the design of nanotechnology industrial applications. The Ideas Laboratory is part of one of the main French nanotechnology research centers, Minatec, which is affiliated with the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA)Footnote 6 in Grenoble. The Laboratory receives funding from a range of private companies in addition to CEA. Its objective is to “explore the potential of micro and nanotechnologyFootnote 7” by focusing on users’ viewpoints. It aims at intervening in the design of new technologies by using methods such as creativity sessions, focus groups, and collaborative design. The Laboratory thus seeks to produce prototypes based on “design assisted by use” (Ida and Mallein 2005). In so doing, it hopes to democratize the innovation processes by opening it up to future users, while exploring future markets for private companies and research centers.

Experiments

These mechanisms define ways to deal with nanotechnology and they are intended to produce the citizens expected to be involved in it. As technologies of democracy, they give rise to different forms of experiments.

For the member of the Grenoble metropolitan area council who had pushed for the organization of NanoViv, asking Vivagora to organize public debates was a way to “experiment with an innovative form of public dialogue.”Footnote 8 For Vivagora itself, the term “experiment” was employed in order to emphasize the collective exploration Vivagora was engaged in. Vivagora saw the public meetings as opportunities to define issues for collective management in the Grenoble area and to involve interested publics. The use of this language implied that neither social identities (e.g. identities of participants in decision-making processes) nor technical categories (e.g. nanomaterials risks) were to be assumed as accepted from the start, but that they had to be experimentally produced through a controlled process.

The Ile-de-France regional council sought to “experiment with a participatory mechanism”, that is, it sponsored a participatory procedure in order to evaluate its ability to provide recommendations that would prove interesting for public discussion (Laurent 2009). For IFOP, the conference was the replication of a device the poll company had sold to other public bodies and private organizations for its ability to produce “sensible recommendations” (des recommendations raisonnables). As such, it was an experiment that could fail or succeed largely according to the ability of the experimenter to produce the desired outcomes. The case of the IdF conference thus echoes the difficult scientific practice of the replication of experiments.

The Ideas Laboratory reproduces another scientific characteristic: the laboratory. It is a closed research institution, where the experiment is expected to produce social scientific knowledge about both expectations of future users of nanotechnology and applied research outcomes through the collaborative design of prototypes. As a scientific laboratory, the Ideas Laboratory is engaged in fundamental and applied experimental research.

Demonstrations

As experimented with in Paris and Grenoble, the three technologies of democracy were meant to provide demonstrations, although in each case the demonstration was of a different kind.

With NanoViv, Vivagora intended to demonstrate publicly that nanotechnology was a science policy program that could be opened to public view and in which interested citizens could participate. It was supposed to be a demonstration of Vivagora’s engagement for the democratization of science. For Grenoble officials, sponsoring NanoViv was above all a demonstration that local officials were concerned about nanotechnology, and that it was well taken care of by local public bodies.

For the Ile-de-France regional council, the conference was a demonstration that citizens could have a say in decision-making, and that the consensus conference format was a device that produced publicly interesting results. The regional councilor who pushed for the organization of the conference, a member of the Green party, wanted both to make nanotechnology a topic of interest, and demonstrate the value of participatory democracy to the Ile-de-France citizens and his fellow councilors. It is therefore significant that more than half of the budget of the conference was devoted to the making of a documentary film about consensus conferences. The whole process was filmed, which resulted in a DVD. Entitled Nanos and us (“Les nanos et nous”), it is now used as an educational device in order to display the value of citizen involvement in science in schools and universities.

The demonstrations produced at the Ideas Laboratory take the form of prototypes and business plans that are convincing for industrial partners. They rely on material objects that display the integration of users’ needs and expectations, and that can be further integrated in industrial development. In at least one case, researchers displayed the link between their work and the development of an existing industrial application—an “augmented-reality window for mobile devices”Footnote 9 providing access to various services developed by a company in information and communication technology from a prototype developed at the Ideas Laboratory.

