The RRI challenge : responsibility in tension with market regulation 9781786301420, 1786301423

Table of contents :
Content: Foreword vii Robert GIANNIList of Abbreviations xiAcknowledgments xiiiIntroduction. On the Imperative for Responsible Innovation in Contemporary Market Societies xvChapter 1. RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks 11.1. RRI and its "precursors" - what's new? 11.2. Addressing the mischiefs of free markets 111.3. Democracy in distress: the prospects of collective responsibility 20Chapter 2. Responsibility and the Future 332.1. The anticipatory aspect of RRI 332.2. Innovation and manageability of the future: on uncertainty, control and regulation 382.3. Why responsibility? 47Chapter 3. EU Governance of RTD and the Market 573.1. On governance and good governance: order with/out authority? 573.2. The economic "imprint" on the EU governance of RTD 663.3. EU governance of RTD: is "Science versus Society" actually the problem? 73Chapter 4. EU Institutional Rationality on RRI 834.1. On ends and means: EU institutional discourse on the instrumentality of RRI 834.2. The RRI "keys": keys to what? 954.2.1. Public engagement 964.2.2. Open access/open science 1004.2.3. Gender 1034.2.4. Ethics 1054.2.5. Science education 1064.3. Walking the tightrope between democratization and responsibilization 107Chapter 5. Ethics and the RRI Promise 1155.1. Ethics in the EU governance of RTD: achievements, problems and challenges 1155.2. RRI and rediscovering the promises of the Nuremberg Code (1947) 1235.3. The future of ethics in the context of RRI: a gatekeeper of an open door? 134Chapter 6. Responsibilization in Tension with Market Regulation 1456.1. Ethics in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms: innovation, responsibility and the perennial reinvention of capitalism 1456.2. On the traps behind the notion of "responsibilization" in a market-driven context 1576.3. Going beyond New Public Management? 168Conclusion 181References 197Index 219

Citation preview

The RRI Challenge

Innovation and Responsibility Set coordinated by Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber

Volume 3

The RRI Challenge Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation

Blagovesta Nikolova

First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA

www.iste.co.uk

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2019 The rights of Blagovesta Nikolova to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967372 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-142-0

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Robert GIANNI List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

Introduction. On the Imperative for Responsible Innovation in Contemporary Market Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xv

Chapter 1. RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

1.1. RRI and its “precursors” – what’s new? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2. Addressing the mischiefs of free markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. Democracy in distress: the prospects of collective responsibility . . . .

1 11 20

Chapter 2. Responsibility and the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

2.1. The anticipatory aspect of RRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. Innovation and manageability of the future: on uncertainty, control and regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3. Why responsibility? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 38 47

Chapter 3. EU Governance of RTD and the Market . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

3.1. On governance and good governance: order with/out authority?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2. The economic “imprint” on the EU governance of RTD . . . . . . . . .

57 66

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3.3. EU governance of RTD: is “Science versus Society” actually the problem? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73

Chapter 4. EU Institutional Rationality on RRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

4.1. On ends and means: EU institutional discourse on the instrumentality of RRI . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. The RRI “keys”: keys to what? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1. Public engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2. Open access/open science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3. Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4. Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.5. Science education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3. Walking the tightrope between democratization and responsibilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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83 95 96 100 103 105 106

. . . . . . . . . . .

107

Chapter 5. Ethics and the RRI Promise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115

5.1. Ethics in the EU governance of RTD: achievements, problems and challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2. RRI and rediscovering the promises of the Nuremberg Code (1947) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3. The future of ethics in the context of RRI: a gatekeeper of an open door? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 6. Responsibilization in Tension with Market Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1. Ethics in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms: innovation, responsibility and the perennial reinvention of capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2. On the traps behind the notion of “responsibilization” in a market-driven context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3. Going beyond New Public Management? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115 123 134 145 145 157 168

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

181

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

197

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

219

Foreword

When reflecting on the relationship between science and democracy, John Dewey noticed that the “climate of opinion differs so widely from that which marked the optimistic faith of the Enlightenment; the faith that human science and freedom would advance hand in hand to usher in an era of indefinite human perfectibility”1. By acknowledging this change, the American philosopher was already pointing towards the perilous influence of capitalism on democratic systems. The book written by Blagovesta Nikolova analyzes the development of this relationship by highlighting the explicit but also implicit strategies of the market on the ethical development of research and innovation. According to the author, the normativity at play when implementing research and innovation is often established by the market. Therefore, an authentic attempt to responsibilize researchers and innovators should not prescind from considering this main bias. This book is part of the Innovation and Responsibility set of books. Other books in this set have addressed the challenges inherent to the present and future of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Lenoir investigates the possible balance between efficiency and legitimacy when implementing innovations2. Pansera and Owen start to raise questions about the policy mechanisms implemented around innovation in developing countries, highlighting how they are entrenched in the modern European discourse of 1 Dewey, J. (1989). Freedom and Culture. Prometheus Books, New York, p. 106. 2 Lenoir, V. (2019). Ethically Structured Processes. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York.

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development and progress3. In a similar way, Nikolova addresses the risk and challenges that a market society can present to integrating plurality by calling for a new understanding of the original meaning of progress. Another related set, Responsible Research and Innovation, also addresses current issues relating to RRI. Gianni criticizes the inflation of the responsibility discourse by linking the very possibility of responsible practices to their institutional enablers4. Maesschalck highlights the necessity for governance processes to be reflexive in order to implement their ethical objectives5. Grunwald suggests a hermeneutic approach to tackle the challenges arising from multidisciplinarity6. Reber deepens these issues by pointing out different kinds of pluralism influencing the establishment of normative trajectories, as well as by indicating practical ways to deal with these pluralities7. The current book is rich in terms of suggestions and analyses of different aspects. Nikolova first describes the potential for social criticism inherent in RRI and in the concept of responsibility. Given the challenges connected to an acceleration in our societies8, responsibility faces a more complex and difficult task. However, Nikolova reminds us that the promises embedded in RRI need to come to terms with and be supported by the actual governance mechanisms in place. Therefore, she offers the reader an overview of the rationality and the current strategies that are framing research and innovation. By doing so, she warns us about the tensions and the short-circuit between what we might call an ethics of the intentions and the actual reality. The author lists a series of actual problems that are undermining the future of research and innovation. The first is the incapacity of the legal 3 Pansera, M. and Owen, R. (2018). Innovation and Development: The Politics at the Bottom of the Pyramid. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York. 4 Gianni, R. (2016). Responsibility and Freedom. The Ethical Realm of RRI. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York. 5 Maesschalck, M. (2017). Reflexive Governance for Research and Innovative Knowledge. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York. 6 Grunwald, A. (2016). The Hermeneutic Side of Responsible Research and Innovation. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York. 7 Reber, B. (2016). Precautionary Principle, Pluralism and Deliberation. ISTE Ltd, London and John Wiley & Sons, New York. 8 Rosa, H. (2015). Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press, New York.

Foreword

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framework to address regulatory aspects of disruptive innovations, inevitably paving the way to soft forms of regulation that might not be strong enough to discourage perilous experiments. A second problem is the ethical powerlessness in front of neo-liberal economic strategies, which assumes different shapes blurring the distinction between the ethical and the economic. In order to address these and many other challenges that she has promptly highlighted, Nikolova proposes to operate a reflection on the main objectives of technological development. Accordingly, she exhorts to restore a long-forgotten conception of progress where research and innovation should not be seen as valuable per se but rather instrumental for human flourishing. The lack of grand narratives and long-term objectives about humanity has fragmented normativity within societies, weakening the possibility of obtaining social progress. Against privatized research and innovation following market-oriented goals, Nikolova calls for a public and honest plural deliberation on the trajectories that technology should be following and the questions it should be targeting. RRI has a dialogical soul, but in order for it to be able to express itself, the role of market normativity should be limited, or at least made explicit, as Robert Brandom would put it9. Many of the issues that she raises require further and complex investigation, but this book has the merit of operating an initial broad social critique to several aspects that are too often taken for granted. Only by questioning the relationship between these different factors and by opening a truthful discussion about them, will RRI be able to fulfil its ambitious objectives. Robert GIANNI February 2019

9 Brandom, R.B. (1998). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

List of Abbreviations

CFREU:

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

CPR:

Comprehensive Reform Program

CR:

Corporate Responsibility

CSO:

Civil Society Organization

CSR:

Corporate Social Responsibility

DG:

Directorate-General

EC:

European Commission

ECHR:

European Convention on Human Rights

ECSA:

European Citizen Science Association

EGE:

European Group on Ethics

ELSI:

Ethical, Legal and Social Issues

ERA:

European Research Area

EU:

European Union

FP:

Framework Programme

GMO:

Genetically Modified Organisms

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The RRI Challenge

hESC:

Human Embryonic Stem Cells

ICT:

Information and Communication Technologies

IPR:

Intellectual Property Rights

LSPC:

Liberalization, Stabilization, Privatization and Commercialization

NEI:

New Institutional Economics

NEST:

New and Emerging Science and Technologies

NGO:

Non-Governmental Organization

NPM:

New Public Management

PES:

Public Engagement in Science

PPP:

Public–Private Partnership

PR:

Public Relations

PUS:

Public Understanding of Science

R&I:

Research and Innovation

RRI:

Responsible Research and Innovation

RTD:

Research and Technological Development

S&T:

Science and Technology

SME:

Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises

SSH:

Social Sciences and Humanities

TA:

Technology Assessment

UN:

United Nations

WWII:

World War II

Acknowledgments

It is very difficult to trace all the influences in an author’s creative path that have resulted in the publishing of a book. Nevertheless, I cannot but mention those who have left their significant imprint in making this text a reality. First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Philippe Goujon for his warm welcoming at the University of Namur, where he introduced me to the twists and turns of the RRI endeavor, and where for two years we endlessly and passionately discussed the prospects of responsibilization of the science and technology domain. Next, I am grateful to both Professor Bernard Reber and Dr. Robert Gianni for their helpful comments that allowed me to significantly improve the text. I am particularly indebted to the publishers from ISTE for being so understanding in view of the difficulties I had in finishing this book while making my first steps into motherhood. Last but not least, I am thankful to all my colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences who taught me to be benignly suspicious of any new idea claiming to shake the politico-philosophical landscape. On a personal note, I must mention my very patient companion Stanislav, a living manifestation of care for the other, and of course, my little Prolet, who unknowingly reminds me over and over again Hannah Arendt’s words: “The miracle that saves the world…the fact of natality…the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born” [ARE 98, p. 247].

Introduction On the Imperative for Responsible Innovation in Contemporary Market Societies

I.1. What’s behind the “E”? I will dare open the serious and difficult theme of the challenges facing the drive for responsibilization of the research and innovation realm in the context of contemporary market societies in an anecdotal style. Introducing the problem in such a way aims to provide a simple illustration of the normative grip that economic thinking has over ethics and societal issues when it comes to science and technology. While referring to materials for the preparation of this book, I encountered a very innocent but telling mistake in a background note aimed at informing potential applicants for Horizon 2020 funding and promoting a responsible approach to Horizon 2020 ICT-related research and innovation (R&I). The document itself was arguing the need for deeper involvement of social sciences and humanities (SSH) in R&I activities, one way being by ELSIfication. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so much), the latter was described as monitoring “economic, legal and social issues related to technological developments” [EUR 15a, p. 2]. Fortunately, the expansion for that four-letter abbreviation was accurately put in a footnote – “Ethical, Legal and Social Implications”. Nevertheless, this very benign mistake led me to think about the power of the reflex to consider “E” first and foremost as the importance of economic expediency and most often, if not always, to find ethics as a rear concern, in a footnote, figuratively

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speaking. Why has the impetus to assume the primacy of the economic realm become so strong that we make such unconscious but very revealing mistakes? We cannot answer this question without exploring the strong grip that market-centered normativity has over the institutional discourse, organizational practices and the imagination of various societal actors involved in the research and innovation process. Of course, focusing on the domination of economic and market thinking is not a conceptual breakthrough that deserves much recognition for originality; however, in our case, it is a good vantage point for a deeper exploration of the reasons for something we might consider to be an “implementation impasse” in the efforts towards responsibilization of the research and innovation process, manifested in the case of the recently promoted European Union (EU) concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In this book, I will try to dismantle the different policy and theoretical discourses that, in their peculiar interaction, interweave the problematic idea of the possible reconciliation between the two “E”s: research and innovation can be both profitable and ethically acceptable; marketization and responsibilization are compatible; ethics can “function” in the current competitive market context. At face value, these contentions and governance ambitions do not seem completely impossible. Indeed, early incorporation of ethical and societal considerations in the research and technological development (RTD) process is economy-wise in terms of ensuring a broader uptake of the end-products of this process, having been marked with the “responsibility stamp”. This seems to be a sound, doable solution, which requires institutional support for advancing and incorporating responsibility. Promoting RRI and its procedural integration in EU-funded RTD is a significant step in that direction. It does not, however, unravel the problematic relationships between economy and ethics proper in terms of how they should be accommodated together in the science and technology (S&T) governance process without instrumentalizing the latter for the smooth functioning of the former. By ethics proper, I very tentatively denote an engagement with reflexive examination entailing the exercise of critique, emancipation from dominant discourses and empowerment by challenging social structures that

Introduction

xvii

are deemed “unacceptable”. How is this possible, if the claim for responsibilization does not question the premises of the current economic system and the imperative for market regulation (i.e. the contention that the market mechanism is the most adequate and neutral normative regulator producing acceptable social order)? How is it possible for ethics proper to exist at all if it is subjugated through institutional integration to policy considerations that by all means prioritize economic growth? Is it plausible to expect that ethics reflexivity can be productively translated into institutional environment and procedures without being distorted and its critical capacity being diminished? Is it not the quest for responsibilization that is doomed to failure vis-à-vis the promises it holds for re-socializing the S&T process and ethicizing the private knowledge-production realm? How can we ensure that Ethics will not fade away while reconciling with Economics? These are some of the questions this book will attempt to consider. I.2. The imperative for responsible innovation It has been several years since the European Commission embraced the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation and started exploring ways to promote its implementation within the field of European governance of RTD. It should be acknowledged that its integration is going well and relatively quickly given the usual clumsiness of institutional and procedural change of an administrative apparatus such as that of the European Union. It has been given an institutional definition [EUR 18h]; it has been operationalized into six “key” areas of implementation; it has been a subject matter of FP7 and Horizon 2020 projects, which explore its conceptual grounds and application challenges; it has been popularized through various conferences; and ultimately it is turning into a realm of theoretical exploration that is at the heart of recently formed research networks and alliances for further development and promotion of the idea, including through a special journal (The Journal of Responsible Innovation). Indeed, we witness a rising enthusiasm for the timeliness of a political and institutional recognition that the research and innovation process needs to be aligned with the pressing needs and concerns of society and that it should not blindly follow the logic of its own evolution, which lacks sensitivity to the broader social (and ethical) context. More specifically,

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the support for RRI within the wider academic community reflects the hopes that certain mechanisms would be finally put in place so that scientific– technological progress is not left to indifferent forces manifested in the perceived neutrality of either the scientific method or the market mechanism alone. The aim is to harness research and innovation activities for politically defined non-neutral effects such as prosperity, sustainability and social cohesion. In this endeavor, the notion of responsibility is crucial. It is not only useful to re-examine the normative commitments of the various agents in the knowledge-creation process. More generally, it evokes responsiveness to a situation that can be simply depicted as problematic. Furthermore, it makes it imperative to react to the circumstances of what is believed to be a crisis between science and the non-scientific world. So, what is wrong with the current research and innovation field? The landscape of visions for the matter is intricate. It reflects different domain interests, normative orientations and agendas. EU institutional rationality assumes that the problem lies in the crisis of trust between the scientific community and the general public. Industry interprets this crisis as lack of public confidence in the marketable products of research and innovation. The general public usually swings between awe and complacency with regard to technical advances, and fear and distrust as regards the might of science and its profit-oriented alliances with market forces. The scientific community, for its part, construes the problem as external – it either attributes it to misunderstanding and ignorance on the part of the public, or to misuse of its well-intended studies by politicians or end-users. What lies behind all these considerations is particular uneasiness about techno-scientific progress – in terms of its effects, “democratic deficits” and overall societal adequacy. It is almost clear that the concern about effects implies the exploration of negative, unintended and surprising repercussions – these are all consequences that could destabilize, harm or damage individual lives and organizational structures. A case in point is the development of dual-use products and technologies. Then, another worry pertains to the perceived democratic insufficiencies in the knowledgegeneration process. This triggers initiatives to fill in the gaps of codified knowledge with “external” epistemic perspectives of various stakeholders

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and disciplines. A common example given in this respect is the contribution made by patient organizations in the design and conduct of biomedical research. While these two main concerns are easily conceived, the notion of societal adequacy might be slightly difficult to elaborate due to normative differences as to what makes something “societally adequate”. Here we will use it to denote and reveal some disturbing moments related to the evolution of the S&T realm. We will point out three of them without indulging in ideologically laden debates on the matter. First, aiming societal adequacy could be understood as pursuing adequate temporal management of research and innovation. The crisis of the modern narrative of time as linear development causes certain anxieties over how to navigate along with the S&T realm in the face of the assumed multidirectionality of the future. In addition, the increasing uncertainty and the ongoing time–space compression [HAR 90] demand more adequate temporal regimes to govern the innovation process so that different considerations (including ethical and social) are taken into account in a timely manner. This could explain why the notions of foresight and anticipation are crucial within the conceptualizations of RRI and why one of the recurrent themes in promoting prospective and proactive responsibilization (as more adequate than post-factum legal normative regulation) becomes the need for early integration of different societal perspectives in the R&I process so that they could be built-in in its eventual products. Second, pursuing societal adequacy could be understood as the search for more appropriate strategies to tackle the epistemic challenges before the contemporary knowledge-production process in the context of increasingly complex socio-technical systems. One such strategy is found in the opening of every disciplinary realm for: (1) the perspectives of other disciplines (interdisciplinarity); (2) the input from the non-scientific world (transdisciplinary collaboration with laypersons, stakeholders, civil society organizations, etc.). The assumption is that complex problems demand a concerted effort for consolidating a variety of perspectives that should produce a comprehensive solution. This means breaking the specific occupational closures characteristic of the professional weltanschauung of researchers ‒ their ivory towers, their “blind spots” in the broader context, their professional arrogance due to complacency on the assumed power of the scientific method. Therefore, aiming at societal adequacy entails transgressing the epistemic isolation of the scientific realm along the lines of

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what some propose to be post-normal, post-academic or Mode-2 research [FUN 93, ZIM 96, NOW 01] so that its activities and products will be complemented, enriched and ultimately “socialized”. Third, technology-induced social change not only creates uncertainty and time acceleration but also destabilizes the normative tenets of societies presenting them with a myriad of moral dilemmas. The breakthroughs in the biotechnological field are a case in point (cloning, eugenics, synthetic organisms, etc.). This invites solutions that need to fill in the normative void and challenge the legitimacy of the perceived amorality1 of both the market and the research and innovation domain which advance neutrality as sufficient normative guidance in the governance of techno-scientific advancement. This could explain the return to ethics in the 1970s (with the focus on applied ethics) and the thirst for ethically adequate solutions to cope with novelty and unfamiliar social situations precipitated by new and emerging technologies. The need to restore the relevance of moral philosophy against the backdrop of innovation-driven market societies comes once again at the forefront. So, the quest for social relevance of research and innovation concerns filling in the normative gap left by scientism in the midst of ongoing marketization of the knowledge-creation process. So far I have briefly discussed the parameters of what is deemed to be a problematic situation in order to illustrate the reasons that prompt a responsibilization response, manifested in the promotion of RRI. The need for such a response is often presented as an imperative for responsible innovation (see [OWE 13]). The notion of imperative entails a particularly engaging normative power2. Its appeal goes far deeper than the ordinary policy commitments to enable the dialogue between different societal actors involved in the research and innovation process. It reveals a profound need to resort to or evoke a mode of normativity that corresponds not just to the oughtness of going beyond the existing governance logic in thinking about how knowledge and its applications are entangled in contemporary market societies but also to the urgency of the moral call to do so.

1 Amorality should not be confused with immorality. The former entails the irrelevance of moral reasoning altogether; the latter means deviation from established moral rules. 2 The latter very much reminds us of Hans Jonas’s appeal for new ethics in the technological age. His specific imperative for responsibility stems from a catastrophic epistemology of the future, which emphasizes the precarious destiny of humankind [JON 84].

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I.3. Market societies and the RRI challenge In the political philosophy realm, it is often claimed that any new politico-philosophical notion comes as a reaction to a situation that has been perceived as problematic. In other words, conceptual novelty in the realm of social life appears as a response to a crisis. Similarly, we might think of RRI as a politico-philosophical and policy reaction to a critical and rather concerning state of affairs as regards contemporary research and innovation. This crisis is related to the normative orientation of the S&T realm. One source of worry is the ongoing commercialization of the scientific domain, which could subjugate the knowledge-generation process to the profit motive. The other danger lies in the so-called technological determinism3 and the assumed neutrality (and social indifference) of the scientific method. This could leave the research and innovation field blind to the effects it could produce, hence the need for more responsible approach which takes into account the possible societal consequences – with regard to health, environment, culture, etc. We already mentioned that these anxieties are accompanied by a certain flavor of urgency or at least inevitability of a reaction that brings forward the “imperative for responsible innovation” about which Owen et al. debate [OWE 13]. Although the idea of RRI is being well developed at the conceptual level, the actual translation of these theoretical insights into the mere practice of research and innovation meets a myriad of impediments. Having to conquer actual policy and practice spaces for advancing the normative appeal of this imperative and its implicit precautionary logic, the RRI field stumbles on the structural limitations (certain institutional arrangements) and cultural pressures (dominant public philosophies) inherent in contemporary market societies. This presents us with what is deemed to be its major problem – the sheer prospects of implementation. The implementation challenge is a manifestation of what I suspect to be the actual RRI challenge, namely the normative incompatibility between the drive for responsibilization and the principles of functioning of market societies. I deliberately chose the term market societies because it has the theoretical merit of focusing on the expansion of market regulation4 beyond the economic realm. While a market 3 Technological determinism refers to a wide spectrum of social theories and conceptions that construe technology not only as the driving force of history and social change but also as the cure for all social ills. 4 I use the term “market regulation” to refer to regulation of social spheres through commodification for the purposes of market exchange. It is not used in the sense of setting

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economy establishes the market mechanism as the main principle for allocation of resources within an economy, the notion of market society implies that the market mechanism is becoming a universal normative regulator, with the ambition to treat non-market entities as commodities suitable for exchange. Market societies make it possible for market regulation to become an axial societal principle and colonize spheres of life previously considered incompatible with it. This also concerns the research and innovation sphere. The commercialization of the biotechnological field provides rather illustrative cases. For example, innovations and techniques for aiding couples with reproductive problems in the context of market societies (where everything is potential commodity for sale) are turning surrogacy into a commercial activity and a hugely profitable business [TWI 11] thus adding another important dimension when discussing its acceptability. So, my reference to the notion of market societies is not by chance. It aims to direct the attention to the transformations of the normative profile of our contemporaneity, since it also concerns the S&T realm. In this endeavor, I will evoke two quite different but very similar accounts on the colonizing ambitions of the market, those of Karl Polanyi and Michael Sandel [POL 47, POL 01, SAN 98, SAN 12, SAN 13]. Coming from different perspectives, inhabiting different historical and social contexts, they somehow share a common concern: the logic of the market conquers extraneous spaces and projects its normative principles onto realms other than the economy, thus turning them into part of the economy. Polanyi argues that such a normative stretch could eventually lead to detrimental consequences for the strength and resistance of the social fabric unless an institutional counter-reaction is initiated in order to mitigate the effects of the self-regulated markets [POL 01]. In his anthropological explorations of historical forms of economic life, he renders market economy as recent and peculiar phenomenon, which was impossible without the support of the national state. The latter provided the necessary institutional arrangements to commodify what was previously considered non-commodifiable: land, labor and money, thus opening the door for the exchange logic of the market to spread on realms previously functioning certain conditions on market exchange so that the market mechanism could be harnessed towards predetermined societal goals. In brief, by “market regulation” I do not mean regulating the market, but regulating social spheres through the application of the market principle.