Constructing Technologies of Democracy

For technologies of democracy to construct publics, they require infrastructures consisting of both material arrangements and expert knowledge. This section uses the three examples to illustrate three types of such infrastructures.

Performing Technical Democracy

Funded in 2003 by science journalists who hoped to “make science public,” Vivagora gradually evolved towards a particular form of social mobilization, based on a series of mechanisms including public debates such as NanoViv. Rather than acting as a neutral organizer of public debates, the organization seeks to mobilize publics and shape public problems. It thereby participates in large-scale social involvement with technological issues. Vivagora was involved, for instance, in the development of a “citizen monitoring” (veille citoyenne) web platform. This monitoring initiative was aided by several civil society organizations that shared online resources in order to collect scientific papers and track regulatory changes related to nanotechnology. For Vivagora, this was an opportunity to stimulate social groups into action while helping to publicize issues related to nanotechnology. Thus, the credibility that Vivagora is accorded in making recommendations and proposals to public bodies is a component of its identity as a facilitator of social movement, which it seeks to catalyze for the sake of engaging a specifically envisioned public. It involves material devices that range from the cooperative website to the open public meetings facilitated by Vivagora members, as well as academic references.

Vivagora’s evolution from science journalism to the development of engaged publics has been fuelled by the STS literature about lay expertise and “technical democracy.”Footnote 10 This academic influence does not mean that Vivagora’s instruments are established. Engaging citizens requires awareness of, and adaptation to, the particularities of the issues at stake, and this demands re-experimentation each time that the organization intervenes. Thus, Vivagora had specific objectives for NanoViv. In a context where nanotechnology was a major focus for local development, and where public bodies had been criticized by anti-nanotechnology activists (see below), Vivagora hoped that NanoViv would make local nanotechnology development plans a topic of collective discussion.

However, the “engaged public” of NanoViv was not the one Vivagora expected. The organization had to cope with the reluctance of local social movements to participate in what was seen as an initiative backed by nanotechnology proponents. The most vocal opponents refused to participate. As for local scientists and officials, they were strongly motivated to participate by the Grenoble metropolitan area council, which was engaged in the public demonstration that it was taking care of nanotechnology. These scientists and officials were reluctant to accept the recommendations that were produced at the end of the debate process. For some, Vivagora was “far too critical of nanotechnology”, and many contended that “nobody knew how the recommendations were written.”Footnote 11 In the end, none of the NanoViv recommendations was followed by the Grenoble metropolitan area council.

Selling Deliberation

Vivagora’s experiments with technical democracy were not enough to ensure its credibility as an expert of public participation mastering an established procedure. This is not the case with IFOP. Over the past few years, the polling company had become a leader in the market for citizen conferences. It organized citizen conferences for national and local public bodies, and, above all, for private companies. For instance, IFOP organized citizen conferences on drug regulation for a pharmaceutical company, which was then able to use the advice from citizens in its relationships with regulatory bodies, thereby applying its “citizen engagement” to its communication campaign. IFOP has been successful in selling its citizen conference format thanks to a well-established process which is independent from the question to which it is applied, and which is able to produce “sensible recommendations” that exclude “extreme solutions.”Footnote 12

Producing such “sensible recommendations” was exactly the objective of the Ile-de-France regional councilors when they decided to commission IFOP to organize a citizen conference on nanotechnology. Such a production relies on an infrastructure that is able to construct a neutral and deliberating citizen, and on representations of the question that are at stake for the citizen to deliberate on. The questions are delegated to the planning committee of the conference, composed of members chosen by the commissioner who select the trainers for the panel with the help of IFOP. The citizen has, meanwhile, become the object of a specific technical expertise. Using academic work about deliberative democracy and the early experiences of citizen juries in France (Boy et al. 2000; Bourg and Boy 2005), IFOP aims to produce a “neutral citizen”—that is, someone with no a priori interest in the topic being discussed—able to deliberate in small groups.

IFOP has refined its selection methods and facilitation techniques in order to ensure the production of this type of citizen. For instance, deliberation requires diversity on the panel. Diversity is ensured through a series of criteria, originally limited to sex, age and professions, but then refined over IFOP experiences. Acting as lay sociologists, IFOP employees have remarked that panel members often referred to their children in discussions related to risks: thus they added the number of a potential panelist’s children to the list of criteria. The neutrality of the panel members is ensured through two rounds of interviews that panel participants go through before being selected. The interviews are expected to ensure that the citizens do not have financial interests that would be or could be perceived as a source of conflicts of interest with regard to the subject at stake (e.g. through family or business ties) and that they will “play the game” of the conference. “Playing the game” is an expression an IFOP facilitator used during an interview with the author. It refers to all the actions the panel participant is expected to perform when engaged in a citizen conference: listening to others, following the instructions of facilitators, cooperating with facilitators during the writing of the recommendations. But “playing the game” also relies on the technical competency of the facilitators: they need to make sure that all the participants speak, that they examine all the dimensions of the issues at stake, that their final recommendations are adequately written—in short, they need to make the neutral citizen speak.

Of course, each of these actions has important consequences for the final recommendations. As such, the organization of the conference can be controversial. There were internal controversies in the case of the nanotechnology IdF conference, but the demonstration was otherwise successively performed. The regional councilor who had commissioned the conference could congratulate himself: the citizens had produced “sensible advice,” that “mostly conforms to what the expert agencies said.”Footnote 13 Newspapers could thus publish articles exclaiming that, “The Ile-de-France citizens were favorable to nanotechnology.”(Les Échos 2007).

A User-oriented Sociology

Researchers at the Ideas Laboratory are scholars coming from various disciplines. history, economics, and sociology are represented. However the primary expertise of the Ideas Laboratory is that of the “sociology of use” (sociologie des usages) (Ida and Mallein 2005). In France, this domain of scholarship has a few notable characteristics.Footnote 14 First, it insists on the centrality of material systems in the construction of the social, and it is interested in the empirical observation of users in practical situations of use. Thus, a central concern of Ideas Laboratory researchers is the study of the appropriation of technology by potential users, and the connections between social practices and material characteristics of objects. Second, the sociology of use has developed since the late 1980 s with strong connections to private companies, particularly in the areas of information and communication technologies. Sociologists at the Ideas Laboratory have thus written about the users of ICTs and have been engaged in numerous partnerships with private companies (Mallein et al. 2003; Mallein and Toussaint 1994). Researchers at the Ideas Laboratory are involved in numerous projects in which private companies and public research centers participate. For instance, “smart interfaces” have attracted the attention of private companies and the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA).Footnote 15 Third, the sociology of use contends that users create themselves along with the objects, and that they participate in their own making.Footnote 16 At the Ideas Laboratory, this translates into a tight connection between descriptive work, the construction of prototypes and the construction of publics.

Based on their description of situations of use, and their sociological inquiries into users’ concerns and expectations, the instruments that the Ideas Laboratory develops (i.e., focus groups and collaborative design techniques) aim to contribute to the design of industrial prototypes for future nanotechnology applications.Footnote 17 The objective is then to ensure the “acceptability” of technological innovations by making sure that they are consistent with users’ values. Thus, potential users are to be enrolled into the laboratory setting in order to discuss potential applications and to participate in designing prototypes. The “democratization of innovation”Footnote 18 can then be ensured, for the sake of the development and successful marketing of products.

Members of the Ideas Laboratory have now begun to extend their expertise beyond the social scientific laboratory. For instance, they employed a typology of “technology user” that they had developed when they participated in the making of a nanotechnology exhibit in the Grenoble science center (Laurent 2010b). They crafted an interactive questionnaire in which visitors were asked about their use of technology, and were eventually told about their “user profile” (e.g., “fan” or “detractor”), and how nanotechnology might affect them. This device extended their social scientific expertise to the creation of additional potential users, who were expected to reflect about future technologies. The laboratory experiments that were attempting to construct users and prototypes could thus be extended from the experimental subject in the closed research center to any citizen of Grenoble who visited the exhibit.