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within other modes/regimes of normativity (sharing, reciprocity, etc.). In his account, a market economy can exist only in a market society [POL 01, p. 74]. The market society rests upon economic determinism that has gradually turned into a public philosophy that, as we will later see in the book, has led to the fading distinction between societal well-being and economic performance. As rightly pointed out by Polanyi: “The market mechanism, moreover, created the delusion of economic determinism as a general law for all human society [emphasis added]. Under a market economy, of course, this law holds good. Indeed, the working of the economic system here not only ‘influences’ the rest of society, but determines it ‒ as in a triangle the sides not merely influence, but determine, the angles…[t]he indirect effect of the market system came very near to determining the whole of society. It was almost impossible to avoid the erroneous conclusion that as ‘economic’ man was ‘real’ man, so the economic system was ‘really’ society” [emphasis added] [POL 47]. The last sentence is very important for us because it reveals the grip that this logic holds over the imagination of academics, politicians and the general public. It produces assumptions that, as we will see, are very delicately underlining different policy discourses on the governance of research and innovation. It also builds in some controversies in the actual policy mechanisms that could explain the implementation impasse and the difficulties in advancing the responsibilization efforts, envisioned in the notion of RRI. When the market mechanism is promoted as an encompassing normative regulator of the whole social realm, this social realm is conceptually diminished to that serving the primacy of the economic logic. Then, how could RRI, which is evoked to correct some of the mischiefs of free markets, emancipate from the considerations of the economic realm, and advance its own responsibilization agenda as a response to the problematic situation that we outlined above? Michael Sandel, on his turn, contends that allowing the market to become the ultimate social regulator will inevitably produce coercion or corruption of the genuine normative principles behind the functioning of crucial non-market realms. While exploring the moral limits of markets [SAN 98, SAN 12], he insists that there is a vital difference between a market economy and a market society, and that in the last 30 years, our societies

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have quietly drifted from the former to the latter. Market society is a result of recent transformations. Its peculiarity lies in extending the market’s inclination to commoditize everything and conquer what were previously non-market realms to submit them to its logic. Again, this also concerns human mentalities – the assumption that everything has an exchange value or a monetary equivalent that can turn appreciated objects and practices into market-regulated items is at the heart of these transformations. This could distort the honorable act of organ donation into a business of organ selling, the civic duty of defending the homeland into a profit-driven warfare, the intimate process of childbearing into a paid service of womb renting, etc. Similarly, market societies could introduce certain coercive and corruptive effects into the knowledge-generation process, which would challenge the ethics and participatory orientation of any attempt at responsibilization. We have to admit that the anxieties accompanying the ever-expanding conquering power of the market over more and more realms of public and private life evoke the imperative for responsible innovation. The need to respond to this situation results from the fact that the grip that market adoration has over the imagination has reached an extent to which the conviction that the market is the ultimate normative regulator and cure for all economic and social ills has reached a point that borders on religious faith. Some employ the term market fundamentalism to address the worry that the encompassing power of market rationality under the premises of the efficiency hypothesis might actually threaten the social fabric5. As we saw, for Polanyi, the source of possible devastation lies in imposing the commodity form over the natural world. In the same vein, but a few decades later, Habermas [HAB 87] warned that the undergoing “colonization of the lifeworld” could lead to extreme alienation. More recently, Sandel [SAN 98, SAN 12] pointed out that the marketization of certain social practices is diminishing their authenticity, thereby corrupting traditional civic virtues as fundaments of public life. Transposed to the realm of research and innovation, this constitutes the RRI challenge. The clash between the imperative for responsibilization that entails reconsideration of the normative tenets of S&T advancement and the 5 As has recently been noted in a comment by Kaletsky: “Market fundamentalism conceals a profound contradiction. Free trade, technological progress, and other forces that promote economic ‘efficiency’ are presented as beneficial to society, even if they harm individual workers or businesses, because growing national incomes allow winners to compensate losers, ensuring that nobody is left worse off” [KAL 16].

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normative profile of contemporary market societies advancing the alleged neutrality of the commodification and exchange mechanisms could explain what is deemed to be the RRI implementation problem. Usually, in the RRI field, there are qualms not about the theoretical development of the idea, but about determining the conditions for its possible application. It is true that the European Commission has introduced several actions on thematic elements in order to advance the implementation of RRI (the so-called “keys” ‒ public engagement, open access, gender, ethics and science education) along with efforts to promote institutional change to accommodate the latter (the sixth “key” – governance). Nevertheless, these six elements of implementation are fraught with their own problems and controversies. They beg for deeper conceptual exploration in view of the context that simultaneously produces the need for responsibilization and the impediments before its realization. That context is what we referred to as “market society”. I.4. The challenges before the RRI field The normative conflict we are talking about is also evident in one of the ill-articulated controversies in the RRI realm. On the one hand, RRI has the chance to voice an old-age concern about the creeping commoditization and marketization of the research and innovation realm. It can advance new arguments in favor of the contention that the evolution of the S&T domain should not be left to the mercy of the market mechanism alone since the latter transforms everything into exchange value and monetary equivalent. The mere idea of responsibilization implies the need for retrieving science from the tight normative grip of economic determinism while bringing it back to an enriched notion of human progress inspired by non-economic considerations. At the same time, as we already noted, driven by the demands of “reality”, the concept needs to make its way within a politico-economic and cultural context which is generally dominated by market-oriented thinking. As a result, RRI proponents have to argue its relevance and defend its compatibility with the market logic. This brings the risks of undermining the normative appeal of the imperative for responsibilization and diminishing the chances of moral philosophy to return into the public debate on S&T. In its attempts to expand its popularity and public recognition beyond EU-funded research, the RRI realm could lose some of its genuine

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conceptual pathos. In pursuit of alliances with and uptake by business entities, it could resort to various settling strategies with the profit-oriented world that would preclude it from deeply exploring the actual impediments to all endeavors to advance its own promises into reality. One particular danger is that eventually, a theoretical “zone of unease” would emerge, a shadowy conceptual space that would not be explicitly developed because of a justified concern that it represents a slippery slope, which may lead to self-defeating (or at least to radical leftist) inferences about the future of the idea. Meanwhile, omitting to delve into the conceptual blind spots that problematize the conflict of the drive for responsibilization with the normative infrastructure of contemporary market societies, leads to certain unintended effects, which would misdirect the analytical attention away from the core problem. For example, one way to approach the issue is by focusing mainly on the “ethics myopathy” of the research community and its disregard for the broader socio-cultural context based on assumptions of the inherent neutrality of the scientific realm. Then, similar to this logic, we may unintentionally and unfairly place the blame only on the scientists and their specific ethos while ignoring the politico-economic structures in which they need to operate and to which they need to adjust. Another shortcut strategy in solving the responsibilization problem promotes greater participation in the knowledge-generation process, but leaves aside the fact that such an approach could easily reproduce implicit controversies in contemporary representative democracies. As an effect, it is very likely that efforts for democratizing the research and innovation process through public engagement could indeed introduce the chance for various societal actors to speak up, but do not necessarily ensure that those alternative voices are heard. Then another problematic step would be to unequivocally accept that industry is the interface with society when it comes to innovation, or to assume that stakeholders, end-users and the public as one and the same. As a result, the democratization of the knowledge-generation process could very easily fall into the track of economic expediency that does not serve the responsibilization effort but the needs of the market players. Further problems can arise from making very narrow semantic interpretations of the notion of responsibility, thereby depriving the latter of the specific scope and appeal of RRI, and boiling down the implementation of RRI to known solutions of the science–society–market trilemma such as corporate social responsibility, foresight and professional codes of conduct.

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Given all this, the current text will cautiously make an attempt to subject the concept of RRI to reflexive scrutiny in terms of its politico-economic context and the conceptual framings that it itself advances. It will try to reveal the controversial ways in which the role and place of the market is assumed within the theoretical and institutional articulations on RRI. That being said, the text does not employ a particular economic framework as a conceptual lens through which the issue of responsibilization of the S&T realm be interpreted. Nor does it promote specific normative economy perspective to clarify the ethics-market problem, although it laments the negligence of the moral philosophy roots of economic knowledge. It does, however, occasionally evoke different accounts from the field of economics in order to illustrate how the economic perspective is being entangled in different theoretical and institutional accounts on the possibility for responsible governance of research and innovation (e.g. the new institutional economics’ imprint on the notion of governance). A particular emphasis in this text will be put on the normative compatibility between the research and innovation realm and the market along the notion of neutrality. On the one hand, neutrality is perceived to be the main normative tenet of the S&T realm, a result of the value neutrality of the scientific method. On the other hand, the economic sphere considers neutrality to be the key virtue of the market mechanism. Its indifference to pre-determined societal ideals and notions of social justice is assumed to produce efficient outcomes in the allocation of finite resources. Both visions intersect on the matter of technology. The research field construes technology as the material manifestation of scientific knowledge, which is neutral in its nature but distorted by its users. Then, the market realm perceives technology to be a marketable product of scientific knowledge and a suitable subject of the neutral price mechanism. The latter would determine its future development without ascribing judgments as to whether this development is good or bad. In such an intellectual context, it is very difficult for the RRI field to raise the crucial question of the acceptability or the unacceptability of a novel technology or innovation. It is so because this same context deprives us of the legitimacy of inquiries pertaining to “the good” or “steering” research and innovation towards some “right impacts”. Of course, we will maintain that technology as a social practice can never be neutral since the mere human condition of sociality presupposes intentionality, that is, non-neutrality. It can be an enhancer coping with vulnerabilities (e.g. medical technologies), or it can be itself an inducer of

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vulnerabilities (e.g. nuclear technologies). Technologies are being created for particular purposes. These can be badly articulated, obscured or misinterpreted, but this does not mean that they do not exist. Value neutrality suggests purposelessness, that is, the emergence of something is not a result of intentionality but an act of nature. Therefore, technology-for-itself is a position that is hard to defend. However, it very well fits the evolutionist-inspired attitudes in some strands of economic theory, which advance the idea of the neutrality of the market mechanism. Unfortunately, it is a very popular position, which makes many techno-savvies insist that technology does not need to be guided towards some societal ideals. For them, technology-for-itself is evidence of humankind’s power over nature, and its role in human evolution cannot be depicted as progressive or regressive. It just is evolution. Thus, questions such as “shall we elaborate this technology?” are futile. The only relevant question for them becomes “can we elaborate it?”, thus rendering the acceptability of an innovation only on the basis of our ability to bring it into reality. This kind of veneration of the might of technology is far from emotionally neutral. It sometimes reaches the point of enchantment, a kind of elation that does not correspond well to the self-doubting Cartesian mind. Therefore, RRI has the serious task of opening space for responsibilization by challenging the united front of technological determinism and market fundamentalism. I must emphasize that this book does not have the ambition to solve the problems of innovation-driven capitalism. It will explore the social critique potential of RRI while attempting to reveal the assumptions behind the conceptual and institutional development of the idea, which are an echo of already-explored concerns in the realm of economic and political theory, especially about governance as a mechanism for dealing with the normative fragmentation of contemporary democracies. An important part in this endeavor is the focus on the unarticulated concerns behind the promotion of RRI with regard to the knowledge-creation process in contemporary market societies. The book will neither denounce the idea, nor propose yet another glorifying reconfirmation of its well-known formulae both in the conceptual and the EU institutional world. It will undertake the task of exploring its controversies. It will also investigate how within the justification of RRI, we might find a variety of ambivalent discursive strategies which touch upon the role of the market both as a problem and as a solution to the hardship of integrating ethics reflexivity in the research and innovation process. This will shed some light, I believe, on crucial parameters of the RRI challenge.

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One of the difficulties in accomplishing this task is that the key notions employed in our argument (governance, market, coordination, participation, responsibility, openness, networking, etc.) are so intertwined and so mutually reinforcing that it is inevitable that they be treated simultaneously. It is impossible to examine each and every one of them within a sterile conceptual format. Hence, the reader will come across conceptualizations and interpretations that at first glance may seem to belong to other chapters of this book but are nevertheless part of the problem at hand. For example, when we explore the issue of the crisis of contemporary democracy as part of the context precipitating the emergence of RRI, we cannot leave aside debates on governance, participation, responsibilization, etc.; when we outline the link between innovation and uncertainty, we cannot ignore the role of markets in producing ignorance and how this challenges the appeal for responsibilization in terms of openness and transparency, and so on. Another difficulty may come from the fact that there is no clear demarcation line between academic and institutional strands of RRI. Although there can be found significant differences, both are influencing each other by the virtue of the mere dynamics of the field – basic definitions from the theoretical landscape are crafted by people who at one time or another have been affiliated to or consulted European policy structures and have influenced the overall institutional orientation towards responsible innovation (for example, René von Schomberg and Richard Owen); then, many representatives of academia participate in EU-funded research projects where they develop their own elaborations on RRI while abiding by the European Commission’s interpretation on the matter. This could explain why sometimes in the text the distinction between the two is not explicit. That is evident in the use of phrases like “the RRI field”, “the RRI approach” or just “RRI” to denote the general theoretical and institutional reorientation to steering research and innovation towards more societally acceptable paths. To recap, this book is about RRI self-confrontation. The latter presents me as an author with a particular difficulty that needs to be honestly and explicitly articulated. After getting to know the forming RRI network, its theoretical landscape and its practical manifestations, and working in research projects that are busy advocating its relevance, we tend to naturally develop a certain loyalty to the field and its proponents, thus losing some of the sharpness of the initial critical stance when introduced to the idea. Eventually, we internalize the arguments employed in defense of the field,

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adopt the specific vocabulary and use main points of reference (as with the Collingridge dilemma, for example, [COL 80]). In other words, we start to speak RRI. But being part of this newly forming approach, which I believe has the features of an intellectual and policy orientation rather than an established research domain, also brings responsibilities to explore the built-in controversies over the idea and the deeper reasons for its implementation impasse. Only then, I think, can the RRI community continue with a frank dialogue about the future.

1 RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks

1.1. RRI and its “precursors” – what’s new? It is still not quite clear what exactly RRI is. It can be construed as a concept that introduces the importance of responsibility in the context of innovation governance. Or it could be referred to simply as a framework – a broader policy orientation that might inform and guide research and innovation practice, within which different implementation solutions for responsibilization of the latter are being conceived. It could also be seen as nothing more than a notion that accommodates a patchwork of ideas problematizing the evolution of science and technology. On the one hand, RRI proponents admit that the concerns behind it are not new and they usually refer to “RRI precursors” to underline that the same problems have been addressed in one way or the other by earlier responsibilizing formats such as Technology Assessment (TA), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Foresight. On the other hand, they attempt at legitimizing RRI as a particular kind of innovation itself – as offering a potential paradigm shift as to the governance of the research and innovation realm [OWE 12, VON 13, NAZ 16]. As any new intellectual stream, the forming field of RRI has its own interpretation of the challenges in front of contemporary knowledge societies. These are explicated through a specific discourse with its own:

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The RRI Challenge

– presuppositions ‒ for example, responsibilization is possible through democratization of the knowledge creation process; the possibility of integrating moral considerations into the design of innovation products; ignoring values is cost-inefficient and irresponsible innovation is economically unwise and expensive; – pivotal themes ‒ for example, value-sensitive design, the polysemy of responsibility, collective and positive responsibility, the Collingridge dilemma and moral overload; and – its own hopeful assumptions ‒ for example, the possibility of solving normative conflicts and reconciling different value orientations and ensuring uptake of the idea by the business world. In this part of the text, we will refer to some earlier attempts at introducing the theme of responsibility within the research and innovation realm. What I denote as “precursors” of RRI are developments in theoretical and institutional debates that have ultimately led to the adoption and the ongoing institutionalization of the idea in the EU RTD context. This differs from the usual approach in RRI accounts. What the latter consider being precursors are just earlier attempts for responsibilization or “socialization” of the S&T field using tools such as TA, Foresight, CSR and the precautionary principle. I will not present a thorough history of those. Nevertheless, I will engage with their particular contributions where appropriate. What I will focus on here are either single events that constitute initial institutional promotions of the idea of responsible innovation or hints in the discourse of European bodies. These could be considered early elaborations on the notion that have paved the way for its fully fledged adoption by the European Commission. I will start with the former European Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potočnik, who, in a speech before the Budapest World Science Forum (10 November 2005), drew the attention to the importance of responsibility as one of the three key features of science, along with truth and progress [POT 05]. According to Potočnik, the 20th and 21st Century’s developments in the research and innovation realm have demonstrated the ambivalence of science and revealed the limits of truth and progress as its driving motives, thus bringing at the forefront the issue of responsibility. Naturally, the latter becomes a political issue. In sensitive research areas such as nuclear energy and cloning, the stakes are so high that any action or abstinence of action requires political deliberation in order to make an

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3

adequate choice. The scientific notion of risk is not attuned to the complexities of real life (see [BEC 98]). This emphasizes the importance of perspectives of laymen, citizens, users, consumers of risk and so on. Potočnik argued the need to validate scientific knowledge as to real-life contexts because of the fact that the use of scientific advice rarely prescribes a single political opinion and that scientific expertise requires a validation process in interaction with non-scientific knowledge. Adequate estimation of the stakes and the risks of such technologies cannot be made within the walls of the laboratory. He seems to be construing responsibilization, not in terms of sharing the responsibility with the general public by opening avenues for the actual involvement of the latter in the day-to-day activities of the knowledge-generation process. The political responsibility he refers to is more in the mode of consultation – engaging the public in the validation process means obtaining more socially relevant information, on the basis of which political action/inaction can take place. Thus, political responsibility requires going beyond the limitations of scientific expertise and not relying solely on it, because blind faith in scientific methods and scientific proof creates the risk of failing the mere validation process [POT 05, p. 16]. By validation, he seems to mean a contextualization effort that makes research knowledge socially relevant and socially robust, a position that we can also find in the concepts of post-academic research, post-normal science, and Mode-2 knowledge production [ZIM 96, ZIM 00, FUN 93, NOW 01, GIB 94, GIB 99]. Another important point advanced by Potočnik in the efforts to responsibilize the S&T realm is one that welcomes re-inventing the notion of progress in line with the importance of values. In this respect it is “crucial to give up the classical fiction of the fact-value divide in public technoscientific issues, as it hinders more open forms of debates and it makes misleading assumptions about the values that are embodied in expert knowledge”1. This is very important for the RRI field if it really aims to challenge the claims for value-neutrality of technological determinism and market fundamentalism and to bring the notion of progress back to the Enlightenment tradition, which instrumentalizes knowledge for pursuing not only the truth but also the good (see [TOD 09]).

1 [POT 05, pp. 18–19].

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The RRI Challenge

Then, when looking for precursors of the RRI framework, we cannot omit some developments in US policy context showing that ideas concerning the responsibilization of science and technology (e.g. responsible stewardship of nanoscience and Parliamentary TA offices) were being crafted elsewhere but developed on European soil. In this respect, it is not surprising to find some of the main RRI themes in earlier US governance responses to the developments in the realm of science and technology. Let us take, for example, the National Science Foundation’s program solicitation and a report on the societal implications of nano-science and nanotechnology [NAT 01]. It claims to provide future support for making social, ethical and economic explorations of the issue a priority and emphasizes the importance of interaction with the public for debating on the unexpected consequences of these technologies. Then, within the US National Nanotechnology Initiative, the notion of responsible innovation is articulated in the following manner: “Responsible development of nanotechnology can be characterized as the balancing of efforts to maximize the technology’s positive contributions and minimize its negative consequences. Thus, responsible development [emphasis added] involves an examination both of applications and of potential implications. It implies a commitment to develop and use technology to help meet the most pressing human and societal needs, while making every reasonable effort to anticipate and mitigate adverse implications or unintended consequences [emphasis added]” [NAT 06, p. 73]. As can be seen, the responsibilization effort consists of promoting what is deemed to have productive effects, by employing it as a problem-solving tool and directing it towards urgent societal needs; at the same time, it is viewed as suppressing its potential negative repercussions. This take on responsibility as to a particular strand of emerging technology is in the mode of searching for ways to adequately assume political responsibility by examining “applications and potential implications” and promote its development in a “balancing act” of action and inaction. We need to recognize that although currently RRI is “marching” in institutional and scientific parlance as a specifically European conceptual achievement, the notion of responsible innovation can be traced back several years within the US policy development. Of course, a particular European

RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks

5

imprint is its institutional “operationalization” into six themes of implementation (ethics, science education, gender, participation, open innovation and governance) and enforcing it in the FP7 and Horizon 2020 Framework Programmes for research and development. However, as can be seen below, most of its tenets are already outlined in a US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues’ report on synthetic biology from 2010. They are public beneficence, responsible stewardship, intellectual freedom and responsibility, democratic deliberation, justice and fairness [PRE 10]. The latter are supposed to guide decision-making with regard to scientific and technical novelties in the following manner2: – public beneficence implies acting to maximize public benefits and minimize public harm. Increasing economic opportunities are also regarded as constituent for the public good; – responsible stewardship reflects a shared obligation among members of the domestic and global communities to act in ways that demonstrate concern for those who are not in a position to represent themselves (e.g. children and future generations) and for the environment in which future generations will flourish or suffer. It calls for prudent vigilance on risks and benefits for humans, nonhuman species and the environment, each with their unique needs and vulnerabilities. It supposes an appropriate equilibrium – neither extreme precaution that blocks technological progress nor extreme action-oriented approach that disregards public safety concerns; – intellectual freedom is coupled with responsibility of individuals and institutions to use their creative potential in morally responsible ways. At the same time, responsible science should reject the technological imperative – doing something because it simply could be done, exercising freedom without responsibility; – democratic deliberation as an approach to collaborative decision-making that embraces respectful debate of opposing views and active participation by citizens; – justice and fairness relate to the distribution of benefits and burdens across society. Society as a whole has a claim towards reasonable efforts on the part of both individuals and institutions to avoid unjust distributions of the benefits, burdens and risks that such technologies bring. This same claim extends internationally to all those who may be affected. 2 For the full description, see [PRE 10, pp. 24–31].

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The RRI Challenge

As could be noted, these ethical principles adhere more or less to the balancing rationality of a consequentialist approach. It advances well-known notions in the RRI field such as “responsible stewardship”, “democratic deliberation”, “maximize benefits” and “minimize harm”. It regards responsibility, again, as a prudent balancing act of steering between fear (extreme precaution that stifles development) and action-oriented negligence (on the part of the profit-hungry market or the allegedly neutral techno-scientific realm). The American conceptual precursors of the notion of responsible innovation put emphasis on political responsibility as to governance of new and emerging technologies, whereas the current European notion of responsibilization accentuates more on sharing the responsibility with the citizens by engaging them in the mere research and innovation process. It is not just about deliberating with them on the eventual consequences of the latter. It is about committing them to its direction. However, if we go back to the European continent, we will see that very soon after the above-mentioned reports, there have already been attempts to outline the emerging features of this new approach. In 2011, little before the RRI notion had been institutionally introduced, participants in various FP7 projects working on responsibilization and ethicizing of research and innovation (within the Science in Society theme) came up together to elaborate on the matter. As a result, a leading definition was adopted. It was one proposed by René von Schomberg (then working for DG Research and Innovation): “Responsible Research and Innovation is a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products (in order to allow a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society)” [EU 11, p. 9]. What is particular in this definition is that it aims to conceive the conditions of something of an ideal speech situation in the context of RTD governance, in the spirit of Habermasian proceduralism (a process in which

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actors become mutually responsive to each other). The report introduces what is believed to be a novel approach in the temporal management of the R&I process in order to avoid acceptance failures and succeed in the proper embedding of the technology in question. The key word is early ‒ by early engagement with users and stakeholder and early commitment to the normative anchor points of the EU. It is considered that the latter could provide proper guidance on what constitutes ethically acceptable, sustainable and socially desirable. The policy guidance as to EU RTD need not be renegotiated anew. It is there ‒ a result of a political consensus on EU values. It is reflected in the Lisbon Treaty (2009) as well, waiting to be persistently and robustly applied. Therefore, the contribution of the RRI approach is not so much in some conceptual novelty but in the insistence of the timely (early), persistent and concerted application of what has already been created as tools for responsibilization. These include: (1) use of TA, Privacy Impact Assessment and Technology Foresight to better anticipate positive and negative impacts; (2) application of the Precautionary principle in order to ensure that safe and sustainable products will reach the users; (3) use of demonstration projects fostering greater cooperation among the parties in elaborating a responsible implementation plan; (4) deployment of Codes of Conduct, that is, using soft law regulatory tools for promoting collective responsibility; (5) ensuring market accountability ‒ using standards, certifications and accreditations (protective function, setting limits as to the safety/profitability relation); (6) integrating ethics as a design factor (value-sensitive design practices); (7) deliberative mechanisms to allow feedback to policy-makers in order to devise more adequate models of responsible governance of innovation; (8) public debate – moderating technology push and policy pull, ongoing public debate and monitoring public opinion are crucial for legitimizing R&I funding and the overall direction of the S&T progress [EU 11, pp. 10–13]. As Owen et al. note, the zeitgeist around the notion of responsible innovation emerged in the coalescing of associated discourses on value-sensitive design, ethics in emerging technologies, societal desirability, reflexive governance and so on [OWE 12, p. 752]. In connection to this, in 2011, Octavi Quintana, the Director of the European Research Area (ERA) acknowledged that the EC embraces the orientation towards responsible research and innovation without having clarity on what it actually entails. It

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The RRI Challenge

just felt right in the midst of concerns accompanying science–society relations and the dangers of organized irresponsibility3: “We need your help to define responsible research and innovation. After several years of research on the relation between science and society, we evidenced that we need to involve civil society very upstream to avoid misunderstanding and difficulties afterwards […]. We cannot guarantee the social acceptability for anything but the more we have dialogue the easier it is to understand the potential obstacles and to work on them [emphasis added] […]. Your advice is important to help us build a policy for the years to come […]” [EUR 11a, p. 2]. RRI accounts, both academic and institutional, come as a response to the fact that the current innovation system is highly complex and traditional notions of individual responsibility and accountability cannot satisfy the general imperative for responsibilization. Their emergence is recognition of the problem and a necessary reaction as to the normative void when considering the acceptable paths of S&T development. However, the concrete parameters of this reaction are still not explicit enough. In the lookout for a definition, Hillary Sutcliffe offers something of a summary4 (and manifestation) of the discourses that target the problem. It is one that does not contribute with underlining the specificity of the idea (unlike Owen’s or Schomberg’s definitions), but one that aims to grasp everything that is relevant for RRI, namely: “1) the deliberate focus of research and the products of innovation to achieve a social or environmental benefit; 2) the consistent, ongoing involvement of society, from beginning to end of the innovation process, including the public & non-governmental groups, who are themselves mindful of the public good;

3 The expression appeared as a subtitle (“Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit”) of one of Beck’s books, see [BEC 88]. 4 It is a summary indeed, one that aims to bring together the issues around Responsible Research and Innovation, particularly, though not exclusively, as expressed by participants at the DG Research Workshop on Responsible Research and Innovation in Europe in Brussels on 16–17 May, 2011.

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3) assessing and effectively prioritising social, ethical and environmental impacts, risks and opportunities, both now and in the future, alongside the technical and commercial; 4) where oversight mechanisms are better able to anticipate and manage problems and opportunities and which are also able to adapt and respond quickly to changing knowledge and circumstances; 5) where openness and transparency are an integral component of the research and innovation process” [SUT 11, p. 3]. While Sutcliffe’s is an honest approach as to the matter, it does not help in distinguishing RRI from the other layers, which conceptualize the adequate mode of relations between science and society and the normative dimension of the S&T evolution. Her summary tries to say everything about RRI, but by doing so, it says nothing groundbreaking or new. It just insists that RRI offers a better way to: squeeze everything positive from innovation and new technologies – to provide social benefit and avoid losing out on another technological advance (as happened with the GMO case); prevent any more disasters (like those with asbestos, CFCs, etc.); anticipate potential negative or irreversible consequences; stimulate growth based on genuine innovations; support outcomes that benefit “people, planet and profit”; foster stakeholder involvement for incorporating new perspectives on innovation design; harness the social responsibility motive of businesses; create networks and connections to enrich the innovation process with ideas; engage and empower the public as early as possible, embracing already trusted tools such as TA, Foresight, Impact Assessment, Ethics Assessment, Scenario development, participatory formats (stakeholder fora, Citizen’s Juries, dialogues, events, focus groups, partnerships, co-creation or crowd-sourcing initiatives) and embrace openness and transparency as underpinning principles [SUT 11]. As can be seen, this account of RRI tries to gather all the aspects of the new governance of the knowledge-generation process under one umbrella – responsibilization. Nevertheless, there are conceptual attempts at outlining the novel and original contribution of this notion. For instance, Owen et al. [OWE 12] highlight three emerging features of RRI that point to: – democratizing the governance of intent (science for society). Here, what is new in RRI is that its departure point is not managing unintended risks but purposive steering towards desirable ends. By engaging the public,

10

The RRI Challenge

researchers could come up with insight into what societal challenges might give science greater public value (not equal to its commercial value) and strive towards the “right impacts”. While the latter is a matter of political, ideologically charged or interest-based discussion, the mere negotiation and re-negotiation with the public of what constitutes a right impact is crucial in the process of responsibilization; – institutionalizing responsiveness (science with society) – this entails opening up the research and innovation process for contribution and input from the public in order to initiate “an iterative, continuous and flexible process of adaptive learning” [OWE 12, p. 755], one that integrates anticipation, reflection and inclusive deliberation into decision-making. While there have been different experiments involving the public (citizens’ juries, conferences, etc.), it is noted that these have been detached from the policy-making process, which puts the responsiveness of the latter under question; – reframing responsibility – RRI builds on traditional responsibilities (i.e. research integrity). It confers new ones as well. These refer not only to scientists but also to all actors involved in the R&I process (universities, businesses, policy-makers, funding institutions, etc.). Thus, RRI advocates for extending responsibilities over the whole innovation ecosystem. It assumes the need for collective responsibility and for overcoming the limits of conventional consequentialist approaches to responsibility by “focusing attention on dimensions of responsibility such as care and responsiveness which are values- and not rules-based, allowing for discussion concerning purposes and accommodating uncertainty” [OWE 12, p. 756]. Of course, the RRI framework is not the one that relies on the notion of responsibility to address the problematic nature of the contemporary S&T realm. This in itself is not a conceptual breakthrough. However, we need to recognize that it employs novel intellectual strategies to attract the attention to the issue. One such strategy is to explicitly focus on responsibility and make it the starting point of conceptualizations concerning the governance of research and innovation by trying to devise different ontologies of responsibility around the notion of prospective, collective or voluntarist5 action. Another conceptual contribution is approaching the concern about the

5 On the voluntary nature of RRI, see [GOR 18].

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11

unattended evolution of the S&T realm through the lens of responsiveness6. Responsiveness can be evoked as a possible remedy for some likely problems in the deliberation process, such as the lack of common language on which innovation can be discussed between the different societal actors, fragmentation of the conversation due to the incompatibility of different sectorial logics, etc. This is important; however, is it enough to make RRI different from other approaches? It claims to be an anticipatory, pro-active, responsibilizing and democratizing process, stimulating responsiveness, reflexivity, participation and actual engagement with its own results. But so is Foresight, which builds upon the ambition to organize a collective dialogue based on the encounter of different epistemic perspectives and democratizing the knowledge-creation process by involving the stakeholders in post-dialogue implementation efforts and engaging them with the images of the future they themselves envisioned and elaborated [MIL 03]. Surely, the forming RRI field is a result of certain unease with the way techno-scientific progress is unfolding. In this respect, there is not much new. It could, however, step on this moral intuition and, in contradistinction to its “precursors”, explore the curious but dangerous bond between economistic prejudice and technological determinism. This will allow it to reveal why the imperative for responsibilization is challenged by the normative structure of market societies and by doing so to fulfill its potential as social critique. This, I believe, is the way it can demonstrate an original contribution within the array of responsibilization efforts. 1.2. Addressing the mischiefs of free markets The main task of RRI in its potential role as a critical endeavor is to reveal the sources of tension between the imperative for responsible innovation and market regulation and, furthermore, to emancipate the discourses that advance RRI’s institutionalization from what Polanyi thought to be economistic fallacy [POL 01, BLO 14]. It is clear that the intellectual and political context in which such a task is to take place is not very welcoming. I will not delve into the debates of the theoretical adequacy of the terms that are publicly advanced to describe it ‒ neoliberalism, 6 Rene von Schomberg concentrates on the processual and product dimension of the responsiveness between the stakeholders [VON 13].

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The RRI Challenge

laissez-fair economics, free market ideology, market fundamentalism and so on. It would suffice to note that they all convey a public philosophy stance that aims not only to discard to Keynesian project but also to dismantle its institutional structure so that the long-lasting dream of autonomous sphere of economy, which imposes its own principles and logic to commodify and thus regulate (through the price mechanism) everything in its way, is realized. This is important for us because it gives a flavour of the cultural climate within which the notion of RRI is to lead its way as a conceptual novelty, problematizing the evolution of the S&T field and how it normatively interlocks with market regulation. We cannot deny that, at least on a conceptual level, there are analyses and suggestions as to the conflict between the imperative for responsibilization and market regulation. Sylvain Lavelle’s examination of the RRI theoretical landscape and advancing the idea for Common Research and Innovation [LAV 16] touches upon this problem and advances the importance of commonality. In practice, this is an audacious move, which implies advancing a new politico-economic order. It indeed represents a critical stance, one honestly and profoundly addressing the issue without trying to reconcile with the dominant economized institutionalist parlance. However, as we can imagine, the prospects of it being widely embraced in view of the dominant intellectual climate are rather slim. Another account ‒ that of Pierre Benoit-Joly [JOL 17] – employs a different strategy. It approaches the problem by elaborating alternative innovation models that are not based on the imperative for competitiveness. Benoit-Joly outlines three such models: users’ innovation, distributed innovation and social innovation. They are all guided by different “moral economies”. Although it is not explicitly an RRI account, his work is significant for the aims of this text because it points to a crucial finding, namely that the democratization of innovation does not necessarily lead to addressing societal challenges. This is important to be taken into consideration when assuming that the democratization of the knowledgecreation process through experimenting with different participatory formats would lead to responsibilization and enhanced socio-ethical orientation of the research and innovation process. Another, more prominent account, one within the RRI field itself, indirectly touches upon the normative clash between responsibilization and market regulation by focusing the attention on cases of problematic or

RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks

13

irresponsible innovation. The latter are depicted as a result of the pushing logic of either the market or the political realm. Von Schomberg identified four sources of such innovation: 1) technology push: setting aside stakeholders’ views, pressing for market realization, untimely regulation (e.g. GMO case); 2) neglect of fundamental ethical principles: omitting to insert mechanisms for protecting the values held dear by the users into the initial design of the innovation product/process (e.g. the Dutch electronic patient record system); 3) policy pull: policy makers are eager to accept and promote the implementation of certain technologies without proper public debate (e.g. the use of body scanners at airports); 4) lack of precautionary measures and technology foresight: ignoring negative consequences of innovation (e.g. asbestos, hormones as growth promoters and benzene) [VON 13, pp. 60–63]. As can be seen, problematic innovation can be explained with the push for market realization in combination with political regulatory failures. This account does not explore in greater depth the overlap of orientations between the governance realm and the market that leads to opening a wide space for promoting innovation that would later initiate waves of public resentment. It does, however, indirectly hint at the mischiefs of free, unattended markets, driven only by the profit motive. Another theme, with which RRI touches upon the problems of science and technology in the context of market societies, is what is referred to as “orphan areas” or unattended fields of innovation that concern injustices and inequalities in Europe and beyond (very pronounced in developing countries) [EUR 13, pp. 15–16]. An example for such a distortion in the normative orientation of contemporary research can be found in contemporary pharmacological studies. It is well-known that scientific efforts are directed predominantly towards illnesses concerning only a small percentage of the world population while ignoring the pressing needs of the regions of global poverty, where a variety of dangerous diseases are taking their toll. In order to fulfil its potential as a social critique, RRI analysis ought to address head-on the reasons and structures that produce these instances of unfairness.

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The RRI Challenge

Another conceptual move when it comes to addressing the mischiefs of free markets is one made by Iatridis and Schroeder [IAT 16]. Their account approaches RRI as yet another occasion to stimulate the application of existing corporate responsibility (CR) tools in order to promote more acceptable business conduct in industry. They speak only of CR but not of corporate social responsibility, thus employing a particular discursive strategy in which societal and environmental considerations are not appendices to the notion of CR, but implicit in it and a manifestation of its recent evolution. This looks like a good conceptual attempt to engage the business world with RRI – by naturalizing what is perceived to be market externalities as inevitable component of the general conception of responsibility in a profit-driven context. The RRI field also has its own practical suggestions for addressing the mischiefs of free markets when it comes to the governance of innovation. In this respect, we need to mention the contribution of van den Hoven with the notion of value-sensitive design [VAN 12, VAN 13]. He adopts consequentialist ethics, weighing possible effects of the outcomes of the researcher/innovator’s actions and possible options (alternative paths) in view of relevant moral values (e.g. justice, equality, privacy, security and autonomy). The inferred considerations can be used as requirements for the design and development of new technologies, products and services so that the latter lead to what he considers to be “moral improvement”. We might interpret this as an algorithm for sensitizing innovation in view of some desired value. The assumption is that technologies and innovation are never impartial. They incorporate biases (cognitive, cultural, social), which in the logic of van den Hoven can be directed towards value-sensitive solutions. And this brings forward a fascinating question ‒ how could values be actually incorporated into design? How can values be expressed in artifacts and processes? The problem seems to be not so much in integrating a chosen set of values (e.g. profit or economic efficiency is also a value for some). The problem is how to integrate mechanisms for benign realization of the aimed effects. We could always boast that we have advanced privacy-sensitive solutions in a particular technology, but is it really so? The matter is rather complicated because of meta-regulatory regimes, gray areas in the interpretation of current laws and the implicit ambiguity of technology as simultaneously solving a problem while opening a new one. The example

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15

with surveillance technologies is telling – they were created to ensure more security and ended up being perceived as a threat to security themselves. However, it seems that van den Hoven is not setting unrealistic targets as to ethicizing the S&T world using value-sensitive design. He promotes the quest for “moral improvement” instead of “moral solutions”. It entails making design of processes and artifacts slightly more sensitive to considerations other than technical functionality and economic profit. This conceptual move has its rationale. It aims to keep the viability of the responsibilization effort without stumbling on practical impasse. I will illustrate what I mean with an example concerning animal welfare. Following van den Hovenʼs logic, we might contend that value-sensitive design regarding places where animals are being raised will bring moral improvement because changes in the design of the process would mitigate some of the cruelties characteristic for such sites. For example, making architectural alterations would provide more living space for the animals thus alleviating their distress. As can be seen, this is quite different from aiming at a moral solution to the problem. The latter would have had more radical repercussions because it would have stepped on the assumption that pursuing animal welfare denies the acceptability of any places that raise animals for eventual slaughtering. It seems that design is currently turning into a buzzword replacing the notion of common good. It is a situation in which we are not to lean on a particular social ideal (it has been expelled along the “mirage of social justice” [see HAY 76] and the end of grand narratives), but we have a fragmented expression of striving towards values ‒ by the means of design. The meaning of values is not construed in view of some societal vision. Thus, they allow for ambiguous interpretations serving strategic communication for the purposes of legitimizing a product by pursuing “design for” – design for privacy, design for security, design for sustainability, design for democracy, design for human capabilities and so on. In addition to that, the plurality of values almost always leads to conflicts over priority. We aim at designs that integrate values, not sacrifice one for the other. We want privacy and security, not security or privacy. However, this is a tremendously difficult task to accomplish. In reference to that, van den Hoven talks about moral overload and the obligation to innovate in order to alleviate the latter. But what are the prospects of success if there is no overarching societal vision? On the one hand, we can construe innovation as a tool for addressing the moral problems of the market (e.g. innovation for

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The RRI Challenge

greener or safer car industry). On the other hand, a societal ideal, which could serve as a reference point for values (or “non-functional requirements” as he calls them) to be contextualized and given meaning, is not present. My suspicion is that such a situation opens avenues for market regulation to enter the scene as a source of neutral normative guidance. Thus, economic considerations could easily make their way in on the basis of being a means to weigh value options. RRI may fall into a vicious cycle of challenging and falling back again into the trap of market regulation. This presents us with one of the mischiefs of free markets that is at the heart of what we referred to as contemporary market societies, namely the expansive commodification, including in the field of our particular interest – the research and innovation realm. Following Planyi and Sandel, we will outline some of its features that we need to have in mind when exploring the tight bond between the claims for neutrality-led techno-scientific progress and value-neutral market regulation. Commodification is distorting essences by turning entities that are not commodities into items of market exchange thus transforming them into fictitious commodities. Labor is human activity, land is nature and money is a token of purchasing power. They serve other purposes in life, and constricting their essence to “production for sale” is fiction [POL 01, pp. 74–76]. Then, commodification can be perceived as an assault on their essence, one that if led to extreme, would destroy the very “fabric of society” [POL 01, p. 135]7. In his account on market societies, Sandel [SAN 98, SAN 12] emphasizes the same problem but in other terms. He explores the “moral limits of markets” against the backdrop of a tendency from the last several decades, related to the marketization and privatization of public functions (e.g. imprisonment, waging wars and internal security) and subduing them to the motive of profit rather than concentrating on the societal meaning they have. He focuses on two effects as to commodification: corruption and coercion. Corruption takes place when the monetary equivalent is assumed to present the value of a good/practice, thus depriving it of its essence and intrinsic value by reducing it to a commodity form. This implies that there is something non-value-bearing about them, something beyond quantification, 7 Some comment that, if left unattended, the market would create anomie [BAU 96, p.9] or would ultimately lead to economically irrational results [WIL 91].

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17

and something incommensurate with money and with the idea for exchange. It presupposes some moral worth that will be degraded with commodification. If we accept this argument and apply its logic as to the current development of the research and innovation realm, we will not be less concerned. Subjecting new and emerging technologies only to the regulatory power of the market can have disastrous ethics consequences in terms of degrading the meaning of knowledge creation and its applications. We already witness such tendencies. For example, developing advanced military technologies that ultimately aim at contactless warfare is transforming (desensitizing) the mere experience of taking one’s life (killing as gaming). Then, the other effect, coercion, takes place when commodification is prompted by the fact that the background conditions in society are not fair8 [SAN 98, p. 95]. Sandel challenges the assumption that “freedom consists in the voluntary exchanges people make in market economy, regardless of the background conditions that prevail” [SAN 98, pp. 121–122]. The reality is that free markets are not so free. Even though voluntary, a certain act is not necessarily free if conditioned by social inequalities. Human beings, even as market agents, do not operate in the idealized world of classical economy – they are enmeshed in social, cultural and cognitive structures that shape the complexity of the economic action as social action. An act cannot be considered only a function of economic realities. Assuming so would lead to disastrous consequences. If we need illustrating examples from the research and innovation realm, we will stumble across some worrying practices. It would suffice to mention the problems with research ethics when it comes to testing new drugs by pharmacological corporations in the regions of global poverty. The pathos of Sandel and his preoccupation with the relation between morality and the market are conceptualized through the notion of market society. The main concern is that in contemporary societies, the market is conquering increasingly more spheres of public life where civic virtues should be the source of normative orientation. He employs the theme for the moral limits of markets as necessary normative boundary to the assumed neutrality of the latter. Social cohesion and the resistance of the social fabric are conditioned on keeping certain spheres of human activity away from market regulatory ambitions. This is a motif we can find in Polanyi’s work 8 For instance, poor people would be more prone to selling their organs.

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The RRI Challenge

as well. He argues the need of regulatory counter-reactions in order to protect the autonomy (authenticity) of social life from the grip of the self-regulating markets: “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society [emphasis added]; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness” [POL 01, p. 3]. Polanyi problematizes the initial process of commodification on the basis of a moral objection to treating human life and nature as commodities. He contends that they have a sacred dimension that commodification will deprive them of. His version of establishing some moral limits over the markets involves governmental regulatory counter-reactions within the so-called “double movement” of two principles: the principle of economic liberalism that aims to establish a self-regulating market (using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods) and the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature (using protective legislation and other instruments of intervention as its methods) [POL 01, pp. 138–139]. According to his perspective, historically, we witness laissez-faire periods that expand the scope of the market; then, we have reactionary protective counter-movements to resist the dis-embedding of the economy and manage the allocation of the so-called fictitious commodities (land, labor, capital)9. In this context, we could construe the policy orientation towards RRI as an instance of such counter-reaction against the degrading effects of commodification in the realm of research and innovation, one that comes from the moral intuition that there is something wrong with the idea of a “laissez-faire S&T” (i.e. socially dis-embedded, market-regulated S&T). The notion of responsibility comes as specific conceptual reaction. Here, we may find sources of justification of the RRI’s imperative for responsible innovation. RRI’s conceptual vantage point could be that the S&T process shall not be dis-embedded. Why? What is so particular about it? Is it that it is 9 For example, Keynesian economics was embraced after the breakdown of laissez-faire capitalism and the Great Depression; then, Hayekian interpretations came to question central government regulation and re-establish the legitimacy of the free market as the most efficient allocator of resources.

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inseparable part of the notion of progress that needs to be oriented towards some normative horizon beyond the notion of socially indifferent (neutral) evolution? Is it that knowledge is a fictitious commodity and as such it has properties and consequences that go beyond the pure commodification logic of the economic realm? Even though we do not resort to the notion of “sacredness” that Polanyi uses, is there something peculiar about knowledge that makes the insistence of treating it as real commodity problematic10? These are questions that the RRI field needs to seriously address in order to live up to the promises of critically approaching the reality of the research and innovation process and to reveal the grip of market regulation and other “truths” over the meaning of science and technology. The market is introducing its own normative orientations into the realm of knowledge, thus turning the question of S&T regulation into one concerning the ethics of the market. If the RRI field allows the question of the moral limits of techno-scientific advancement to be discussed on the terrain of classical economics, the prospects for conceptual emancipation of this pressing problem become slim. The effect would be to confine the discussion on ethics to elaborations on the merits of neutrality as a superior normative orientation, thus expelling the very notion of “good life” out of the argument for responsibilization. As a result, the imperative for responsibility would restrict its claims just to individual responsibility embodied in decent professional conduct or liability (in the cases of illicit behavior). And this is an approach to responsibility that is severely criticized by RRI theoreticians. Therefore, a possible intellectual strategy in advancing RRI’s imperative for responsibilization is taking cue from Sandel and Polanyi and reformulating the ethical exploration on the moral limits of markets as an exploration on what the acceptable limits of commodification are, thus opposing the assumption that commodification is the only means of knowledge realization. This is a difficult task as long as the imperative for applied science represents a major driving force in the governance of R&I and feeds on the insistence upon bridging the research realm with the 10 This all brings us to the interesting topic of “intellectual property”. It is a manifestation of the transformation of knowledge into fictitious commodity and the social consequences of that – establishing regimes of access, which reflect and reproduce existing international or social inequalities (e.g. biopiracy) or conflicting normative appeals – of morality and the market (e.g. pharmaceuticals). Certain accounts respond to this situation by exploring the notion of “intellectual commons” [e.g. JES 07].