The Technologies Compared

In the three examples considered here, technologies of democracy are meant to help orchestrate collective action with respect to scientific objects and issues. They are subjected to experiments conducted by hybrid actors, and link private interests to the making of public choices. These examples include an NGO using public debates as the locus of engagement and ways to finance its activities, a company selling participatory devices and working with a regional council to promote “participatory democracy,” and academic researchers who are involved both in industrial product development, and in the display of nanotechnology in a public museum.

Table 2 below synthesizes the descriptions of the three technologies of democracy, the citizens they are attempting to create, the experiments and demonstrations in which they are involved, and the academic references on which they are based. Stabilization of the technologies appears more or less successful, but in each of the three cases, the experts of technologies of democracy intervene, whether they experiment with ad hoc devices based on an engagement for the democratization of science, replicate an established technology of democracy from one issue to another, or gradually produce theoretical and practical knowledge on the relationships between users and industrial products.

Table 2 Public, experiments, demonstrations and references of three technologies of democracy
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Contested Technologies of Democracy

As shown above, constructing publics requires the use of social science and material devices in order to stabilize technologies of democracy. Stabilization, however, is not guaranteed. The three examples also provide illustrations of contestations and uncertainties surrounding technologies of democracy. The IdF citizen conference illustrates internal controversies in the replication of technologies of democracy. The two Grenoble-based technologies of democracy faced counter-experiments, and counter-demonstrations that were led by anti-nanotechnology activists who refused to participate in the official experiments.

Difficulties in the Replication of the Experiments

The partial stabilization of the NanoViv procedure failed to preclude criticisms regarding the allegedly manipulative role of Vivagora members who facilitated the debates and wrote the final recommendations. In contrast, the IdF citizen conference relied on an established technology mastered by IFOP. By linking the objectives of the conference with those of the regional council, the conference managed to successfully integrate the institutional context in the procedure. This, however, does not mean that the demonstration that a neutral citizen can produce sensible recommendations was an easy task. The sociology of science has shown that the replication of scientific experiment requires material and cognitive investments, which do not always guarantee the expected outcomes since the processes of replication (i.e. how to conduct experiments with a given instrumentation) are also open to discussion (e.g., Collins 1975). Similarly, even in the case of technologies of democracy relying on an established cognitive and material infrastructure, numerous difficulties may arise throughout replication processes.

Nanotechnology, for that matter, was a difficult trial for the replication of the IFOP’s citizen conference, at the level of both the representation of the scientific field and the creation of the “neutral citizen.” For the IFOP organizers, the representation of nanotechnology for the panel members was to be based on a “rational approach.” They assumed that panel members needed to be taught about nanotechnology applications in various fields and to be presented with their benefits and potential risks. On the other hand, some members of the planning committee (which had been chosen by the IdF regional council) insisted on presenting nanotechnology as a global and futuristic program, which included the transformation of humans and nature, and which raised ethical and long-term concerns linked to the democratic governance of science and the responsible development of technology.Footnote 19 For IFOP, this could have been a threat to the production of “sensible” recommendations. As the facilitator said during an interview:

Panel members were freaking out. All they heard about was ethics. I was at pains to get them back to a rational discussion.Footnote 20

A “rational discussion,” from the facilitator’s point of view, would need to be based on concrete applications of nanotechnology.

As the planning committee imposed presentations about ethics and long-term issues, the facilitator had to invite additional presenters who would speak to the panel about nanotechnology applications and make sure that the discussions within the panel did not venture too much into the discussion of the long-term issues of nanotechnology. This policy proved difficult to implement, making the construction of the neutral and deliberating citizen all the more challenging. One the panel members repeatedly criticized the facilitator, refused to comply with his suggestions, and proposed a radical critique of nanotechnology programs. For him, nanotechnology was developed for the sake of financial and industrial interests, and in no case for the benefit of society. Nanotechnology governance issues were thus of primary interest for him. But his critical position made him a “non-neutral citizen”: his viewpoint was eventually not included in the final recommendations. IFOP organizers later conceded that they had made a mistake during the selection phase: the critical citizen should not have been selected, as he was a threat to the making of sensible recommendations.