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The RRI Challenge

market. It is assumed that scientific results can have actual social impact only as marketable products. We live in a world in a relentless quest for technological applications of scientific research as if the latter are the only legitimate form of its existence. This corresponds to the engineering mentality behind the notion of knowledge societies, one that promotes a benign interventionist stance towards reality meditated by applied knowledge, which is hoped to deliver on efficiency, performance, optimization and so on. As can be noted, the justification of technology-mediated social change can be traced back to the normative tenets of market regulation. This normative intersection represents a serious impediment vis-à-vis the efforts for responsibilization. In sum, this section aimed to explore the potential of RRI in addressing the moral limits of markets as normative regulator of the research and innovation realm. In this endeavor, the field is to stumble on a particular difficulty. Usually when we comment on complex social phenomena, we tend to analytically isolate their different aspects, reflecting different normative profiles commensurate with the logic of different spheres. This is the intellectual legacy of classical economics that argued such normative autonomy, a legacy that has reached its peak in the notion of postindustrial society as one experiencing a “disjunction of realms” [BEL 76]. Then one of the troubles for RRI theoretical and institutional discourse would be to assume that the economic problem is just a single aspect of the responsibilization problem. Given that, one of the main challenges in exploring the moral limits of commodification of research and innovation would be to problematize not just the unfettered S&T progress per se, but the S&T progress whose normative orientation comes from market regulation and economic reductionism (restricting complex social reality to the economic factor). 1.3. Democracy in responsibility

distress:

the

prospects

of

collective

Eliciting the need for RRI might be done not only in view of the mischiefs of the markets but also in the context of the problem for the democracy deficit in contemporary representative democracies. How could the governance process of S&T advancement be organized in a way to respond to the need for a democratic dialogue between the concerned parties, while bridging the trust gap between the scientific community and the

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general public? This question fits well the problems of democracy theory and its pressing concerns like the possibility for collective action, the crisis of political responsibility, the questionable legitimacy of the decision-making process, the responsiveness of the institutional environment, the role of expertise and knowledge in the overall functioning of societies and the effective forms of public engagement in the governance process. Thus, issues like participation, deliberation and collective responsibility play a serious role in the conceptual justification of RRI. The debates on the crisis of democracy are not new. The discussion on the merits and pitfalls of that form of organization of public life periodically recurs. We already mentioned the problem of the legitimacy of the decision-making process that initiates an exploration into novel modes of governing and engaging various societal voices in policy formation and policy implementation. It is at the heart of many notions for reinvigorating the promises of the democratic process – by promoting participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, collaborative democracy, direct democracy, anticipatory democracy and so on. The overall challenge that precipitates the emergence of all these ideas, one that pertains to our interest in the democracy–responsibility conceptual coupling, is what was once identified as the problem of governability [CRO 75]. A manifestation of the latter is the so-called overload of the decision-making systems [CRO 75, pp. 11–20]. It makes democracies more vulnerable to instability due to the increased number of decisions to be made. The ongoing opening of the democratic mechanisms for increasingly more group interests and demands, adding information channels and a variety of sources of expert knowledge, challenges the governing capabilities of institutions. Amidst this complexity, the reflective space within the policy-making process is shrinking due to the demands of instantaneous decision-making. Within an instant information model, incessant flows of information induce a constant process of producing novel public problems in such a way that even minor ones (using extensive media coverage) very quickly become major public concerns. This makes it difficult for official authorities to respond in a timely and adequate manner. The whole mechanism does not leave much room for normative distancing before conceiving large-scale policy solutions. This introductory contextualization is relevant for the purposes of the current text since it prompts to consider the RRI’s responsibilization

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The RRI Challenge

problem as a governability problem concerning the research and innovation realm. The above-mentioned overload of decision-making systems has repercussions for the way the S&T advancement would be managed. This becomes a particularly pressing question in view of the diminished possibilities for reflexive examination and adequate regulation of new and emerging technologies in the context of accelerated economic and political time. The latter has been a subject of interest since the 1970s in many accounts that span from the realm of international relations to the field of future studies. Brzezinski recognized this problem of time compression, uncertainty and acceleration as an “out of control” situation, where discontinuity becomes the central reality of contemporaneity and where ethical perplexity adds up to an always-too-late historical comprehension [BRZ 95]. Once we grasp the ongoing change, we are already lagging behind in our understanding because in the meantime new change has come. In view of the governability challenge, we could interpret this as an age of weakened normative references, of loosening social control due to collapse of traditional institutions providing authority and normative guidance (like teachers, schools, family and the community) and of transition in value orientations (towards individualism, tinkering with the self, self-realization understood only in market terms). The emptying of the normative underlining of contemporary democracy in the context of both accelerated change and increasing demand for adequate governmental response leads to “a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority” [CRO 75, p. 74]. Authority in a way reflects the legitimacy of the guiding normative framework of some societal vision. The lack of such vision leads to a normatively fragmented context where the democratic procedure turns into a bargaining mechanism between competing political interests of various social groups. What represents an acute interest for us is the normative fragmentation in contemporary democracies, which reflects intellectual and popular attitudes that the democratic mechanism reproduces the market mechanism. It is no wonder that the political realm is commonly perceived as a competitive place for offering certain interpretations of what represents “the good life”, without a common normative horizon (beyond the market metaphor) giving politico-philosophical justification of the shared life in a polity. This situation of a consensus without purpose, of legitimacy of the democratic procedure without normative substance of a societal ideal, is seen to be at the

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heart of “the rise of anomic democracy” [CRO 75, p. 107] and “the end of liberalism” [LOW 69]. This is a great impediment before RRI’s quest to open debate on “steering” research and innovation towards “the right impacts”. In order to be viable, the notion of “right” needs to be elaborated in reference to some overarching vision of the good life. However, how to come to such a vision without compromising on the legitimacy of the mechanisms that are to produce it? The Forward Studies Unit, an entity that greatly influenced the EU debate on governance and governability, approaches the problem of legitimate regulation in normatively fragmented societies by adopting a specific view on democracy as a knowledge-generation mechanism. Mutations of democracy, which is always in the making, are related to transformations in the knowledge that is used in the formation of the rules of public life. As to the current situation: “Knowledge is no longer ‘given’ and accessible by the mechanisms of elected representation or by the concentration of specialist expertise, but rather thought to be ‘constructed’ and renewed in a process of collective learning that draws support from social pluralism” [SCH 01, p. 3]. This is the reason why they propose a procedural perspective on regulation, one that goes beyond formal and substantive approaches as to the latter. It envisions setting up mechanisms that would promote self-learning within organizations. Given that, we can see why in RRI institutional discourse responsibilization is inevitably linked with democratization of the knowledge-generation process. Since knowledge produced within the scientific community is involved in the everyday reproduction of democracy, the latter is seen not so much as reflecting sectorial interests but as incorporating new and multifarious knowledge for the purposes of adequate decision-making and regulation. This explains why the EU democratic deficit is traced not in the impossibility to copy national institutional bodies on the EU level, but in the hardship of the latter to reflect/incorporate the plenty of knowledge and the diversity of European contexts into the regulatory mechanisms. The richness of social, cultural and scientific knowledge is difficult to be fully taken into account by the European legislative system. We can depict the problem as a crisis of regulation,

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The RRI Challenge

governability crisis, coordination problem within contemporary complex, as well as accelerated and normatively differentiated societies, but: “[r]ather it is a crisis affecting the very idea of a model, i.e. the idea that governance is to be understood in terms of applying a method, in differing environments and despite such differences. Seen this way, the political crisis is merely the symptom of a deeper crisis in formal (or, more precisely, substantive) rationality and its presuppositions, namely that phenomena obey laws, that we can update these laws, and that, thanks to the accumulation and processing of information, we can use our knowledge to act effectively” [SCH 01, p. 18]. Instead of a stifling model, reflexivity is promoted to boost an ongoing learning process vis-à-vis the context of rule application. It seems that traditional regulatory mechanisms conceive of knowledge as an external resource that needs to be taken into account when shaping policies. The procedural perspective approaches the policy-making process as a knowledge-creation mechanism that involves a variety of contexts and types of knowledge (tacit, laymen, expert, scientific, etc.) of the societal actors. Then, adequate policy solutions are to emerge in the process of collective learning. Adequate policy solutions do not mean final solutions, but temporary regulatory perspectives, which are part of a renegotiation and renewal process that is undergoing in time and reflexive in nature (in view of newly conceived knowledge). Therefore, the problem of knowledge is pivotal in terms of establishing “a cooperative order within a fragmented and rapidly evolving society” [SCH 01, p. 68]. The latter, in view of uncertainty and complexity, needs to transform into an experimental society, one that restructures its institutions by reshaping its incentives for learning and adaptation. The procedural perspective offers an attempt to re-invent the liberal society under conditions of complexity. What is particular to this attempt is the assumption that the main actors within such a vision for a selforganizing society are organizations not individuals. This is a fundament on which the concepts of collective action and collective responsibility emerge. How is RRI contributing in reformulating the foundations of innovation governance, given the abovementioned developments? Along the lines of these new regulatory approaches, it advances a procedural perspective as well, one that is directed towards democratization of the knowledge-creation process and one that emphasizes the collective nature of the responsibility

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that is to be assumed in that same process. Owen et al. define responsible innovation as: “[c]ollective commitment [emphasis added] of care for the future through responsive stewardship of science and innovation in the present” [OWE 13, p. 36]. This entails a process in which: (1) intended and unintended impacts of R&I are anticipated; (2) reflection (on underlying purposes, motivations, potential impacts, knowns and unknowns, associated uncertainties, risks, areas of ignorance, assumptions, questions and dilemmas) takes place; (3) visions, purposes, questions and dilemmas are deliberated collectively and in an inclusive manner and (4) be responsive to issues concerning R&I in an open, iterative and inclusive manner. As a framework, RRI can accommodate various methods for advancing those dimensions of the process (foresight, technology assessment, horizon scanning, scenario planning, etc.) [OWE 13]. This same perspective on RRI is also adopted by the Stilgoe et al. collective. They advance a prospective and collective notion of responsibility (“[t]aking care of the future through collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present” [STI 13, p. 1570]) and highlight the importance of the integration of anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. Acknowledging that these can mutually enforce but also conflict with each other, they claim that the ambition of the RRI framework can go as far as raising, discussing and responding to particular questions. It does not solve the problems, but it helps to stir things up a little, embed deliberation in the process and open space for revelations that put the technology in question into a new light, into a process of dynamic inquiry so to speak. In this sense, the RRI framework does not provide a universal tool for normative sanctioning. However, the four dimensions can be “heuristically helpful for governance” [STI 13], especially in the cases where there is no regulatory precedence set yet. The justification of RRI’s conceptual reorientation to collective responsibility can be sought in another line of argument as well. It advances a shift from culpability approaches to responsibility (manifested in the concepts of accountability, liability, guilt, evidence) to future-oriented, prospective dimensions of responsibility (care, responsiveness, uncertainty). The focus on collective responsibility comes from the realization that relying

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The RRI Challenge

on individual responsibility in the context of highly complex and dynamic innovation systems is not productive. The actors in the research and innovation ecosystem are involved in an intricate interplay of social, technical and natural domains. The uncertainty that this situation produces makes traditional approaches to responsibility, which are individual and ex-post-oriented, seem inadequate as a regulatory solution. Retrospectively tracing responsibility in such complexity is nonsensical; therefore, we need to grasp that this intricate interaction in which we are enmeshed entails collective responsibility. This line of argument also explains the advancement of the idea for collective experimentation as a new mode of governance in some RRI accounts [STI 15]. It is particularly relevant for the case of emerging technologies. The socially experimental character of the latter entails extending our scrutiny beyond their economic promise or claims for being a quick fix for thorny societal problems. Very often they bring with themselves “the illusion of control”, that is, that they can be properly and safely managed using scientific knowledge. However, the scientific notion of control has its problems as well. It estimates risks in terms of probabilities and very often leads to legitimization of technologies as “safe” in a risk assessment procedure that leaves aside some particularities of the context. This can have disastrous consequences in terms of damage and harm11. Therefore, relying on the scientific notion of risk in governing new and emerging technologies is quite insufficient. It is rather abstract and needs to be contextualized as to the complex interplay of social, political cultural and market forces. That is why Stilgoe insists that the experimental nature of emerging technologies brings back the question of democracy into governance [STI 15]. It opens the door for negotiation between scientists and the non-scientific community into the knowns and the unknowns in order to imagine uncertainties and stakes and negotiate the conditions for performing the experiment in and on society. This would allow overcoming the usual “solutionism” ‒ assuming problems and not reflexively exploring them. The experimental nature of emerging technologies requires to treat them not as

11 For example, a nuclear plant could be carefully managed to the best of the scientists’ and engineers’ knowledge and be deemed safe technology according to their methods and estimations. However, it can turn out quite unsafe not only because of unforeseen events (like natural disasters), but also because of profit-oriented strategies at the expense of safety. The case with Fukushima is illustrative [see KIK 17].

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naturalized fact (as inevitable, as was the case with geo-engineering) but as a process “in the making”, a process that invites societal dialogue on the proper mode of regulation that needs to be established. Collective experimentation entails collective responsibility. Although the notion of collective responsibility is quite vague as to the expected effects of its adoption and even counterintuitive as to our individualistic reflexes on the matter, it is engaging nevertheless. It evokes a response to a situation to which we cannot remain indifferent. It prompts one to feel responsible generally rather than be held concretely responsible. I believe this explains the reference to care and responsiveness in some RRI accounts. They can both be construed as manifestation of internalized active concern, which is neither a paternalistic condescension nor willful negligence of public or other worries. Therefore, RRI driven by the imperative for responsibility and stepping on the advances of governance and democracy theory introduces the notion of prospective collective responsibility to address the worrisome trajectory of S&T, one that results in systemic irresponsibility (using Beck’s phrase) and increased vulnerability to abstract systems (using Giddens’s insight [GID 91]). RRI discourse can be regarded as part of the conceptual response to the crisis of contemporary democracy, but one projected to the developments in the research and innovation realm. It advances the notion of collective responsibility as conceived in a process of collective experimentation and collective learning. By relying on the importance of anticipation, inclusion, deliberation, reflexivity and responsiveness, RRI theoretical accounts align with the proceduralist tradition in the conception of normativity. This, however, points to numerous problematic moments that the RRI field, in its potential contribution to advancing social critique, needs to address. One such problem is that while accentuating on the features of the process of democratizing the knowledge-creation process, the first-order normative question of desirable ends remains unexplored [STI 13, p. 1577]. The conceptual isolation between substantive and processual aspects of normativity needs to be challenged. Stilgoe et al.’s account implicitly recognizes that the conception of ethics needs to take place on both levels. Otherwise, we can resort to already defined “normative anchor points” (e.g. EU consensus on fundamental rights) as is wisely done by von Schomberg [VON 13] to avoid the problem of elaborating a legitimate societal vision in the context of normatively fragmented societies.

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This sets certain traps for RRI. On the one hand, it can make meaningless the proceduralist claim that genuine normative orientation will emerge within the knowledge-creation process. On the other hand, resorting to readymade normative solutions will make it methodologically challenging to address the conflict between the imperative for responsibilization and market regulation since assumptions for the primacy of economic expediency could be built-in within those same solutions. As we will see later in the text, there are many instances that demonstrate the fading distinction between economic benefit and societal welfare within EU institutional discourse, which of course has its projections in the advancement of RRI as responsibilization effort. Some RRI accounts explore the conditions for reconsidering the research and innovation process as one of collective experimentation, collective learning and collective responsibility. As such, they need to ensure the commitment of maximum participants along the tenets of anticipation, inclusion, deliberation, reflexivity and responsiveness. The practical pursuit of those dimensions shows that they very often intersect in the implementation of various responsibilization tools. For example, Constructive TA might combine anticipation, involvement (participatory formats) and reflexivity. The latter might also conflict with one another. We are all familiar with the distortions that could be produced within different participatory formats because of resistance exercised by the involved parties. Engineers can oppose discussion on “non-functional requirements” (as called by van den Hoven), market players can deliberately avoid ethics reflexivity and academics can resent inclusion of laymen’s perspectives. In this regard, the issue of responsiveness is crucial indeed. In order to have fruitful anticipation, inclusion or reflexivity initiated, all concerned actors and participants need be “sensitive” to external input. This also has to do with assuming collective responsibility. In view of all this, RRI as a social critique stance needs to direct the attention to some of the difficulties and traps of attempting to engage a variety of social actors in the research and innovation realm with regard to the notion of collective responsibility. The first and very obvious impediment is cultural and it concerns the grip that market societies have on the imagination as to the legitimacy of the term “collective”. Frank Cunningham, drawing on Macpherson’s notion of “possessive market

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societies”, depicts the cultural aspect of market societies as one of possessive individualism that comprises selfishness, fixation on private ownership, commodity fetishism, consumerism and greed [CUN 05, p. 132]. All of these represent a mental impediment, a cognitive sieve and even a normative agenda that makes the argument for collective responsibility and societal well-being very difficult to sustain. Since one of the claims of RRI is to align research and innovation with the needs and desires of society, it will have to problematize the shattered normative background in which the individual is perceived to be the only meaningful reality. Interestingly, institutional language and RRI discourse use “society” in the sense of cohesive social body, without realizing that its story is that of dismantled public sphere and destroyed grounds for collective action12. This also poses one of the implementation challenges implied in the question of who is society in the poly-axiological context we inhabit. Furthermore, how to identify the needs and desires of “society” in the absence of a recognized public philosophy? The neutrality of the market does not acknowledge the importance of such; it has turned into a public philosophy itself. Another problem arises in connection to this one. Conceptualizations on the democratization aspect of RRI focus on the notion of experimentation as to normativity. In some accounts, it is argued to be part of experimental learning during the norm-construction process. This is to help overcoming the grip of established normative stances and perspectives. The aim is to create capacities not only for learning and change of perspectives, but for being open for conceiving new normative orientations. However, the idea of experimentation can set some traps concerning the future of RRI. As we saw, the notion of an experimental society advances an understanding for a more flexible mode of governance. Within it, societal problems are being managed by the means of reflexive and incessant process of updating the regulatory parameters in view of new information. The problem is that the

12 In this respect, it is useful to refer to Hannah Arendt’s comment that the crisis of the public realm began with the advent of society – as an agglomerate of individuals with their individual features, preferences and room for privacy. Modern freedom (in contradistinction to the ancient notion of freedom) is disregarding the deep justification of political life, rooted in the public sphere (which makes collective/political action possible). It leads to normative fragmentation (bargaining between individual interests). “Society” is a political embodiment of this normative fragmentation and a symptom of the precarious state of the public sphere [see ARE 98].

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assumed openness of the process can be construed as being a-teleological. Collective experimentation could be misinterpreted as collective recognition of the legitimacy of value-neutral experimentation performed by the market using the price mechanism. Therefore, RRI as a critical endeavor will need to emancipate the notion of experimentation from libertarian economistic thinking, based on the combined epistemologies of Popper, von Mises and Hayek. Otherwise, the concept of collective responsibility conceived as steering and committing to right impacts will be lost in the normative indifference of open, market-oriented societies. In sum, I will note that notwithstanding the above-mentioned difficulties, and keeping in mind Boltanski’s interpretation of critique [BOL 11], RRI has the potential to conceptually challenge the normative tenets of the current S&T development. First, it calls to attention the need of a governance change on the basis of a moral intuition that renders reality unacceptable. It is not by chance that one of the recurring themes in RRI theoretical and institutional accounts is that of the acceptability of new and emerging technologies. The field can also be instrumental in articulating more freely anxieties regarding poverty and the deepening inequalities within established developmental agendas. Thus, for example, coupling RRI with the issue of global poverty (e.g. problems of indigenous communities or excluded populations in the so-called developed countries) can serve as a more legitimate channel for critique of the current politico-economic order. The idea of pro-poor innovation exists. It just needs to be unfolded and exacerbated within the context of RRI’s claims. Second, critique stems from uneasiness with the world as it is and is being actualized by groups and individuals as an emancipatory effort in their everyday lives. In this sense, it is not a privilege of the intellectual. This, in a way, goes along with RRI proponents’ efforts to come up with conditions that would engage the research participants in challenging existing cognitive biases, theoretical assumptions and sectorial truths, and would foster reflexivity as to two levels – processes and products. Given that, we need to be vigilant about dangers of co-opting critique that would undermine and tame the pathos that accompanies the emancipatory advancement of alternatives. This requires attention to the future of RRI in terms of how the drive for responsibilization will interact

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with the imperative of market regulation and the overall evolution of innovation-led capitalism. We know that one of the greatest challenges in front of RRI is to extend the reach of its messages to the sector of the private knowledge-creation process. It is assumed that it has quite successfully taken the necessary first steps in establishing an institutional infrastructure to foster good practices towards responsibilization of R&I in the realm of publicly funded research by setting RRI definitions, implementation “keys” and requirements for integration in the EU governance of RTD. However, its “tender spots” are still realms of intersection between science and business ‒ innovation markets, private RTD, entrepreneurial science and so on. One particular risk is that RRI could lose some of its appeal and, under the auspices of business ethics, be co-opted as an illustration of already existing solutions (such as CSR). Another danger is that RRI could be distorted in such a way that it would ultimately serve the normative principles of the profit-seeking world by defending the purely economic character of innovation, oscillating the assumption of value-neutral science and value-indifferent market, defending the interchangeability of economic success and societal well-being and so on. As a result, the underlying and not well-articulated unease that is driving the conceptual breakthrough of RRI might fade away and be finally submerged by the colonizing logic of the market. Thus, the danger of co-optation is grave – it can turn the RRI idea into yet another market niche with its own book market, conferences, and projects, which would reproduce the capitalist logic and would allow venting out some of the concerns with no actual emancipatory impact. Following this line of argument, we could contend that the future of RRI highly depends on whether the field will develop its social critique stance by challenging complex forms of domination. In contradistinction to simple domination, which presupposes oscillated structures of oppression, averse to change and difficulty in contesting reality at all, complex domination provides room for critique and contestation and relies on the notion of change [BOL 11, pp. 116–150]. However, this is exactly the challenge because critique could be absorbed under the claims of change. What does this practically entail regarding RRI? It means that even though the field advances a critique on the problematic bond between R&I and the market, under conditions of complex domination, we might simultaneously end up with arguments that defend: (1) the need for ethical

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space beyond the normative grip of market regulation (in other words, there is something worrisome in leaving S&T progress only to the normative guidance of economistic thinking and the purported value-neutrality of the market) and (2) the compatibility between the logic of responsibilization and that of market regulation (i.e. believing in an idealized version of the market, open for responsible practices compatible with the profit-seeking mechanism). Such a situation would not solve the problem, however; it would leave only a taste for emancipation. It would touch on the hot spot but would only articulate it to a certain extent. It would give the impression for change or introduce changes but without reconsidering the normative and institutional pillars of the realm of knowledge-creation and exploitation. Therefore, the RRI field is facing the tremendous task of finding ways to challenge the conditions of complex domination if it is to realize its critical potential. Otherwise, it will become yet another unaccomplished attempt in a series of efforts to put the market-driven S&T realm on a more ethical basis.

2 Responsibility and the Future

2.1. The anticipatory aspect of RRI We already demonstrated that RRI accounts promote a future-oriented notion of responsibility, which aims to initiate a collective commitment towards the “right impacts” foreseen in the needs and desires of society. This entails exploration of the possible future effects of new and emerging technologies, both positive and negative, and anticipating plausible and surprising paths of development in order to adequately navigate the research innovation realm given the complexity and uncertainty it itself produces. Although such exploration implies a consequentialist ethics of weighing benefits and dangers, and the latter is often regarded as insufficient in initiating genuine ethical reflexivity, we cannot but recognize the importance of such premeditation techniques as a first step in the responsibilization effort. This can explain why anticipatory formats such as Technology Assessment and Foresight are perceived not only as precursors but also as tools for advancing the RRI agenda. In the context of complex and very dynamic socio-technical systems, one of the great governance challenges is the diminished visibility as to causes and effects. This negatively impacts the ability of policy mechanisms to steer technology-led social change to what is deemed to be “right impacts”. Two very powerful notions that wield the imagination of the world we inhabit make anticipation efforts inevitable. The first is the extreme dynamics of our times that we usually depict with terms like turmoil, turbulence and tumult ‒ terms evoking assumptions about socio-technical systems that are out of order, out of control and out of sync and that render

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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the adequacy of political action problematic. The other concerns the opaqueness of the complex network of cause-and-effect chains that realize our present and shape our future. In this sense, the metaphor of the “black box society” [PAS 15] is very relevant because it reflects our increased technological abilities to digitalize/record/archive our social practices and experiences, and at the same time, our deficits in understanding the complex mechanisms that produce social reality. The ultimate idea that combines those two notions of dismantled order and discontinuity is the omnipotence of uncertainty as the only certainty there is. Within RRI accounts, there are different strategies to navigate into uncertainty through anticipation. I will not enumerate the various RRI definitions that imply exploratory approaches as to the future by projecting possible productive and disruptive repercussions as to the products of the research and innovation process. I will, however, focus on one particular account that emphasizes the hermeneutic nature of using visions of the future in the quest for responsibilization. Armin Grundwald, anticipation-oriented theoretician, participating in the RRI debates, approaches in an interesting way the problem with responsibilization in the context of diminished epistemological visibility. He starts with the premise that when it comes to new and emerging science and technologies (NEST), the usual reflex of using the consequentialist paradigm with regard responsibility is not always working. The problem, as in the case with democracy, is knowledge. Consequentialist weighing of plausible benefits and costs relies on available knowledge that can allow anticipation of possible effects, dangers or even opportunities. However, as is usually the case with NEST, if such knowledge cannot be obtained, we are left with no productive alternative but to approach the future hermeneutically [GRU 16, GRU 18]. How can this be done? The answer is: by analyzing speculative techno-scientific images of the future. If we were in a better epistemological situation, we would have used a prognostic (unidirectional extrapolation based on quantitative techniques) or scenario-based (multiple futures, based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods) orientation, which would advance some form of consequentialist logic with regard to responsibility. However, for addressing the responsibility void in cases where this possibility is denied, Grunwald suggests turning towards speculative accounts of the future in order to hermeneutically elicit underlining meanings, cultural premises, normative presuppositions and visions as they relate to key constellations (man–nature, man–machine, etc.),

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what significance is being attributed to those, what perception on evolution and techno-scientific advancement is promoted, etc. Those visions, even though being epistemologically deficient, can spur debates and reveal more about our contemporaneity. Therefore, the hermeneutic approach advances a responsibilization strategy that relies on the analysis of how present narratives speculate about highly uncertain techno-futures. It would give us more information on the current world in which the techno-futures are created and communicated. This meta-knowledge can contribute to RRI debates in three directions: focusing on present developments rather than foreseeing the future (in some cases, this is the more adequate approach); avoiding interpreting future developments through a narrow technocratic lens; contributing to a more transparent democratic debate. This perspective can explain why Grunwald sees RRI as this a movement that originated within the TA movement and which enriched the latter with ethics and STS analysis [GRU 11]. In conceiving responsibility over the direction of S&T evolution, RRI inevitably relies on imaginative practices as regards the future as a tool to open up room for debate. Different modes of premeditation are rendered very applicable in cases of estimating risk. This could also be regarded as a responsibilization tool in terms of anticipating dangerous and unwanted effects as to the implementation of innovation. Then, visions of the future could also be used to explore problematic moments in the current organization of the research and innovation process. The latter corresponds to my appeal to develop the social critique potential of RRI. Then, visions of the future can also be harnessed to obtain insight as to possible points of intervention for steering research and innovation towards more acceptable paths. The advantages of anticipation, however, cannot hide some problematic aspects vis-à-vis the normative orientation of contemporary market societies. Instead of a tool for responsibilization, envisioning the future might become an impediment to the latter. This is related to the performative effect of various accounts of the future, on the one hand, and the ongoing commercialization of the activity of foreseeing the future, on the other hand. As was already noted, anticipation is necessary since innovation and cutting-edge research imply unpredictability as to the socio-ethical consequences. We need imaginative exercises to attempt to foresee the many directions into which this uncertainty might unfold in order to assume

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collective responsibility and exercise care for the future that Owen et al. talk about [OWE 13]. At the very same time, we seriously need to pose the question of what is the healthy limit of incorporating such “picturized” tomorrows. How many futures can we anticipate and what are the dangers of anticipation itself in view of the unprecedented commercial promise of envisioning the future and promoting catastrophic images of the future that feeds into fear and produces anxiety while realizing enormous profits (e.g. the cinema industry)? Another relevant question is: do such narratives and visualizations create the illusion of manageability of the future, or do they really contribute to increased governability in the context of complex societies and democracy in crisis? Again, the problem is in the performative power of such accounts and we cannot ignore the fact that it can be harnessed for purposes that are not quite in line with the responsibilization efforts as to the governance of research and innovation. They can initiate self-fulfilling or self-denying mechanisms of social change. They can also be used as a normalization strategy for promoting visions of the future which are deemed problematic. The popularization of such accounts may in time take away the initial uneasiness with which a certain future sujet is perceived, and normalize it psychologically thereby boosting its long-term acceptability. A case in point is the singularity hypothesis which advances a future that will ultimately not need us1 and which in a way has turned into a normative agenda as to the place of technology into human evolution. Another worrisome tendency of anticipation against the backdrop of the commodification effects of market societies is the process of capitalization on anxieties about the future (selling images of the future). When it comes to the innovation and manageability of the future, intellectual attitudes and policy orientations have crowned uncertainty as the only certain feature of social life. This fuels a grandiose mechanism of profit-making on the basis of conjectures about possible, plausible and likely scenarios. The expanding consultancy sector, in various realms of activity, which provides analyses, prognoses and recommendations on the basis of anticipation, presents an evidence for that. Preparing to navigate into those “turbulent times” by practical or conceptual tools for taming uncertainty by envisioning the future has become the utmost manifestation of responsible behaviour for individuals and organizations. However, as Goede wisely heeded, 1 The problem of the future that will not need us was articulated by Bill Joy as well [JOY 00].

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premeditation could have performative effects while simultaneously displacing political responsibility for these effects [GOE 08, p. 157]. We need to acknowledge that referring to the future through anticipation is inevitable in any responsibilization effort in the research and innovation realm. It is part and parcel of a grander shift in perceiving the adequate space for unfolding socio-economic imagination – from utopia (depicting an ideal social order, assuming timelessness) to “uhronia” (inevitability of the future, requires prognostic effort) [KOS 02, pp. 84–99]. Temporality becomes a crucial axis in projecting politico-philosophical ideas, while the future becomes the “temporal space” for the unfolding of a progressive or regressive (apocalyptic) social order. Within this tradition, established with modernity, anticipation is affirmed as a very important aspect in assessing the societal meaning of science and technology. All attempts at doing so aim to reduce epistemological uncertainty. Mental exercises for envisioning the future (foresight, scenario building, Delphi method, TA, etc.) are to compensate for the impaired visibility of causal mechanisms. They represent a good basis for initiating a regulatory reaction to epistemological deficiencies in terms of consequences and effects. We might regard the precautionary principle as such a regulatory reaction, especially in view of the dynamic development of the S&T realm and the accelerated social change it produces. It is not by chance that it is referred to as a responsibilization tool. However, as we will see in section 2.2, responsibilization can manifest in coming up with the means for achieving some manageability of the future. This could be done with the help of pursuing new chronopolitics of research and innovation. Such is the logic behind the precautionary principle – on the basis of anticipation it introduces a temporal “slowdown” as a regulatory response to the push of technologies with unclear or undesired effects in the future. However, the chronopolitics of responsibilizing innovation might have another normative precipitator. Such is the case with Hillary Sutcliffe’s take on responsible innovation, which is aligned with the concept of intergenerational justice from the Brundtland report (1987) on sustainability. She advances the notion of “innovation that helps fulfil our needs and hopes without compromising the ability of others now and in the future to fulfil their own” [SUT 14], thus advocating for a different temporal management of innovation-led social change, one establishing responsibility towards the people of the future. Once the famous futurist Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of anticipatory democracy as a necessary political format for coming to terms

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with the inevitable “futureshock” that we are all going to experience. The vertigo effect of accelerating social change requires measures to nurture anticipation on all levels of the social structure (from school education to policy-making). This is a means to reconcile with the speed with which the future enters our reality (driven by technology) and ensure a proper adaptation response in order to maintain functionality of the individuals in a highly dynamic environment [TOF 70]. Therefore, cultivating the skill to anticipate is seen as key to sustaining the viability of contemporary democracies. We can relate this argument with the imperative for responsibilization implied in RRI. Anticipation brings forward the future as a neutral conceptual terrain on which democratic debate about the governance of S&T can take place. It is an undeniably suitable occasion on the basis of which to initiate deliberation among the different social actors involved in the research and innovation process. Therefore, anticipation will always be an inseparable part of any responsibilization effort concerning the direction along which S&T will shape our world. 2.2. Innovation and manageability of the future: on uncertainty, control and regulation In Chapter 1, it was hinted that the imperative for responsibilization entails addressing the “restlessness of modern technology” [JON 79] and the dynamic and anomic context the latter produces. One way is by conceiving images of the future and harnessing the power of anticipation for consequentialist examination or hermeneutical exploration. Another way is trying to devise proper regulatory responses in view of uncertainty and the diminished possibilities for exerting control over social processes. In the context of innovation-driven capitalism, the governability crisis in contemporary democracies takes the form of a concern for the feasible manageability of the future. In view of that, the role of innovation is ambiguous. On the one hand, innovation, by the virtue of promoting new products, new production processes, and even new lifestyles, introduces discontinuity in established practices and opens new paths of evolution as to the current socio-technical structures. It introduces uncertainty as long as it aims to initiate new regularities in the performance of different realms. This feature

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of innovation as a disturbing force by advancing novel trajectories of social change can also be interpreted in view of the normative orientation of market societies. Innovation is an ardently pursued source of unpredictability in a market-driven, profit-oriented context in which market players aim to minimize their own uncertainty by maximizing uncertainty for anyone else. One way to do that is by nurturing discontinuity through constantly introducing innovative products and processes. Another way is by distorting the efficient distribution of relevant information by using ethically questionable techniques based on secrecy or manipulation (e.g. hiding important research results, altering scientific data, financing adversary research, etc.). Within this perspective, innovation is seen as the source of the problem on the manageability of the future and the regulatory stalemate. Another perspective construes innovation as a solution to this out-ofcontrol situation, and what is more, as a means of survival in the dynamic market environment. This view puts emphasis on the ever-changing nature of the context and on the importance of uncertainty, turbulence and unpredictability. Innovation is implicitly regarded as the means to navigate towards the future into this chaos, as an adaptation tool [BES 13]. Therefore, the manageability of the future is sought in innovation as advancing more creative solutions to compensate for the regulatory crisis. It is expected to advance novel mechanisms of social change by either coming up with technological fixes for grave societal problems or by advancing new governance paradigms (that represent social innovation themselves). Then, RRI can be regarded as an attempt to promote a new governance paradigm (paradigm innovation) in the realm of research and innovation. RRI brings with itself a particular intellectual attitude of monitoring and managing the future, the relation to which advances notions such as proactivity, anticipation, pre-emptive governance, “steering” towards the right impacts, etc. The problem (innovation) and the solution (RRI) come from the same conceptual stance, which is a product of the challenged regulatory capacities in normatively fragmented market societies. This is also tightly related to the specific temporal regime of contemporary market societies. In the context of innovation-driven capitalism and profit-maximization strategies, the imperative for speed (of turnover, innovation, capital accumulation, market realization) seems to be the dominant driver, and acceleration the modus operandi of contemporary knowledge societies. Accelerated change and the lack of stable normative orientation produce the famous “out-of-control” situation. This creates

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specific problems in terms of ensuring visibility as to the cause-and-effect mechanisms. It impedes foreseeing possible directions of social change and adopting proper regulatory measures. One attempt to address the issue of regulation in view of the existing complex and dynamic environment is undertaken by the already mentioned Forward Studies Unit [LEB 97]. It advances an understanding for an undergoing transition from a regulatory chain to a regulatory process. We already noted that the problem of governance refers to transformations in the mode of governing of democratic societies. The latter implies a changing role of public actors and the means available to them to exercise it. This view offers a new way to regulate complex problems (for which new information is constantly emerging). It adopts a flexible and inclusive rather than rigid and top-down approach. This mode of regulation does not aim to substitute the classical liberal state (with its formal rationality) or the welfare state (with its substantial rationality); it aims to increase the potential of the former modes of regulation by “[a]chieving a better linkage between systems of knowledge: bureaucratic, expert, social, etc.” [LEB 97, p. 14]. This entails a proceduralist take on norm creation. The latter is rendered not a linear process, but one which takes constant re-examination of the context and reinsertion back into the process (feedback loops). It advances collective learning that is supposed to overcome the limits of substantive rationality by opening up “[t]he entire regulatory chain […] in a process which in its attempt to involve and engage the resources of all affected actors at all stages can have profound effects on both accountability and effectiveness” [LEB 97, p. 15]. This perspective construes democracy as a process of knowledge production by and with those for whom that knowledge is deployed, a process equally involving those same actors in its deployment. The proceduralization of norm creation ensures the legitimacy and effectiveness of government action. As to the issue of responsibility, it is insisted that turning the regulatory chain into a regulatory process does not entail any grand changes as to the nature or loci of responsibility: “To be clear, these modes of governance do not imply that the location of ultimate responsibility for decision-making is changed or made less certain. Rather the process by which stakeholders are involved in collective learning means that the substance upon which decisions are based is enhanced in terms of democratic accountability and the likelihood of acceptance and effectiveness is accordingly increased. Nor is the

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responsibility of public actors diminished by procedural modes of governance. Instead, it is increased as they must ensure the openness and adequacy of the procedures aimed at collective learning and co-ordinated action” [LEB 97, p. 20]. Then, the role of public actors becomes one of regulating the process of collective learning ‒ ongoing incorporation of different perspectives, accommodating new information, addressing emerging difficulties, improving reflexivity and avoiding segmentation through a multi-disciplinary approach. By the same token, the role of the EC is seen in controlling the contextualization of the production and application of rules by focusing on clarifying the issues, enabling the participation of stakeholders, maintaining a long-term strategic vision, integrating policies, encouraging the collective development of objectives, engaging broader contextual expertise, developing mechanisms for achieving the necessary participation, and encouraging ongoing evaluation and revision in the light of new information or emergent problems [LEB 97]. As can be seen, this perspective on the manageability of the future in view of complexity and uncertainty relies on a processual view on regulation. The dynamics of the context makes necessary the flexibilization of regulation in order to allow for reflexive incorporation of relevant knowledge and the available resources of the involved social actors. This can explain why the European Commission has promoted the following definition of responsible governance of innovation: “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) implies that societal actors (researchers, citizens, policy makers, business, third sector organisations, etc.) work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society” [EUR 18h]. This notion advances the processual character of innovation governance, as is reflected in other RRI definitions, emphasizing the participatory, deliberative, experimental and reflexive character of committing to the future. We can also find another approach in trying to come to terms with the regulatory problem of research and innovation in contemporary complex

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societies. It is the one that advances precaution. Precaution entails setting some limits as to certain trajectories of S&T development, especially when prompted by market pressures for speedy commoditization and profit realization. It is implied in many responsibilization tools – from application of the precautionary principle to legal prescriptions on safety standards and establishing various license regimes. As we saw, one method of justifying precautionary measures is by exercising anticipation to elicit knowledge of possible consequences and effects. However, in the context of highly dynamic complex societies, coming up with relevant and reliable knowledge on that matter is difficult, if not impossible. Then, another conceptual approach through which such knowledge can be obtained is by analyzing past experience, that is, instead of foresight to use hindsight. Such a strategy is adopted by the European Environmental Agency, which twice (in 2000 and 2013) cast its reflection backwards and examined instances of unnecessary (overregulation) or untimely (under-regulation) application of the precautionary principle to technologies of public concern [HAR 01, GEE 13]. Here, manageability of the future is pursued by demonstrating regulatory failures from the past. As the reports show, there are very few instances of false positives and many false negatives for dangerous products and processes. Using hindsight is part and parcel of the task of coming up with the adequate regulatory tools in a situation of rapid change, dynamic innovation ecosystems, and a business world elusive to responsibilization efforts, etc. The latter is of major concern because there are many instances in which scientific knowledge is being “financed, created, evaluated, ignored, used and misused” [GEE 13, p. 8] for the purposes of avoiding precautionary regulation. The reports also reveal very costly mistakes from the past and the skewed ways in which the costs of actions and inactions for hazardous technologies have been estimated. They dig into how some market players have ignored early warnings and participated in manufacturing doubt about the science supporting such warnings. The documents point to the need for better administrative and judicial arrangements to protect people who would otherwise be harmed by inadequately deployed innovations, and the indispensability of the public in making strategic choices as to monitoring and managing innovation. A third possible response as to the crisis of regulation in normatively fragmented societies is resorting to techniques of normative foresight and backcasting, that is, techniques of setting normative goals for the future and envisioning the mechanisms that can produce this desired state [GIA 13,

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MIL 16]. Within RRI accounts, the notion of steering towards the right impacts [VON 13] is inextricably connected with this specific mode of engagement with the future. Such a view on the manageability of the future assumes the plasticity of the latter. It reflects a particular feature of the temporal regimes of post-modernity – the conceptual shift from linear understanding of the historical process to the possible multi-directionality of the future. The temporal orientation of RRI is not novel, but its interpretation is. In a way, it reflects the overall transition from exploratory to normative techniques in foresight practices and the assumption that change could be guided through intervention towards desirable outcomes. RRI’s appeal fits the strivings to restore the modern meaning of progress by accentuating the normative dimension and presuming that the scientific and the ethical are inseparable. The reliance on normative foresight techniques brings forward the question of the legitimacy and the crisis of planning as a regulatory response in this turbulent and normatively fragmented context, as we will see below. These are all instances of pursuing manageability of the future by adopting a new chronopolitics of innovation. Chronopolitics is connected with the social construction of time [WAL 70]. It is about setting and perpetuating temporal regimes which are to advance different purposes and effects. There are many examples in this respect like Taylorism in management for accelerating production time; the notion of delictability and statutory age in criminal law; setting the temporal dimensions of the legal notion of personhood, etc. RRI theoretical accounts advance a new chronopolitics as well, but in the governance of innovation. One of the most frequent references in justifying the prospective interpretation of responsibility as response to the regulatory difficulties is the Collingridge dilemma, which depicts the temporal limitation of pursuing adequate governance of innovation. RRI attempts to reverse the usual logic on responsibility. It advocates for the integration of normative considerations at a very early stage of the development of certain innovation products or well before the initiating of a particular research and innovation process. This entails another temporality of assuming responsibility – ex-ante, not ex-post. However, the quest for achieving some manageability of the future is fraught with problems, especially in view of the responsibilization effort. The first one that I will denote is the one Georgio Agamben described as being amidst the symptoms of the crisis of democracy. It refers to a particular reversal in the governmental paradigm ‒ concentrating

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predominantly on the effects rather than the causes of a social problem [AGA 14]. Our inclination to rely too much on anticipatory exercises for the sake of imagining the possible effects of current decisions in complex socio-economic systems may distract us from the greater task of understanding bigger problems such as what the meaning of a particular technology is. Institutional rationality is reversing the hierarchical relations between cause and effect. Today, a matter of governmental prudence has become the managing of the effects instead of addressing the causes, and this in turn leads to the need for more and extended controlling mechanisms to keep up with all the possible effects. This, instead of reducing complexity, might actually result in decreased manageability of the future. Then, the other problem he highlights is the process of increasing depolitisation, of blurring the line between the private and the public realm (especially, in view of the processes of biogiditalization of identity and the repercussions for the social realm). In such a situation, the notion of citizenship (as being active in the public realm) loses its significance, the space for politics and ethics shrinks as and they are both emptied of their meaning. These realizations are very important if RRI is to fulfill its potential as social critique and as such challenges head-on the structural pressures upon the responsibilization of the S&T realm. Reflexive examination is an inevitable component of that effort because it could problematize this reversed logic as providing manageability of the future. It would direct the attention to the mere meaning of a new or emerging technology in the context of uncertainty and normative disorientation instead of naturalizing it as something given whose projections onto the social fabric need to be anticipated and mastered to the best of authorities’ abilities. Another difficulty is how to sustain a viable normative orientation in steering research and innovation towards the “right impacts” and whether planning has its place in RRI responsibilization efforts. Within our account, it represents an example for a coordination attempt in the context of uncertain, dynamic and normatively fragmented societies towards some predefined goal. As such, it stumbles on the same structural impediments as any other regulatory approach within contemporary market societies. A problem that needs to constantly occupy our attention is how to sustain a viable normative orientation as to the right impacts within a culture that perceives the market to be the only mechanism that delivers on producing the right (i.e. socially beneficial) impacts. As one particular example shows, planning efforts, even though accompanied by public deliberation, can very

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easily fall under the spell of market expediency and end up serving the infrastructure of capitalist accumulation instead of realizing a particular social vision held dear by the people for whom the planning effort is aimed [BAR 11]. Yet another problem in coming up with regulatory solutions in view of uncertainty is the danger of transmitting political (and even in curious cases legal) responsibility as to policy decisions onto the research realm alone. I will use Simone Arnaldi’s account on the transformation of the notion of responsibility [ARN 14] in order to clarify this contention. According to him, within the traditional social contract of science, there is a clear division of labor (and role responsibilities) between scientists and decision-makers, while the public is regarded as a passive consumer of the S&T progress. The ethics of the researcher is related to the demands of his or her professional role. The expertise he or she provides is not an occasion for assigning responsibility for the eventual consequences within the social realm. Then, the new framework not only widens the range of relevant actors (includes the public) in the process but also tries to bridge facts and values, expertise and consequences in a way that conceives that responsibility and ethics duties of the researcher as going beyond his or her obligation to be a good scientist. Now, responsibility is conceptualized vis-à-vis the ethical, social and legal consequences of the promoted technology or innovation. On the one hand, this is a much needed conceptual breakthrough, which engages the scientists with the broader context in which they operate. However, this could also be a very tricky mechanism that could transfer the political responsibility onto the research and innovation realm alone, which in the meantime is unrealistically expected to provide clear answers in a context of uncertain and highly dynamic environments. As we already saw, this is prompted by a reversed governmental paradigm, one oriented exclusively towards the management of effects. As a result of these shifts, we have witnessed very strange practices of ascribing juridical responsibility (liability) to scientists for carrying out unsatisfactory risk assessment [CAR 12]. One more difficulty we will briefly outline concerns the role of law in innovation governance. Although proponents of RRI very often point to the limitations of the legal compliance approach in advancing ethics, we will not denounce the regulatory significance of legal normative regulation against

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the backdrop of uncertainty. It is quite important in the context of dynamic social change because it pertains to crucial questions in treating new and emerging technologies, and I believe it deserves more serious analytical attention on part of RRI accounts. It is true that such an approach entails abiding by a predetermined perspective on what constitutes “publicly acceptable”. The case with ethics assessment of EU RTD projects on the basis of pre-defined themes that set the limits of legitimate ethical issues (like human participants, animals, dual use, environment, third countries, etc.) is illustrative. Nevertheless, I think that RRI proponents need to put more efforts in suggesting ways for transforming the legal normative framework on the basis of already expressed ethical and societal concerns instead of denouncing the mere idea of legal compliance as irrelevant and insufficient within the responsibilization efforts. RRI reflexivity could be harnessed for exploring the following questions: what would be the prospective legal framework in view of emerging technologies? How does social change, introduced by novel technologies, affect established legal terms and contents of the norm2? How can actual legal responsibility be avoided and corporate non-litigiousness advanced while hiding behind the notion of collective responsibility [TAK 13]? What are the possible misuses of the notion of collective responsibility for covering inadequate governance of S&T? In view of this, the RRI field needs to be alert to the dangers of one particular conceptual assumption, namely, that regulation is only a post-factum sanctioning of the effects and consequences of research and innovation. RRI accounts shall not fall into the trap of confronting the notion of regulation as an emanation of top-down and ex-post approaches with the notion of governance as more horizontal, in an advance way of managing innovation. Such conceptual opposition between both terms (which some find to have a lot in common3) may eventually prove unwise because it shifts the attention away from the main problem: how the pressures coming from the appeal for market regulation in the research and innovation realm impede the imperative for responsibilization.