The example of the IdF citizen conference thus shows that the success of the replication of a technology of democracy is not given in advance. To the extent that each replication is a new trial, the experts who deploy the technology will have to establish anew their instruments as well as produce the desired outcomes. This implies that alternative views and critical voices are silenced or accommodated to fit with the constraints of the demonstration. This is part of the skills of the experts of the procedure. In the case of the IdF conference, the critiques were internal to the process. In other cases, counter-experiments and counter-demonstrations may be organized outside of the technologies of democracy. The critiques that NanoViv and the Ideas Laboratory faced in Grenoble provide telling illustrations of this point.

Counter-demonstrations and Counter-experiments

Anti-nanotechnology activists criticized technologies of democracy that were experimented with in Grenoble. Originating from a small group called “PMO” (Pièces et Main d’Oeuvre), the contestation of nanotechnology in Grenoble takes inspiration from French critical sociology, and the critique of technology (e.g. Ellul 1977). The main activity of PMO consists in writing texts in which anonymous authors describe the links among Grenoble officials, nanotechnology research institutes and private companies, and argue that nanotechnology development is advanced in Grenoble without collective discussion and consideration of negative long-term effects (Laurent 2007). PMO’s form of social mobilization is based on “critical inquiry” (enquête critique), that is, analysis of the economic and strategic interests that determine local policy and industrial choices. This lay critical sociology thus seeks to describe the social world from an “exterior” position that removes the observer from the world being described. Critical sociology attempts to deal with this situation through various forms of methodological reflexivity, aiming to ensure the validity of the exterior position.Footnote 21 PMO deals with the problem of exteriority through anonymity: PMO’s members are anonymous and do not want to constitute a social movement, for fear that it would lead to a fight for special interests instead of the pursuit of disinterested critical inquiry.

Ensuring the value of critical inquiry also requires demonstrations. Andrew Barry uses the term “demonstration” to describe the “public proofs” performed by activists, which he argues can be understood in terms of scientific demonstrations as well as social events. Barry illustrates this point with a case of mobilization against a planned highway in the British countryside, in which the demonstration being made is that of the connection between people and land (Barry 1999). One can pursue this approach in the case of PMO, and describe the demonstrations the group performed in terms of both scientific demonstration and social mobilization.

One of the most widely distributed productions of PMO is a graph that represents the multiple links between the officials in the local administrative bodies, the industries, and the management of scientific research. Connected to this demonstration of the control of the local decision-making process by a small group of people is the demonstration of the physical transformation of the city of Grenoble. For example, activists occupied a crane during construction work on the CEA-Minatec research center. The activists’ demonstrations thus take the form of literary formats and spectacular interventions. They are complemented by ironic and humorous activities. For instance, a fake official information newsletter of the Grenoble metropolitan area council announced in June 2005 that a new personal chip card, named “Lybertis,” was supposed to be mandatory, and that, “thanks to nano electronics,” it would be able to store all potential information about its holder’s activities and thereby represented “a progress for society” as the president of the local council was supposed to have said.

For PMO, the production of publics for nanotechnology as it was attempted with NanoViv and the Ideas Laboratory was not acceptable. PMO considered that these experiments were ways to manipulate the public into accepting nanotechnology, legitimize policy choices already made, or contribute to the development of superficial products. In response to the initiatives meant to democratize nanotechnology and open it to future users, activists staged counter-demonstrations. They released numerous texts in which they describe the connections between the organizers and nanotechnology policy-making, and the ever-stronger support for nanotechnology development by Grenoble officials. They wrote anti-nanotechnology mottos on the walls of Grenoble, interrupted local science fairs, and organized “real debates” in parallel to official ones. Demonstrations were meant to render immediately visible the critical gaze they directed toward nanotechnology development. They were meant to transform passive spectators or readers into active “critical citizens” who would be able to engage, like PMO, in critical inquiry.