2 For example, it is interesting how the category of “suspicious individual” is being and will be construed in view of the evolution of new surveillance technologies. 3 It is not by chance that one of the schools, advancing some principles that we can recognize from the discussion on governance is the so-called “regulation approach” or “regulation theory” [BOY 90, BOY 02].

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2.3. Why responsibility? Very often, accounts of RRI emphasize the polysemy of the notion of responsibility and very well depict all its manifestations (as a role, as an ascription, as competence, etc.), dimensions (epistemic, ethical, empirical and political) and interpretations (blameworthiness, liability, accountability, responsiveness, care, etc.) [STA 13, GRU 11, PEL 13]. This book recognizes their relevance as conveying awareness of one’s peculiarity of vocation and what the latter demands. Projected to the scientific realm, I will approach responsibility as awareness in the sense of alertness, vigilance and healthy anxiety as to the specificity of the scientific activity, and care (as opposed to indifference) for its projections onto the world outside the laboratory/cabinet. Then, by responsibilization of the research and innovation realm, I understand the continuing process of attempting to nurture this alertness and care ‒ with all its twists and turns, achievements and dead ends, new beginnings and temporal stalls. We already paid some attention to the problems that prompted the imperative for responsible innovation. The concerns as to the evolution of the S&T realm, the increasing complexity and reduced visibility as to casual mechanisms, the troubled regulatory efforts – they all put responsibility in research and innovation into new light. In this section, I will focus on some other factors that bring its importance forward. First, it is the emergence of a new research culture that undermines the tenets of what long ago Robert Merton described as the ethos of modern science [MER 73]. Then, it is the market pressures on the functioning and normative orientation of the research and innovation realm. Lastly, the normative self-confinement of the scientific realm around the claim for the perceived neutrality of S&T manifests in scientism and the complacent disregard of broader socio-ethical concerns. The transformations of the knowledge-creation process that has exacerbated the relevance of responsibility can be summarized as a shift from producing reliable knowledge to focusing on socially robust, problem-oriented knowledge. These changes are also reflected in the way the meaning of responsibility was construed in relation to different responsibilization tools. In the early days of Technology Assessment (1970s), responsibility was considered reactionary. Technology was deemed to follow its own dynamics and TA was established as an early warning mechanism that could give insight into possible negative impacts so that

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policy measures (prevention, compensation, etc.) could be taken. It was to support the policy world by the means of anticipation. In the 1980s, with the orientation towards the constructivist paradigm, responsibility was re-imagined in terms of shaping technology development and innovation processes into more desirable forms. With the advent of Constructive TA, it was construed as more interventionist (or let us say “steering”). Then, with the new century and the focus on participatory democracy, another aspect of responsibility was added – that of entailing citizens’ or stakeholders’ involvement. Participatory TA was developed to fill in the demand side of the process of shaping S&T trajectories. It became important to take into account non-specialist perspectives (see [COT 14]). Thus, RRI can be seen as a step towards exacerbation of all those tendencies (anticipation, steering, integration, co-construction, reflexivity, etc.), or as Armin Grunwald has put it himself, as “a radicalization of the well-known post-normal science” [GRU 16, p. 31]. What kind of research culture is implied in the notions that try to grasp the transformations in the current knowledge-creation process – post-normal science, post-academic science and Mode-2 science? I will rely mainly on the account of Ziman [ZIM 96, ZIM 00] on the emergence of post-academic science since it is developed against the backdrop of the classical Mertonian model of the “ethos of modern science” and traces how its normative tenets – communalism4, universality, disinterestedness, originality5 and skepticism – are being challenged in contemporary societies. The changes that are depicted below put the question of researchers’ responsibility in new light and advance conceptualizations on research ethics that accentuate on the engagement of the scientists not only with the truth but also with needs and concerns coming from the broader societal context, as RRI does. First, if before communalism was regarded as pooling of personal knowledge while the fruits of academic science were rendered “public knowledge”, now science is considered more in terms of a communication system advancing collective action within heterogeneous networks for the production of proprietary knowledge. In highly competitive market societies, knowledge and innovation are engines for generation of profit and as such present enough stimuli for concerned parties to establish their exclusive character (i.e. to be treated as property instead of common good). The great 4 Actually, Merton talks about “communism” in science. 5 Originality is not present in his initial model.

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battles around intellectual property rights (IPR) are telling for this shift in contemporary research culture. Here, responsibility is reimagined not as contributing to the common pool of knowledge from which everyone can benefit but in terms of protecting the proprietary character of the produced results or insights, and establishing certain conditions for access (e.g. through copyright, patent, etc.). Universality implied creating knowledge that is general enough to be applicable to any cultural context. Now, the value of science is not sought in advancing metaphysical universalism but in serving practical matters by elaborating solutions to problems in view of the local context. Incorporating local knowledge becomes very important. Responsibility here is reimagined in terms of committing to concrete local challenges. This would very often require interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary dialogue in order to suggest a comprehensive and yet very specific solution for the problem at hand. Disinterestedness in its turn, difficult even to sustain within traditional science, presupposes that the knowledge-creation process is neutral, would reflect impersonal stance, and would advance what is deemed to be philosophical objectivity. Nowadays, the insistence is that it should be more consistent with the realities of social existence and recognizing that “[s]ocio-economic power is the final authority” [ZIM 96, p. 73]. Disinterestedness is very interesting theme. On the one hand, along the traditional scientific ethos, it denies sources of distortion of the scientific truth. We can say that today disinterestedness, as a key feature of research integrity, is put on trial within the pressures of market societies (especially in the realm of private RTD activities). On the other hand, institutional accounts, like the one promoting RRI, insist that science should become more interested in the demands and concerns coming from the broader context. It needs to be re-socialized and redirected from producing universal objective truth to concrete social impact. Furthermore, it is necessary that it adopts a more interventionist stance to social change (not reflecting reality but shaping reality). This puts the imagination with respect to the responsibility of the researchers, on a new ground. Accounts like RRI advance a shift from negative to positive approaches to responsibility. It seems futile to hold researchers and innovators responsible for the social change they have caused (ex-post accountability); however, they shall take responsibility ex-ante for the change they will initiate.

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As to the theme of originality, which is added in Ziman’s interpretation on Merton – we need to note that, before, the scientific endeavor was guided by its own autonomous logic as to the novel contribution it can make, while now, this is not exactly the case. The main question becomes: who sets the problems? Very often the priorities are “dropped down” by the financing institutions (public or private). Then, responsibility is construed in view of honoring this dependency – as doing a service for the donor in exchange for payment. Lastly, skepticism (which Merton initially referred to as organized skepticism) is still at the normative basis of many academic practices. It advances the importance of refutation in the production of reliable knowledge by exerting controlled critical controversy, peer review, questioning the logical and factual consistency of research findings and not just accepting them at face value. Of course, in the current context of market societies, this becomes much more difficult due to several reasons: the commercialization of knowledge and its transformation into proprietary knowledge; difficulties in obtaining access to it in order to be verified in an independent research setting by another scientific team; shrunk fiscal possibilities to finance science; promoting the efficient exploitation of resources by avoiding double effort in research. As a result of the above-mentioned confinements, researchers very often step on scientific results that are not independently verified. Given the above transformations as to the ethos of modern science, the result might be a conflict instead of mutual enforcement of problem-oriented (socially robust as to specific local context) and truth-oriented (universal, objective, reliable) knowledge. Socially robust knowledge entails more intensive testing and retesting in many more contexts. It is not fixed, not predetermined; it is open to ceaseless negotiation and “[i]ntensive interaction between data and other results, between people and environments, between applications and implications” [GIB 99]. In the new situation, science must leave the ivory tower and enter the agora for joint production of knowledge by society and science. It has its repercussions ‒ focus on entrepreneurial and managerial skills of the researchers, downplaying the role of systematic intellectual criticism, high “cognitive insecurity” [ZIM 96, p. 74] due to methodological disorientation in treating “trans-epistemic” issues. This puts forward the question of responsibility once again. One of the problems is whether the dependencies from external bodies and the diminishing autonomy of academic science will lead to distortions in the quest for truth.

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Another is that the orientation towards finding comprehensive solutions to specific problems with a loose eye on methodological rigorousness might open room for influences, interest-based interpretations and outright political (mis)use of research findings. Within this new research culture, whether we will denote it as post-normal, post-academic or Mode-2, the traditional norm of communalism acquires new meaning. Today, it is about the common pursuit of a comprehensive solution to a particular problem, which is manifested in pooling disciplinary perspectives, in loosening methodological rigorousness, in fading epistemic boundaries, in advancing participatory structures and exchanges with “society”. It refers not only to the scientific community proper but also to the science–society interactions and the need for an extended peer community [FUN 93] beyond the research realm. In view of that, responsibility and research ethics are also reconsidered – not that much around preserving the purity of the scientific method in the pursuit of objective truth under the auspices of the Nuremberg legacy (see Chapter 5) but much more around providing material and worldly contributions justifying the benefit of this peculiar activity. The traditional stance was that the knowledge-creation process is of value in itself, being a manifestation of the enlightened triumph of reason and the scientific method over superstition or any other form of delusion. Now, in a somewhat different socio-economic context, where its existence is weighted in light of its productive potential, it is constantly questioned as to its usefulness and economic expediency. Before, its funding was a matter of private and public patronage, now it is a matter of negotiating strategies within the public fiscal policies or profit-oriented investment in RTD activities by the private sector. The finances of science change the research culture (and research ethics) as well. The economistic logic imposed on the research and innovation realm requires evidence for the quality and impact of scientific activity as to predefined societal needs. Such engagement with the context presents a slippery slope for the scientist who is now considered an “expert” burdened with the expectation to deliver advice based on finalized (secure, perfect) knowledge and to provide cognitive and decision-making closure in a world of uncertainty. This makes it even much more difficult to define the tenets of responsibility. On the one hand, the new research culture may be compromising on the norms of objectivity and universality. On the other hand, science is being sought to perform functions as an arbiter in ambiguous situations because of its reputation as a source of reliable and

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disinterested knowledge. It is a paradoxical situation in which traditional research ethics, at the heart of which is the pursuit of truth, has been complemented with engagement with the societal context. The result is opening avenues for political and corporate influences that could refute these same research ethics. What is of particular interest for us in view of RRI’s implementation problems is that the advanced new culture of democratization of the research and innovation process by the virtue of incorporating external normative orientations through inter- and transdisciplinarity can actually challenge the RRI responsibilization process the way we understand it ‒ as one entailing reflexive awareness of the field’s situatedness and initiating resistance as to market pressures. The promoted methodological democratization overcomes sterility in science but it can lead to evading responsibility as well. Or it could encourage the reconsideration of the accountability structures of the contemporary knowledge-production systems. Such a view is advanced by Gibbons who argues that a situation of entering into a new contract with science “[w]ill require more open, socially distributed, self-organizing systems of knowledge production that generate their own accountability and audit systems” [GIB 99]. As we will see in Chapter 3, this notion of accountability is in line with the theoretical developments in the scholarship on governance with its emphasis on horizontal, networked and processual modes of managing social change. Socially robust knowledge, in contradistinction to reliable knowledge, entails that the public perceives the knowledge-creation process as transparent and participative. In the new situation, the autonomy of science is under question – autonomy in the sense of both choosing its own direction of development and having independent structures of accountability. The second question that precipitates the RRI’s focus on responsibility as to S&T development is the insufficient capacity of the scientific realm to self-regulate in the context of market societies. The reasons are numerous and have to do with the above-mentioned changes in knowledge production systems that could explain the normative reorientations within the scientific ethos as well. I will outline those that are relevant for our account. First, it is the obvious one – the pressures from the market in cases of privately funded knowledge-generation processes. Contractual obligations and accountability as to keeping trade secrecy, confidentiality, and respecting intellectual property rights makes it difficult to sustain the traditional tenets of research integrity, even though the researcher in question wants to do so. Role

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responsibilities of scientists as science professionals (pursuing rigorous science, avoiding harm) might come into conflict with judicial responsibilities as corporate professionals and employees (concealing evidence for harm under the auspices of non-disclosure obligations), and thus precipitate a moral dilemma. In such cases, whistle-blowing can be a manifestation of a responsibilization effort, but one risking legal sanctions and punishment (compensations, punitive damages, etc.). Another case, one which is quite challenging but more straightforward is the problem of mercenary science. It might represent a form of scientific interest, guided by the monetary motive and disregarding who the sponsor is, what their goal is and what the effects would be. This kind of carelessness under the aegis of scientific neutrality and technological determinism can be extremely dangerous if such research reaches malicious agents. There are a lot of concerns as to dual use products or scientific findings that might end up as biohazards (viruses, superbugs, toxins, etc.) in the hands of terrorist networks or international organized crime. Getting the job done and solving a concrete technological problem is not enough of a responsibility in an era, where the effects of scientific advances escape the imagination of their own creators. In connection with this, the notion of the responsibility of scientists is also put on trial as another controversial situation. This concerns the issue of openness. On the one hand, pressures from within the field prompt for pursuing more publicity for the research results thus contributing to the global accumulation of knowledge, realizing profit on the basis of paid access, avoiding duplicity of the research effort and, of course, building one’s name and reputation within the relevant disciplinary realm. On the other hand, how can one reconcile the imperative for openness through publishing with the concern that once published, the data and the accompanying insight can turn into “dangerous knowledge” by being accessed and exploited by malicious subjects. Then, there is the problem of the ethics-free zones in science that allow the so-called “ethical dumping”. These are places within the global production of knowledge where the legal normative framework is permissive for pursuing experiments, technologies and innovations that could be deemed problematic. Such zones fit the logic of market societies very well with their drive towards initiating new products, processes, desires and needs, because they alleviate the usual impediments before the development

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of new and emerging technologies and advance mechanisms for ethics offshoring. Ethics is demanding and expensive. Strictly abiding by the requirements of the fundamental rights regime is time consuming and as such it is slowing down the economic and turnover time as to the eventual commercialization of a product. For instance, it is well known that the cheapest way to conduct clinical trials is to “offshore” them to the developing world [MAH 13, GLI 09, MAN 14]. As a result, new players have emerged – the contract research organizations [SHU 07]. They are specific corporate entities for outsourcing research services, helping the industry to study the effects of new products and facilitate their market uptake. Another effect is that such countries themselves favor fewer regulation safeguards [ARA 14b] as part and parcel of their developmental agendas. This is related to another problem ‒ science and technologies can turn into instruments of dispossession and advance exploitation practices in the context of global inequalities and a highly competitive world economy. Examples include patenting local organisms, genomic sampling and exploiting native resources (e.g. genomic theft in the rainforest, mineral extraction in Africa and so on). This puts forward the thorny question of responsibility and research ethics, especially in view of the tendency of market societies to commoditize everything and realize profit, even at the expense of vulnerable groups. Along the emerging new research culture and the pressures from contemporary market societies, we also need to direct our attention to a problematic and yet very popular commitment with science that exacerbates the need to bring the notion of responsibility forward. And this is scientism. It advances overconfidence in science to provide knowledge and answers to all human problems. It rests on a metaphysical claim to produce the undeniable truth. As such, it goes against the genuine spirit of the scientific endeavor which relies much more on exerting rational doubt, examining the premises of every truth, including the exploration of the limitations of its own claims. Scientism has become “the new orthodoxy” [WIL 15] and as such it has spurred unquestioned enthusiasm as to science and technology as the only legitimate driver of social change. It assumes the lack of telos in the world; it is committed to a mechanistic perspective of life, and sees all problems as technological problems. Its understanding on technology as value neutral and a potent force introducing change and leading human progress, which inevitably produces efficiency, is very close to the assumptions concerning the virtues of market regulation. Then ethics, embodied in scientism, in the best case can be no more than a bunch of

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utilitarian considerations [WIL 15, p. 17]. In the worst case, it has no place at all, since it could be perceived as an intrusive, perpetrating, external censor that aims to establish the violence of some abstract oughtness over the cherished neutrality of scientific work and its ally ‒ the market. In conclusion, we saw that the RRI’s concentration on the question of responsibility is precipitated by something that we outline more like a patchwork of tendencies that make it necessary and urgent to address the problem of techno-scientific advancement. On the one hand, we witness palpable changes in the ethos of science along the premises of the new governance paradigm (e.g. opening for non-scientific perspectives). On the other hand, there are problems of sustaining research integrity in contemporary market societies in view of the pressures from corporate science and the availability of ethics-free zones. In addition to that, the inclination to scientism and its abhorrence of ethics as irrelevant, otherworldly and worthless consideration makes the issue of responsibility even more persistent. I named this section “Why responsibility?” not so much to concentrate on the particularities of RRI’s notion of prospective responsibility (which I believe has been done throughout the book) but to explore some of the conditions that make this focus on responsibility ineluctable. What I find as the major source of RRI’s appeal and the main impediment before its implementation is the contemporary cultural context that celebrates the normative interlock between technological determinism and market fundamentalism.

3 EU Governance of RTD and the Market

3.1. On governance and good governance: order with/out authority? The notion of governance is considered to be very important in establishing the reality of RRI as practice. In this chapter, we need to explore in more depth how the EU’s reliance on the notions of governance and good governance contributes to advancing a particular understanding of the role of the market in shaping and implementing RTD policies. In the spirit of institutionalist theory approaches, governance is introduced by the European Commission as an umbrella “key”, one that needs to ensure the viability of the RRI by creating an institutional environment that is conducive to the responsibilization effort. Then, within RRI theoretical accounts, it is depicted in normative terms – as a necessary means of organizing the research and innovation realm by employing more horizontal formats in initiating the interaction between the concerned social actors. Our focus, however, will be on how the notion of governance, within all its variations, assumes a crucial role of the market in solving what was already referred to as governability crisis, and how these assumptions are introducing a normative contradiction within the suggested solutions for unfolding practical space for the other important “keys” ‒ ethics, science education, gender, participation, open innovation. This could give us some insight about the built-in impediments before the responsibilization process on the level of EU-funded RTD activities. I came up with the ambiguous “order with/out authority” by taking the example of Rosenau and Czempiel (eds.)’s book entitled Governance

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Without Government (1992). In that book, this phrase was employed to allude to the fact that some crucial changes are taking place in the realm of international relations in view of the fading monopoly of the national states as the only legitimate actor on the global stage. A paramount problem becomes how governance can occur in the context of continuous relocation of authority – inward and outward – towards supranational and subnational entities. We need to note that, within this theoretical perspective, governance is understood in more general terms as exercising some (any) form of regulation. It is not necessarily a conceptual counterpoint to government. As Rosenau notes, governance without government entails “[r]egulatory mechanisms in a sphere of activity which function effectively even though they are not endowed with formal authority [emphasis added]” [ROS 92, p. 5]. This worry as to the realm of international relations is applicable to the state of contemporary democracies as well. The problem is not governance itself, but what kind of governance is needed (mode of regulation) in the context of a governability crisis, which is also manifested in the crisis of authority and the increasing normative fragmentation of societies. In the realm of international relations, this led to advocating a reform of the United Nations along the findings and recommendations of the famous Cardoso report (2004). It recognizes the increasing role of non-state actors in international relations in forming public opinion and in pushing the agenda on global issues such as AIDS, climate change and environment. Hence, it advocates for re-orienting the organization more towards “convening and facilitating rather than ‘doing’ and putting the issues”, fostering multi-constituency processes, supporting and promoting networks on global issues, investing more in multi-stakeholder partnerships, incorporating local perspectives on deliberation on global issues, promoting engagement with elected representatives and authorities at the local level, etc. As can be seen, what is advanced as paradigmatic shifts towards new modes of governance entails the increasing role of the UN as enabling, steering and coordinating the communication and the cooperation between all social actors (including NGOs) on all levels for solving a particular problem. We can also trace other imprints on the notions of governance and good governance. Cybernetics represents a particular interest in that respect because many of the assumptions as to new governance, expressed in the proceduralist approach to regulation, can be found there. It was interested in building a conceptual apparatus that deals with the issue of control in

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complex systems [FRA 99, HEY 01]. The presupposition is that society is a complex system like any other complex system in the natural world and as such it can undergo the same kind of analysis as any other field – biology, sociology, physics, etc. There are few elements of this approach that are of importance to us and that we can find as hidden assumptions in current EU institutional discourse and independent elaborations on RRI. First, it introduces alternative understanding of control – the latter is conceived not as top-down coercion, but as possibility for self-regulation of the system by the means of feedback mechanisms. This very much reminds us of the notion of regulation as a procedure rather than as a single act – something we described in Chapter 2.2. Then, it underlines the importance of steering1 rather than following a fixed goal. Part of that endeavor is the reliance on feedback in order to allow the incorporation of new and relevant information so that the process of self-regulation adjusts to the new conditions. We can find this rationale in the insistence of opening channels for information flows and include the perspectives of a variety of social actors and stakeholders so that they could come up with the best regulatory solution possible for a particular policy problem. The cybernetic perspective is occupied mainly with the possibility and effectiveness of control for the purposes of the system’s self-perpetuation. On some level, it is in accord with certain assumptions advancing market regulation as an evolutionary-like mechanism, which would, by the virtue of neutrality and adequate processing of relevant information, produce efficiency in the short term and equilibrium in the long term. We need to recognize that the notion of governance is not unambiguous. Its semantic flexibility is the result of the interplay of various theories and their specific interpretations – rational choice, new institutionalism, systems theory, regulation theory, etc. Some accounts emphasize the steering capacity of the state as central for coordination; others point to the coordination capacity emerging within the network, in the mere interaction of public and private actors (this implies not actor-centered steering, but steering in functionalist, Luhmanian style). However, they all share several assumptions. The first one concerns the changes in the nature and role of the state – it is seen more as creating and managing networks and partnerships in the context of the increasing role of non-state actors. The second concerns 1 The etymology of “cybernetics” is related to “steering” ‒ from the Ancient Greek κυβερνητικός (kubernētikós, “good at steering, good pilot”).

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changes in regulation – from hierarchical mode of organization of the political process towards more dispersed mechanisms of coordination (like markets, networks, partnerships, etc.), especially in delivering public services. This establishes (belief in) the dependency of the state on other actors to perform its functions. Order could emerge within these interactions, even in the absence of enforcing state authority2. The conceptual compatibility between the market and the notion of governance can be traced back to neo-classical theory. It emphasizes the role of markets as a coordination mechanism. What we have to take into account, however, is that governance is being used twofold – either as a coordination mechanism in a general sense (in this sense, state regulation is a mode of governance as well) or as a particular mode of coordination (horizontal, non-hierarchical, in opposition to government. We might suggest that the latter is a questionable dichotomy since regulation shall not be understood only as state-guided intervention and control over social change. There are significant parallels between scholarship in regulation approach (French) and that of governance (American equivalent). Both emerged in the 1970s as a response to problems of market failure and state failure [JES 06, pp. 251–252]. They share interests in the issue of self-organization and self-reproduction of complex systems, and steering in turbulent times for which neoclassical theory’s reliance on the notion of equilibrium cannot provide adequate answers. Some RRI accounts imply the notion of steering as well, thus emphasizing that neither the market nor the state alone can initiate the adequate coordination mechanisms for aligning research and innovation with ethical considerations and societal needs. This perspective is in the spirit of Bob Jessop’s dialogical mode of governance. He proposes three modalities of governance – exchange, command and dialogue [JES 02]. The first one is a response to state failure, the second to market failure. The third one, however, is more related to the notion of governance as is usually understood in RRI studies, namely, as one entailing a heterarchy as a third 2 As for the political context that precipitated these transformations, it is the one that advanced the neoliberal reforms in the 1980s with the argument of the unmanageability of the Keynesian welfare state (a manifestation of the governability crisis). The role of the state was shrunk to policy formulation (steering). It withdrew from the direct delivery of public services (rowing) while advancing the notion of the so-called entrepreneurial state – based on market principles such as competition, efficiency, customer-orientation and measurement of outcomes (see [POL 11]).