Anti-nanotechnology activists thus constructed a parallel public space, outside the scope of the official one, composed of websites, independent media, and places in the Grenoble area where public meetings were held and activists discussed nanotechnology, and where the public of nanotechnology was made of individual and anonymous citizens engaged in the critique of development programs and of participatory initiatives. As such, PMO’s intervention is another technology of democracy, less formalized, but which can be described in the same terms as the three others (see Table 3). PMO attempts to construct a public made of individual and anonymous citizens engaged in critical inquiry. It is engaged in experimentation with forms of social action that are meant to transform a passive public into a critical one. Such an objective requires that the activists publicly demonstrate unacceptable links among nanotechnology actors (e.g. that Vivagora is paid by the Grenoble metropolitan area council to organize NanoViv).

Table 3 Public, experiments, demonstrations and foundations of four technologies of democracy
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Conclusion

The making of the publics of science and technology can be analyzed through the lens of experiments and demonstrations based on technologies of democracy. Within this perspective, the main analytical focus is not the description of a domain pre-identified as “public engagement”, nor the construction of evaluation criteria for engagement mechanisms. Rather, an approach based on the tools and methods developed through science and technology studies can empirically account for the circulation of, replication of, and controversies about the devices that produce public problems and ways to deal with them.Footnote 22

As a result, the study of such political categories as citizenship and legitimacy can gain empirical grounding, particularly through the description of instruments that are meant to engage the making of democratic life. The technologies of democracy examined in this paper construct different kinds of citizens, and propose different ways to ground legitimate democratic constructions. In doing so, they also connect these political constructions with the identification of nanotechnology as a public problem. Thus, Vivagora attempts to make nanotechnology an issue of collective decision-making discussed by engaged citizens; the IdF conference formulates the problem of nanotechnology as that of rational decisions to be supported by neutral and deliberating citizens; the Ideas Laboratory seeks to jointly produce nanotechnology applications and their users; and PMO is of the opinion that nanotechnology should be subjected to independent critique conducted by anonymous citizens engaged in critical inquiry.

Like sociologists of science who seek to give “symmetrical” accounts that refrain from distinguishing “good” and “bad” science, in this exploration I refrain from evaluating from “outside” the political constructions that technologies of democracy produce. Many criteria of success exist within the examples considered here. For some scientific and administrative officials in Grenoble, “success” consists of providing effective information and gaining the trust of the public, while Vivagora expects participatory mechanisms to produce input for public decision-making processes. The “success” of the IdF citizen conference is based on its ability to produce “sensible recommendations”. The Ideas Laboratory measures “success” in terms of market growth for nanotechnology products. For many of its researchers, what matters is the transformation of product design that results from the integration of input from future users. PMO’s criterion of success is the transformation of a passive public into critical citizens.

The value in emphasizing the multiplicity of forms of technologies of democracy goes beyond simply indicating the existence of a diversity of political constructions. Analyzing the experiments and demonstrations of technologies of democracy leads the analyst to describe the investments these technologies need, the voices they must silence, the alternative constructions they face, and the political order they produce. In highlighting the controversial constructions of technologies of democracy, the analysis also renders visible the possibilities for alternatives, either articulated in the very making of publics (cf. the case of the IdF conference), or advanced through counter-demonstrations and counter-experiments (cf. the case of PMO).

Studying public engagement—and the conduct of democratic life—through the lens of technologies of democracy has implications for policy-making as well. It means that technologies of democracy are not ready-made instruments that can be unproblematically applied from one issue to the next, but part and parcel of the political choices that define legitimate public problems and acceptable ways to deal with them. Thus, the separation between technologies of democracy and the issues to which they are applied is an outcome of a process that needs to be analyzed. Undertaking such an analysis is a way to extend the scope of public decisions that might be open to collective examination to the construction of the technologies of democracy themselves.