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way between the anarchy of the market and the hierarchy of imperative coordination. It advances horizontal self-organization among mutually independent actors, a coordination that promotes reflexive and procedural rationality, and aims at a negotiated consent. A typical example of a mode of organization of the dialogue and communication between those various perspectives is the network. Versions of networking can be public–private partnerships, strategic alliances, interorganizational collaboration, stakeholding, social pacts, associational democracy, etc. Then, network governance is seen as offering better problem-solving solutions in contrast with centralized entities because in the ideal case it is supposed to integrate distributed capacities in addressing complex problems – by pooling “differing worldviews, information, relationships, unique structural positions, leadership, superior communication and mediating skills, power, trust, and different forms of knowledge concerning the dynamic conditions of both the governance context and the forces shaping internal problem solving practices and structures of organization” [HUP 12, p. 24]. Of course, we stumble across an inevitable impediment – greater complexity entails greater variety of actors and their resources. This heterogeneity could lead to an operational impasse, because the potential for conflicts increases (different visions on approaches, means, strategies, needed outcomes, etc.). The so-called efficacy paradox [see VOß 05] cannot be dissociated from the phenomenon of decentralization. The danger of stalls in decision-making or unnecessary waste of resources, or high coordination costs, is always lurking when normative order needs to emerge out of the plurality of interacting agents. Hence, many accounts on governance do not denounce the importance of public authorities altogether, but highlight their role as enabling the interaction of the multiplicity of stakeholders. They are to function as mediators that coordinate both the generation of information and the implementation of policies. As to the terrain of EU policies, these considerations are reflected in scholarship addressing “new modes of governance” [KOH 06] – novel institutional arrangements that involve a larger range of social actors and aim to provide better coordination solutions in comparison with traditional policy-making and policy-implementing configurations that are focused on the centrality of the state, and on hierarchical rather than network arrangements. This brings forward the notion of networked governance as a particular matter of interest in the research on the multi-level nature of the EU political system and the growing importance of private actors

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(i.e. non-state and non-EU) in the policy-making process [KOH 06, p. 34]. It is so because “[t]he ‘state’ is vertically and horizontally segmented and its role has changed from authoritative allocation ‘from above’ to the role of an ‘activator’. Governing the EC involves bringing together the relevant state and societal actors and building issue-specific constituencies” [EIS 99, p. 5]. As can be seen, network governance implies initiating problem-solving constellations (multi-level social actor interaction). As a new governance approach, it is advanced by the European Commission to tackle what is perceived to be a paradox – the fact that citizens are increasingly distrustful of political institutions and at the same time they demand from them adequate solutions to major (and often complex) societal problems. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the EU is perceived to be imposing policies in a top-down manner without sufficiently local and national contexts. The realization of that, in combination with the theoretical elaborations of the FSU on the processual character of regulation, resulted in the emergence of the so-called White paper on governance [COM 01]. It outlined the necessary changes that need to take place in order to achieve one of the strategic goals of the EU [COM 00a]3, namely reforming European governance by opening up the policy process for more people and organizations in shaping and delivering EU policies, so that their considerations are effectively taken into account. This entails lesser reliance on top-down approaches and complementing EU policy tools with non-legislative instruments. The linear model of dispensing policies needs to be replaced by “[a] virtuous circle, based on feedback, networks and involvement from policy creation to implementation at all levels” [COM 01, p. 9]. In this endeavor, the role of network-led initiatives is crucial. Then, stronger culture of evaluation and feedback is to ensure the reflexive and collective learning component in new governance [Ibid., p. 21]. Speeding up the legislation process is also underlined as crucial. In the context of highly complex and normatively fragmented societies, this is quite a challenging claim because exercising reflexivity is usually time-consuming. However, in the context of the new governance approaches it entails re-inventing regulation as an incessant process of accommodating novel information and knowledge rather than being a regulatory act that claims a permanent normative

3 One of the strategic goals is promoting new forms of governance in Europe.

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solution. All this aims to build confidence in EU institutions by making them more responsive and acceptable for European citizens. Here is where the normatively oriented notion of good governance comes in. We need to note that its roots can be traced back to institutionalist approaches in economics, and has been developed by international bodies mainly for the purposes of advancing a particular normative agenda in their relations with countries in distress – financial and political. The EU has integrated this notion and adopted it for promoting new governance approaches to address the democratic deficit and the troubles with the coordination between the different social actors and levels of authority. It is, however, burdened with economistic assumptions that reproduce a particular normative orientation related to the primacy of market regulation. This in its turn brings in certain controversies when advancing the notion of RRI as a novel governance approach as to the research and innovation realm. The economic nuances in the notion of good governance can be traced back to its institutionalist origin. It implies a mode of coordination conducive for economic growth rather than a mode of governing that is superior to that of command and control governing styles. It is used as a criterion by international organizations when deciding on providing aid and loans. For example, the World Bank’s notion on good governance is institutionalist and managerial in its spirit. It has developmental claim – while governance in its general sense is about the quality of government action (“the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a county's economic and social resources for development”), good governance focuses on the institutional conditions conducive for development (“sound development management”) [TWB 92, p. 1]. Proper institutional environment is needed to reduce uncertainty and encourage market-led growth. The role of governments is sought in establishing rules for the markets to operate efficiently, correct market failure and provide public goods. Key areas of governance are public sector management, accountability, legal framework for development, and information and transparency. As can be seen, this take on good governance promotes greater visibility manifested in clear rules, responsibilities and openness as to information. These are areas where markets will not do well if left to themselves and where the enabling role of the state is highlighted. Information and communication technologies are expected to significantly contribute to ensuring this visibility.

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Then, the UN’s notion of good governance is elaborated as one in connection with the concept of human development – as an exercise of political and administrative authority in a way that promotes equity, transparency, participation, responsiveness, accountability and the rule of law. It links it with human rights and focuses on the importance of institutional conditions that would allow the realization of those rights. It is attributive to all kinds of organizations – governments, corporations and NGOs. There might be slight differences in the “pillars” of good governance (transparency, accountability, etc.) outlined by different international organizations, but they all aim to produce visibility for economic and political actors, and an environment where market-generated or politically generated uncertainties are minimized and clarity is maximized – as to rules, as to who assumes responsibility for what, as to accountability in cases of failure, as to the mechanisms of decision-making, as to structures of involvement of exogenous groups, of participation and deliberation, as to legal rules and their enforcement, etc. The underlying aim is to produce trust and make organizations work more effectively in a trustless environment such as the market. All in all, the appeal for good governance entails a legal framework and an institutional environment conducive for development. This assumption very often leads to market-laden interpretations on what should constitute an institutional change for development. The bitter experience with the Washington consensus is exemplary for that (see [STI 02]). Then the crucial question as to good governance is how authority is being exercised (in an equitable, honest, transparent, effective, by involvement, with adequate feedback, etc., way?). Still, there are accounts that point at the discrepancy between the promise of the idea and what it actually delivers, being “the new kid in developmental discourse” [GRI 10] or just another tool in managing the third world state and the third-world people by reproducing historical colonial structures based on the notions of civilization and commerce [ANG 00]. As we noted, in the context of the evolution of the European project, the principles of good governance were evoked to provide a solution to the problem of trust in view of regulatory transformations that come to respond to the growing risks for decision-making coordination on EU level. Opening the method of coordination by focusing more on soft law instruments (recommendations, guidelines) than hard law legal action is to promote the

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following good governance principles outlined in the White paper on governance (2001): – openness (work in a more open manner, accessibility, effective communication, better understanding on the part of the citizens); – participation (wide inclusive approach in developing and implementing policies); – accountability (clear roles, clear responsibilities of institutions); – effectiveness (effective, timely, delivering what is needed on the basis of clear objectives, an evaluation of future impact and past experience); – coherence (ensuring consistent approach in complex systems) [COM 01, p. 8]. In summary, this detailed preliminary account is not exhaustive of the different sources and influences on the notions of governance and good governance, but it outlines some basic lines of scholarship that help us explore why the EU institutional promotion of RRI takes exactly the form that it takes around the tenets of the new governance approach. Given that, we can trace the projections of this new governance approach onto what was already mentioned to be a new culture of organizing the research and innovation realm. It aims at open and inclusive research constellations, in the pursuit of comprehensive solutions. We can see its impact on the RRI concept itself ‒ the focus on participation and open innovation “keys”, on timely management of innovation, on reflexive governance and on soft law normative regimes. It is also close to some of the assumptions as to the possibility of efficient market regulation4. The EU institutional account on RRI relies on the new regulatory pathos around the notions of governance and good governance. Having in mind the initial uses of the concept of good governance (to convey the necessary conditions for effective functioning of markets), we could understand why certain pillars in the RRI approach easily entail market-oriented interpretations.

4 This possibility is assumed to be reliant on diminishing the role of uncertainty by providing more visibility as to the institutional environment, so that market agents can have undistorted expectations as to the dynamics of that same environment.

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3.2. The economic “imprint” on the EU governance of RTD The research-market convergence in EU RTD has been set at the very beginning of the Framework Programmes (FPs). It is quite pronounced nowadays, especially after the crisis of 2008, when R&I became the main hope for renewed economic growth. Science and technologies are expected to answer to the growing public considerations as to global risks – in the realm of environment, security, healthcare, energy, food, etc. This situation is a result of the discursive cross-over of several lines of argumentation that bring the strong economic imprint in the mere justification of RRI. One advances the need for effective management of resources by avoiding waste of public and even private funding for unacceptable/problematic innovation. Another underlines the economic nuances in the interpretation of societal well-being (the latter is often being understood as a derivative of economic success). A third comes from the new institutional economics’5 imprint on the notion of governance. The integration of the economic aspect into the normative orientation of the research and innovation realm can be traced back in the evolution of the FPs. It is incorporated within bigger governance visions aiming to overcome the gap between science and society. The latter consideration advances an RTD policy orientation towards opening up the field of EU research for collaborations outside the scientific realm. An early example of such form of opening is the initiative for European Laboratories Without Walls (ELWW) from the 1980s [MEE 87]. It promoted collaboration between research units, so that duplication of effort and research isolation could be avoided. In addition to that, it aimed to improve the international competitiveness of European industry and agriculture. Another form of opening, especially after FP5, is that of integrating ethical, legal and social issues into the research and innovation process. It represents the so-called ELSIfication. This approach of broadening the considerations as to the direction of science and technology was conceived initially on US soil in the course of the Human Genome Project. It was 5 Simply put, new institutional economics (NIE) approaches the question of economic performance in view of how institutions interact with specific organizational arrangements. A leading assumption in NIE is that individuals have incomplete information and bounded rationality, and in order to reduce the transaction costs of acquiring information in the face of uncertainty, they rely on formal and informal institutions. The performance of the market economy depends on how these institutions and modes of organization facilitate private transactions and cooperative behavior (see [MEN 08, FUR 05]).

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implemented as a program that needed to: anticipate and address the implications for individuals and society of mapping and sequencing the human genome; examine the ethical, legal and social consequences of mapping and sequencing the human genome; stimulate public discussion of the issues; and develop policy options that would assure that the information be used to benefit individuals and society [NAT 12]. Within the current European governance of RTD, it is still referred to as a legitimate approach of sensitizing, and we might say responsibilizing, scientific research and its technological manifestations. It is considered to help in achieving societal uptake of the research and innovation products and facilitate their market realization by exploring acceptable forms of usage. Later, following the provisions of the new governance approach and pursuing an extension of the impetus for opening the research and innovation realm, FP6 and FP7 sought the realization of a common European research area to ensure a more integrated, coordinated and efficient innovation process through: – creation of an “internal market” in research (a genuine area of free movement of knowledge, researchers and technology) designed to strengthen cooperation, stimulate competition and optimize the allocation of resources; – restructuring of the European research fabric, essentially by improving the coordination of national research activities and policies (which account for most of the research carried out and funded in Europe) [EUR 00]. In the spirit of the emerging new research culture and the new institutional economics’ take on governance, ERA was expected to open up possibilities for network governance in the pursuit of better coordination and utilization of resources, on the one hand, and for multilevel interaction between different loci of authority, on the other. As can be seen, this particular vision of RTD governance is very close to the postulates of market regulation concerning the efficient allocation of resources. Along with that, the process of opening up of research is also focused on advancing a dialogical mode of governance by engaging the scientific community in cooperation with a variety of social actors. Within FP5, the emphasis was on unidirectional communication from science to society in the explanatory mode of Public Understanding of Science (PUS), so that “citizens are informed about and are aware of the social aspects with regard to scientific and technological progress” [EUR 03, p. 6]. Then, with the

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adoption of “Science, society and the citizen of Europe” [COM 00b], another mode of opening was considered – opening through partnership (FP6, Science and Society action). It was expected to overcome public mistrust or apathy as to science and facilitate the integration of R&D in the overall economic process. Later, FP7 advanced a mode of re-contextualization by promoting the “Science in Society” theme within the “Capacities” programme for a “thriving knowledge-based economy” [EUR 07a]. It is: “[i]mperative that a social and cultural environment conducive to successful and exploitable research [emphasis added] be created. This means that legitimate societal concerns and needs are taken on board, entailing an enhanced democratic debate with a more engaged and informed public, and better conditions for collective choices on scientific issues, and the possibility for civil society organizations to outsource research in relation to their concerns” [EUR 14a]. The economic expediency of the partnership between science and society is laid down. Currently, with Horizon 2020, the process of opening is extended to collaboration about purposes as well. It advances the tenets of postacademic science and the focus on socially robust research. The “Science with and for society” line establishes a two-way engagement of societal actors and researchers in the mode of responsibilization (for society) through democratization (with society). Its economic expediency explicitly articulates in the sought instrumentality of Horizon 2020 for reaching “the general objective to build an economy based on knowledge and innovation [emphasis added] across the whole Union, while contributing to sustainable development” [EUR 11b, Annex I]. Responsibilization through bridging the gap between science and society is not only a matter of discourse, but also a matter of actual incorporation of issues belonging to the socio-economic continuum. I deliberately use the latter phrase to emphasize that, in the spirit of market societies, the distinction between those two notions is fading. It is curious that this same expression can be found in policy documents, which in itself creates opportunities to conceptually assimilate “societal” under the auspices of “economic”, or as Polanyi noted, to assume that the economic reality is the only reality there is.

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In connection to that, we cannot omit mentioning a study analyzing over 2500 research solicitations within three FPs in the period (1998–2010). It identifies four modes of integration (socio-ethical, stakeholder, socio-economic and industrial) and, with the help of quantitative analysis, reveals an overall trend towards increasing integration. It is important to note that requests integrating industrial and socio-economic aspects substantially outnumber those integrating socio-ethical and stakeholder aspects – by a 2-to-1 margin [ROD 13]. As can be suggested from this research, market-oriented and economically expedient integration dominate over ethically oriented and participatory approaches. The most dominant type of solicitation is the one calling for active participation of industrial actors in research and innovation activities. This involvement of private industry aims at better industrial exploitation of research results. The socio-economic integration (second) entails consideration and anticipation of economic aspects of the research results – in terms of growth, employment, competitiveness, etc. Then, the socio-ethical integration opens room for involving SSH perspectives in science and engineering activities by involving either SSH researchers or engineers incorporating/considering SSH perspectives themselves (applying the ELSI approach and the like). The least prevalent type is the one calling for participatory approach – involving non-academic and non-industrial actors by way of public and stakeholder engagement. The study also shows that, while the overall integration increases, specific types of integration do not undergo such change. For instance, socio-ethical integration moves up from 9% in FP5 to 11% in FP6, and down again to 9% in FP7. Requests for stakeholder integration, for example, represent 7% of the total solicitations in FP5, staying at 7% in FP6 and going up to 9% in FP7. Diversity declines from FP6 to FP7 in the sense that the percentages of requests increase for both industrial and socio-economic integration, while they decrease for both socio-ethical and stakeholder integration (taken together from 40% of total requests in FP5 to 28% in FP7). However, socio-economic and industrial integration types together increase from 60% in FP5 to 72% in FP7. The research-market convergence establishes very steadily, while the two key components of the responsibilization/democratization dyad – ethics and participation ‒ decline in the context of very active institutional discourse on the matter. Then, in financial terms, a gross estimation of the evolution of socio-economic relevant research activities in FPs shows that budgets

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increased from 147 M euro (out of 13,125 altogether) to 190 M in FP5 (out of 14,960) and up to 355 M in FP6 (out of 16,270) [EUR 03, p. 12]. It would be interesting to see if those trends are reified or go astray with Horizon 2020. Nevertheless, all this is very instructive for the different planes on which discourse and actual practice can operate. Integration might increase while diversity in integration decreases. Currently, in Horizon 2020, the research-market axis seems to be kept within the three main directions of the programme – excellence (science for itself, focus on quality, EUR 27,818 million); industrial leadership (science for the market, focus on economic utility/expediency, EUR 20,280 million) and societal challenges (science for society, focus on relevance, EUR 35,888 million) [EUR 11b]. As can be seen, tackling societal challenges has been given budgetary priority although all three are crucial in harnessing research and innovation for achieving the objectives of Europe 2020 (smart, sustainable and inclusive growth). In an anti-lobbyist manner, it is stated that H2020 activities shall have as their vantage point policy priorities “without predetermining the precise choice of technologies or solutions that should be developed”. This seems in line with “the responsibilization” imperative. The guiding normativity shall be public policy, not profit, although it ultimately aims at market realization through “[b]ringing together a critical mass of resources and knowledge across different fields, technologies and scientific disciplines in order to address the challenges. The activities shall cover the full cycle from research to market, with a new focus on innovation related activities, such as piloting, demonstration, test-beds, support for public procurement, design, end-user driven innovation, social innovation and market take-up of innovations” [Ibid.]. The role of SSH is underlined in this endeavor – to contribute to the interdisciplinary knowledge-creation process, but also to provide evidence-based knowledge for the purposes of policy-making. In view of the Innovation Union Initiative, we can interpret this as research-market convergence, but sensitized. In line with the new governance approach, H2020 also entails opening space for stimulating public–private partnerships (the market axis of research), public–public partnerships (multi-level governance – regional, national, international) and cooperation beyond the EU (with third countries and international organizations).

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In the quest for market realization of societal challenges solutions, an important aspect is the question of embeddedness. It is revealing for the economic imprint on EU governance of RTD and particularly on RRI. For example, in von Schomberg’s definition on RRI, we can find a rationale for the responsibilization effort, one that aims to allow “a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society” [VON 13, p. 39]. In this sense RRI is perceived more or less as an instrument for opening a societal space and creating trust as to the realization of technology. It is construed as conceptual and procedural facilitator for innovation and its marketable products. This is in line with EU institutional rationality, which makes great efforts to foster research and innovation as sources of renewed economic growth. According to an Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee, the latter requires measures to “embed science and innovation more strongly in society” [EESC 14]. Innovation should be unleashed, obstacles to it – identified and removed, technical requirements and restrictions – loosened in searching for the right balance between regulation and freedom of action. All this is related to a particular vision about science and technology as economic opportunity by opening new markets, accelerating turnover time, increasing cost-efficiency and effective performance, etc. It advances the assumption that the value of research and innovation lies in its potential as a profit-generation mechanism. Science and technology can bring forward social change and along with that initiate new social practices, new consumer tastes and behavior, and open unforeseen areas of product application and market realization. Moreover, with the crisis of 2008, political discourse feeds on the idea of the commodification potential of research, and conveys some urgency in using it to find solutions to the problems of economic recovery. Innovation is construed as a quick fix for creating added value, propelling the sluggish economy and reinvigorating economic life. In this context, “the industry” appears to be the appropriate translator of this specific potential of science and technology into consumables by the public goods and services. We cannot argue against the market realization component of research and innovation. The problem of bridging the gap between market and society seems to be reformulated in economistic terms. Stepping on the assumption that the market is the ultimate social regulator and the most efficient distributive mechanism, the way to reconcile science with society (not in terms of trust, but in terms of supply/demand of solutions to the societal challenges) is turning the market agents in one project (be they big industry, SMEs, start-ups, etc.) into

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connecting points and channels for R&I’s societal realization. The appeal for speedy harnessing of its potential leaves very restricted room for reflection on the matter, not to mention for unfolding responsibilization initiatives since “[e]xceptional expectations are raised concerning the possible roles for science and technology. A new agenda unfolds concerning ‘how?’ science and technology should be fostered – and ‘how fast?’ But relatively little effort is expended on ‘why?’, ‘in which ways?’ and ‘says who?’” [STI 10]. At the same time, we witness discursive strategies and semantic moves that advance an understanding of market-based rationality as being the societal rationality. Respectively, the imagination on societal needs and desires becomes confined to economic needs and desires. I will illustrate this with a concrete example from an EU-funded research project on ethics and security ‒ INEX: Converging and conflicting ethical values in the internal/external security continuum in Europe [INE 11]. In that project, researchers have demonstrated very well how the market rationale behind the security industry is being gradually embraced by the policy realm as the societal rationality, which in its turn justifies the further expansion of the sector in a variety of public domains (ID cards, passports, welfare systems). The notion for the immaturity of the market [INE 08, p. 11] is used to prompt policy measures and public authorities’ support to satisfy the imperative for economic growth. In a curious way, the liberalization of the market for which the industry is fighting requires state and hyper-state regulation, making itself a main customer and thus opening a vast room for market realization of its products and services [COM 03]. This leads to efforts of advancing a security culture in which industry and researchers are supposed to collaborate in order to address what is deemed to be security challenges. The language of challenges is crucial in the legitimization of market rationality within public policy and the “socialization” of industry interests as acceptable public concerns, thereby leaving an economic imprint on EU governance of RTD. In summary, EU institutional rationality adheres to the tenets of new institutional economics assuming that the proper functioning of the market is inevitably conditioned by the institutional and organizational arrange-ments that provide the framework in which the latter operates. By the same token in considering the adequate governance mode for the field of research and innovation, the European Commission employs the assumption that the proper institutional arrangements can guarantee market realization of S&T

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and economic growth. This kind of focusing on the dependence between economy and society very often leads to implicit assumptions that somehow industry is the interface with society or that the latter is exhausted with it. As a result, “socially desirable” is conceived equal to “economically productive”, and well-being is conflated with an increase in economic figures. Following the example of Polanyi, Sandel and others, the RRI field needs to constantly problematize such assumptions. In relation to that, it also has to explore profoundly the process by which knowledge is being conquered by the joint “neutral” forces of techno-scientific progress and market regulation. 3.3. EU governance of RTD: is “Science versus Society” actually the problem? As we saw in the previous section, when it comes to the governance of RTD, much of the EU institutional effort is directed towards finding the proper mode of dialogue between science and society. There is a general policy orientation from Public Understanding of Science (better communication, informing the public, building awareness, popularization) to Public Engagement with Science (involvement of the non-scientific community in the research and innovation process, participatory formats, ensuring social relevance). We need to note that PES does not denounce PUS, it just builds on it. They both come to respond to a particular problem as to the process of knowledge-creation, namely the problem of trust. That is why EU institutional rationality advances formats such as “Science and Society”, “Science in Society” and “Science with and for Society”. The governability crisis as to the normative orientation of S&T is imagined as a gap between the field of research and innovation, and the citizens. This perspective has its justifications, but there are reasons to believe that it does not exhaust the problem at all. It is true that the developments in the S&T realm give a lot of reasons for concern, much of which feed into the normative appeal of the imperative for responsibility. There is a problem indeed in trusting the scientific community along two major worries. First, it is the undergoing commercialization of research and building profit-oriented alliances with industry that may challenge not only traditional research integrity, but also the public good character of knowledge. Wendy Brown once addressed this issue of the creeping influence of big business into universities and the disastrous consequences

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such as the advent of neoliberalized knowledge [BRO 11]. The ongoing marketization is changing not only the nature of knowledge, but the profile of the researcher as well (as we see with the demise of the Mertonian ethos of modern science). At the very same time, there are growing concerns as to the increasing power of science as a transformative force – one that could bring social change, initiate dangerous processes (e.g. atomic energy), re-invent essences (e.g. biotechnology), question the human condition (e.g. space colonization), create damage and harm (e.g. science for military purposes), etc. Its initial emancipatory power, a legacy from the Enlightenment, has expanded to reach radical distortions. It has the potential to create phenomena and initiate processes that could not only reduce human freedom, but wipe out humanity altogether. It turned into a risk-producing activity. These are, in summary, the sources of distrust on the part of society. The research community has its own take on the public, whose hostility it interprets as a manifestation of general misunderstanding of the scientific method and the scientific ethos. Society is imagined as obstructive, anti-scientific, dramatizing, exaggerating, manipulated and irrational. According to this outlook, its attitude can be traced back to its own ignorance, media simplifications or deliberate strategies for misinformation or manipulation, very often with concrete political purposes (as is the case with religiously committed conservative parties when discussing biotechnologies). In this context, the scientific realm is perceived to be “under attack”6 by forces that introduce distortions of the scientific truth, thereby compromisingthe efforts and the integrity of researchers. The public misinterprets scientific achievements; the politicians use gross simplifications of scientific discoveries to mobilize political support and even cut/redirect scientific financing under ideological premises. These attitudes explain why EU institutions put great effort into establishing the arrangements that would allow a productive conversation between researchers and various societal actors, and as is recently the case with RRI, to make them “work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society” [EUR 18h]. There is, however, a great impediment before the successful accomplishment of this task. It is the normative interlock between science and the market around the 6 The narrative about science being under attack has recently been popularized by Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, who in a documentary film explored the different cases of rejecting what is believed to be the scientific truth.

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claim for neutrality. It constitutes, I suspect, the actual challenge as to the governance of RTD and the overall responsibilization efforts. It was already noted that a particularly pertinent and popular variation of the scientific outlook – scientism – is very close in its normative orientation to the hailed by anti-Keynesian economists indifference to the market, which is perceived to be incognizant of value preferences of individuals and value judgments about the end effects of its operations. By the same token, under the auspices of technological determinism, many scientists and techno-savvies deny the relevance of greater societal visions as to the overall governance of the S&T realm. They often advance evolutionist perspectives on the matter, which could very easily question the mere idea of governance as to the research and innovation realm, and respectively all its adjoining notions such as steering, coordination, collective learning and processual regulation. I will start with an example that very well illustrates the normative orientation I am referring to and that some denote as “science delusion” [SCH 12, WHI 13]. In his famous book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins poses the central question of normativity in science by citing an interview with Jim Watson, a key figure along with Francis Crick in the Human Genome Project: “In my interview with Watson […] I conscientiously put it to him that, unlike him and Crick, some people see no conflict between science and religion, because they claim science is about how things work and religion is about what it is all for. Watson retorted: ‘Well I don't think we're for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose”. But I'm anticipating having a good lunch’. We did have a good lunch, too” [DAW 06, pp. 99–100]. Although Dawkins’ pathos is about religion, the conversation with Watson actually reveals a broader problem as to the normative orientation of scientism; an understanding on normativity that is very similar to market-oriented reasoning on the matter, and one that implies indifference as to any societal aims. It hails an evolution process with no meaning and no purpose. The cherished neutrality of the scientific method can turn into a nihilist complacency that is nothing more than a “manifestation of

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thoughtlessness” [WHI 13]. It is quite problematic to insist that such a claim has no political bearing, or to insist that this political bearing is none of our concern as long as the scientific truth has been uttered. So the problem with scientism is a problem of science’s self-confinement. The troubles come from the ideology of science rather than science itself [OLA 01, p. x], and the claim that knowledge is exhausted with scientific knowledge. What started centuries ago as a demystifying and secularizing liberation from the oppression of religious views on the natural and social world has become a very narrow interpretation of the human. This introduces some hardship on construing our complex relationship with nature (as an object and as part of nature ourselves), especially in view of the transforming potential of novel technologies and their contribution to human evolution. Scientism makes any responsibilization effort very difficult and hampers the RRI endeavor as well, since it closes the space for reflexivity and normative co-construction. What is more, it implicitly denies reflexive explorations since the latter seems useless and nonsensical in the context of meaningless and purposeless evolution. Despite fighting the stifling nature of religion, scientism advances with almost a religious pathos a hegemonistic binary outlook on right and wrong ways of conceiving knowledge. This explains the condescending attitude and even scorn towards qualitative research and its marked preference to quantifiable and measurable data7. This is important for us because it gives clues for the context in which SSH are expected to give their contribution within the overall transformation of innovation governance. RRI accounts, including institutional, perceive the role of SSH in providing insights into the social relevance of a particular R&I process and its eventual products and effects. This is crucial in the overall responsibilization effort. Even though it is institutionally supported by the EC, it is rather difficult to implement. The huge problem is its normative incompatibility with scientism and technological determinism. It might constitute a serious implementation impediment before RRI that needs proper conceptual and policy attention. The apple of discord that seems to be at the heart of the argument between scientism’s extreme empiricism and the supporters of the inevitable need of qualitative interpretations of reality is the issue of free will. The 7 It has plagued education research as well [HYS 07].

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positions on the latter respectively advance different perspectives on the human. For the SSH, free will can introduce radical unpredictability as to human behavior. For extreme empiricists, human agency is potentially “readable” by the means of science and sophisticated technologies, which can advance physicalist explanations of human behavior and deterministic accounts on social action (e.g. it is very popular to use genes as an explanatory tool for social phenomena like altruism, deviance, eating disorders, etc.). Advancing such an outlook sows the seeds of trouble as to ethics because it can shake the notion of responsibility understood as liability8, and deprive of meaning the notion of responsibility understood as proactive commitment. RRI’s insistence on prospective positive responsibility is intimately connected with the possibility to exercise free will and take responsibility by advancing a voluntary commitment to a particular normative orientation. A responsibilization effort requires over-coming the confinements of scientism and confronting its normative emptiness. This entails going beyond the purported sufficiency of the materialist (or even physicalist) presuppositions of scientific inquiry, allowing a broader conceptual space for reflexivity. Some of the materialist assumptions behind scientism can be traced back to the 19th Century and they very well fit the economistic assumptions about the virtues of the markets. First, everything is essentially mechanical – complex entities, even living creatures are construed as mechanisms. Second, all matter is unconscious – it has no inner life, or subjectivity, or point of view. This corresponds well with assumptions about the impossibility of holistic explanations as to market since the latter is incognizant as to the subjective constructions of want, need, desire and morality. The latter are not objective entities to be known. Third, nature is purposeless and evolution has no goal or direction. By the same token, the market mechanism is indifferent as to ideas of the good life; it lacks a societal telos or social justice direction (the latter is a mirage according to Hayek [HAY 76]). Again, in the context of this normative interlock between the scientific outlook and market-oriented thinking, RRI’s ideas for steering towards the right impacts or aligning with the values, needs and expectations of society is challenged. 8 We can imagine how reliance on scientism’s presuppositions can influence or alter the tenets of legal reason and the judicial process (e.g. assuming that crime is a result of a complex biochemical reaction, not a matter of free will).

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We need to be fair and recognize that the Austrian school of economics, which exerts great influence over the culture of contemporary market societies, does not reject the idea of purpose or responsibility in economic life altogether. It does so only when commenting on the performance of the market mechanism. I will use Hayek’s account because it explains very well some of the reasons of this easy union between scientism and economics. One such reason is that principles related to the market mechanism are projected on the notion of economy. The problem is in the ambiguity and the entailing confusion from the common use of the word economy. He makes a clear distinction between economy and market in view of coordination: “[w]hile an economy proper is an organization in the technical sense in which we have defined the term, that is, a deliberate arrangement of the use of the means which are known to some single agency, the cosmos of the market neither is nor could be governed by such a single scale of ends; it serves the multiplicity of separate and incommensurable ends of all its separate members” [Ibid., p. 108]. So if the economy is a deliberative coordination effort, which is based on some hierarchy of ends or cherished values, the market has no such normative underlining. The spontaneity of its mechanism of coordination of wants and needs is the only viable response to the impossibility of a rational agreement on the aims that individuals pursue. Unlike economy which is a unit cognizant and pursuing certain end states (like household, farm or an enterprise), the market serves no such order of ends; it is just a processing mechanism (or the “only known method”) of the available information that adjusts the goals of all participants into a resultant state of affairs, which is indifferent as to value-laden categorizations as to that state. It is a wealth-creating game of catallaxy [Ibid., p. 115]. Hayek’s account comes as a conceptual response to the governability crisis and advances a processual solution as to the problem of regulation in complex and normatively fragmented societies. It is much in the spirit of new governance theories, whose main task is to come up with a regulatory solution that is to coordinate the multiplicity (and sometimes incompatibility) of normative orientations of the various societal actors. Given that, the RRI endeavor is in a precarious position. On the one hand, its institutional strand relies on the advancements in the realm of new governance theories. In doing so, it can incorporate some of the assumptions

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about the market as the only regulatory mechanism responding effectively to the problem of complexity and normative fragmentation. On the other hand, some of its theoretical accounts revise the relationship between research and innovation, and the market (in view of irresponsible or problematic innovation), and advance a deliberate pursuit of acceptable effects thus conceiving responsibility. How is responsibility going to be conceived and exercised if the spontaneous order of the market is indifferent as to the issue of right impacts? Within such a perspective RRI’s responsibilization efforts might become meaningless. If RRI is to abide by the normative orientation of market societies, no responsibilization can be initiated as to the development of S&T. The market “will decide” on this coordination problem – as a neutral reconciliation mechanism between competing non-economic ends. This fits very well the scientism paradigm and its passionately expressed indifference as to resultant states of affairs concerning the effects of research outside the laboratory. The normative match between science and the market has been conceptualized before. For example, Melinda Cooper notices some overlaps in the developments of the epistemologies of the life sciences with those of neoliberalism [COO 08]. Of course, causal relation cannot be directly assumed. However, it is worth exploring these developments in the vein of what Jasanoff called co-production [JAS 04]. Other accounts focus on the transformations from the last few decades that allowed the tremendous marketization of research, especially when it comes to the life sciences [RAJ 12]. Institutional, regulatory and financial conditions initiated three major trends: the emergence of the entrepreneurial university; the corporatization of the life sciences and the naturalization of this corporatization. At the same time, this becomes an unquestionable part of the contemporary research culture. It is not that research has not been commercial before; however, as Kaushnik Rajan fairly notes, the question is about “the legitimate extent of commodification, the role of the university, and the value system of science” [Ibid., p. 5]. The value system of science, not only in the realm of life sciences, is moving away from the Mertonian ideals of communism and disinterested-ness. Most universities now have technology transfer offices that aim to ensure public disclosure of inventions (legitimizing their function as public providers of knowledge) under the auspices of intellectual property rights regimes. They are acting as entrepreneurial agencies, combining the logics of public dissemination and private monopolization. As Daniel

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Greenberg has put it, the problem is with “[t]he deliberate infusion of entrepreneurial goals into the academic environment, so that attentively or not, university leaders, professors, and their students inhale commercial values [emphasis added] as they make their choices and perform their work” [GRE 07, p. 4]. As a result, the role of universities is changing as well ‒ from fostering social debate and democratic critique to emphasizing social and economic utility [HYS 07, p. 120]. The process of marketization of science might be seen as threatening the Mertonian model of the “ethos of modern science”. In the context of profit-making mechanisms and market regulation, it is leaning more towards secrecy and confidentiality rather than sharing. It advances enclosure in the spirit of property-knowledge and commodification. This brings in a myriad of problems concerning the confirmation of results, falsification of results, commercial bias in interpreting results, loyalty to the respective industry that finances the research, suppressing undesirable data, conceiving “damage” in business terms (increasing cost), placing liability in legal terms onto the honest researcher who is revealing the truth, etc. The rise of interested science is embodied in the figure of the scientist entrepreneur as well – the scientist who is a shareholder or has a financial interest in commercialized RTD entity. This causes a normative conflict between legally binding duties within corporate science and the ethos of modern science, which carries normative orientations that are more commensurate with conceiving knowledge as a common good (entailing openness, transparency, accumulation, sharing, etc.). All this erodes public confidence in science. In the context of market societies, scientific endeavor very much takes the features of bare scientism, something that Tzvetan Todorov also observed to be a certain loss along the pathos of the Enlightenment. The expulsion of moral philosophy and the notion of common good from the progressive claims of science deprives the mere idea of knowledge from its ethical foundations [TOD 09]. Scientism also has another effect with regard to producing social reality – it implies that the scientific approach to all problems or issues will beget the best possible results [HYS 07, p. 116]. This is at the heart of the technocratic turn in policy-making and the recent fashionable insistence on evidence-based policy. It is the imperative of efficiency that is to be enacted by the application of the scientific principle in estimating plausible impacts and consequences of a certain policy direction. The crisis of democracy that

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has become a prominent theme of discussion since the 1970s, along with the continuing legitimization of the market as the most efficient and fair social9 and normative regulator, identified the figure of the technocrat as a political solution to the need of correct, reliable, apolitical (neutral) policy answers. This left less room for moral philosophy in the political debate and gradually turned the latter into a quasi-scientific instruction of the public on the basis of the authority of the specialist who proposes apolitical and amoral evidence-based solutions. It opened the governance realm for scientists as consultants, whose expertise can shape not only political debates, but the decision-making process as well (e.g. climate science and climate politics). Given that this process of incorporating scientific expertise as political advice is not new and has been a subject matter of theoretical debates on post-industrialism and the advent of knowledge societies, we might look a little askance at the originality of recent efforts to “re-socialize science” into society as part of the responsibilization process. In this section, we saw that EU institutional rationality sees the challenge in the distance between science and the broader social context, including the policy-making mechanism. Part of the problem is not that it needs to be accommodated in the social structure, but actually that it has settled very well in the context of market societies. As a result, it makes it very difficult: 1) to conceive of responsibility beyond the perceived value-neutrality of the scientific effort; 2) to contest the apolitical nature of the technocratic advice; 3) to argue against the instrumental and amoral nature of its technological products; 4) to see the S&T evolution as independent from the social setting and the normative grip of market regulation. What is more, opening the channels of decision-making for the scientists and technocrats (with narrow expert knowledge) is a slippery slope. It can give opportunities to actually transfer political responsibility onto them because responsibility has been conceived more on the basis of expert knowledge and less by the means of politico-philosophical (ethical) debate. What is more, we might cautiously suspect that notwithstanding the specificity of their outlook, researchers can become scapegoats of political failures in reinventing the grounds for democracy in contemporary market societies. They could be easily accused of lack of sensibility as to societal concerns and demanded to somehow overcome the structural impediments posed by market regulation in a political context that has not undertaken this huge task itself. So the result 9 Social regulator as to allocation of resources and information signals, normative regulator – as to values, expressed as preferences.

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could be a practical impasse or resentment on their part, given that they are being pressured without being given clear instructions on what to do, or because they are being held responsible for things they do not consider themselves responsible for. In this mix-up of poorly articulated problems (coming from the structure) and not very adequate solutions (institutional arrangements with no conceptual clarity and actual procedural space for implementation), ethics starts to be seen as a conservative force, as an impediment to progress, as a sabotage (slowing down the pace of social change) or as an external and clueless censor meddling with issues out of its realm of competence. So is science versus society actually the problem? RRI and the constant emphasis on the need of researchers to take into account societal and ethical issues create perceptions and self-perceptions for the social and ethical deficiencies of the natural and engineering sciences. This shifts the focus of analysis away from the actual source of the problem, namely how to regulate the knowledge-creation process in a free market economy, which relies on innovation for capital accumulation and realization. Marketization of knowledge is the huge “governance problem”, not the responsibility of the researchers themselves. At the same time, the political realm transposes the problem of the gap between the decision-making level (as expected to provide solutions to the new societal challenges) and the citizenry (as demanding those solutions) onto the relations between the research expertise-oriented community and the public that is hungry for quick fixes.

4 EU Institutional Rationality on RRI

4.1. On ends and means: EU institutional discourse on the instrumentality of RRI Within the overall evolution of the EU policies on RTD, RRI comes as a novel approach, which advances the principles of new governance and good governance in the realm of EU-funded research and innovation. As we will see in this section, it is instrumental not only in bridging the gap between science and society by advancing the “With and For” mode of cooperation, but also in promoting a research culture which aims to expand researchers’ commitments and responsibilities beyond the laboratory and to the broader societal context. Below we will see that it is used as a means of promoting more adequate temporal management of research and innovation, integration of societal needs and desires by pursuing “by-design” policies, achieving efficiency and minimizing transaction costs as to the knowledge-creation process, advancing soft-law regulatory instruments in the spirit of the new governance approach, and engaging the business community with responsible behavior. At the same time, it is contributory to the establishment of a new research culture that is oriented towards addressing societal challenges, using new epistemological configurations (through interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity) and pursuing impact and relevance rather than “the objective and ultimate truth”. The first official recognition of these many aspects of the expediency of responsibilization can be found in the words of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, a former European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, back in 2012:

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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“As the Europe 2020 Strategy makes clear, to overcome the current economic crisis we need to create a smarter, greener economy, where our prosperity will come from research and innovation. Science is the basis for a better future and the bedrock of a knowledge-based society and a healthy economy. After ten years of action at EU level to develop and promote the role of science in society, at least one thing is very clear: we can only find the right answers to the challenges we face by involving as many stakeholders as possible in the research and innovation process. Research and innovation must respond to the needs and ambitions of society, reflect its values [emphasis added], and be responsible” [GEO 12]. As can be seen, RRI is advanced as a new governance approach in tackling what is considered to be societal challenges by expanding the involvement of societal actors for finding “the right answers”. And, of course, “right” is ambivalent as it implies not only adequate/efficient, but ethically acceptable solutions as well. Since R&I is a proxy for prosperity, an engine for smarter (i.e. IT-led), greener (environmentally sensitive) and inclusive (socially considerate, more equitable) growth, RRI is an inevitable component of its governance because it can provide the normative underlining of this economic growth. It can bring the pursued sensibility to socio-ethical considerations within the knowledge-creation process. Thus, RRI is imagined as part and parcel of the overall ability to respond to societal challenges [EUR 12a]. The theme for the Grand Societal Challenges gained popularity and legitimacy as the EU policy direction in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. The problems of global economic interconnectedness put the issue of global risks in new light and opened room for conceptual rehabilitation of social inequalities as one of the factors threatening the stability of the global system. The advancement of RRI and its institutional promotion can be traced back in a series of declarations – the Lund Declaration (2009), the Vilnius Declaration (2013) and the Rome Declaration (2014). They all establish its instrumentality in addressing societal challenges. The Rome Declaration is very important in this respect because it outlines the expediency of RRI in detail. It emphasizes its role in providing continuity in the effort of the political promotion of the idea as a governance novelty. It stipulates the need for advancing actual mechanisms for its implementation;

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building capacity for RRI; reviewing and adapting metrics and narratives for research and innovation; and implementing institutional changes that foster RRI. The Rome Declaration is telling for the way the legitimacy of the concept is gradually being promoted around an economized version of the notion of governance. It explicitly states that: “The benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation go beyond alignment with society: it ensures that research and innovation deliver on the promise of smart, inclusive and sustainable solutions to our societal challenges; it engages new perspectives, new innovators and new talent from across our diverse European society, allowing the identification of solutions which would otherwise go unnoticed; it builds trust between citizens, and public and private institutions in supporting research and innovation; and it reassures society about embracing innovative products and services; it assesses the risks and the way these risks should be managed” [PRE 14]. As can be seen, the document advances the economic expediency of the responsibilization process by emphasizing its potential contribution to the EU as an economic project based on innovation. It points to the importance of diversity as a production factor stimulating creativity and innovation (here come gender equality, open access and science education) by opening channels for networking and better knowledge exchange. It promotes the integration of the public and private sphere (the market is the mediator). It advances consequentialist logic of risk assessment as a regulation tool. What is discursively presented as a conceptual progress as to the understanding of RRI is actually a step back since it reaffirms the problems in the overall governance principles of the EU instead of addressing them head-on and emancipating the matter from its purely economistic considerations. The earlier document ‒ the Vilnius Declaration (2013) – although devoted to the integration of SSH into Horizon 2020, is also based on this economistic view on the role of science and technology: “European societies expect research and innovation to be the foundation for growth [emphasis added]” [VIL 13]. The democratization element in RTD governance, which entails “resilient partnership with all relevant actors” will make research serve society and will contribute to “achieve the benefits of innovation”. What is striking here is that SSH are not evoked to fill in the normative vacuum in market societies but to actually mitigate the societal uptake of

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innovation so the latter can achieve its promise for economic growth. They are expected to: provide a better understanding of innovation; enable the embedding of innovation in society in the pursuit of the predefined societal challenges; identify and propose solutions for emerging societal challenges (which practically means niches for research and innovation); contribute to enforcing the imperative for interdisciplinarity in conceiving solutions for practical problems; and provide insight on the plausible effects on society and the economy of publicly funded research. This, in line with the new governance approaches, is put in the context of the larger problem of bridging the scientific community and society at large. Then, RRI has a strategic potential of harnessing the power and legitimacy of interdisciplinary mechanisms and participatory formats for building trust, producing acceptability and coming to “the right answers”, hence its institutional definition: “Responsible Research and Innovation means that societal actors work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes, with the values, needs and expectations of European society” [EUR 12a]. The circulating official definition is much in line with neo-institutional accounts advancing the idea that introducing certain institutional arrangements can change attitudes and shape behavior. Thus, RRI is instrumental in advancing a new research culture within EU-funded RTD. The operationalization of the six keys is telling of this endeavor. In a leaflet on RRI, we can find a summary and a simplification of these six aspects of the responsibilization effort and their respective utility [EUR 12a]: Engaging is depicted as “choosing together”. It entails framing of challenges on the basis of representation of different sectorial concerns (social, economic, ethical, etc.), elaborating joint solutions and pre-empting possible failure of future innovations (in terms of public value). Gender equality is instrumental in “unlocking the full potential”, thus addressing the under-representation of women both in terms of staff ratio and in research content. Science education is construed as “creative learning fresh ideas” and prompts for finding new means to promote a science literate society, to boost the interest of children and youth, to nurture the researchers of tomorrow, and also to educate other societal actors so they can become responsible participants in the R&I process. Open access is depicted as “sharing results to advance”, which

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entails a transparent and accessible publicly funded research. Ethics is referred to as “do the right “think” and do it right”. It involves respect for fundamental rights and the highest ethical standards, increased societal relevance and acceptability, and ensuring high quality results (not being an impediment for market realization). Lastly, governance calls to “design science for and with society” by taking political responsibility to enact models that integrate the five other keys in order to prevent harmful or unethical developments in R&I [EUR 12a]. The new governance imprint can be found in another summarized definition of RRI, one proposed in a report of a group chaired by van den Hoven1. It is depicted as: “a comprehensive approach of proceeding in R&I in ways that allow all stakeholders that are involved in the processes of research and innovation at an early stage (A) to obtain relevant knowledge on the consequences of the outcomes of their actions and on the range of options open to them and (B) to effectively evaluate both outcomes and options in terms of societal needs and moral values and (C) to use these considerations (under A and B) as functional requirements for design and development [emphasis added] of new research, products and services” [EUR 13, p. 12]. As can be seen, in the spirit of new regulatory approaches, it advances: more adequate temporal adjustment of research and innovation through early engagement; addressing epistemological deficiencies by anticipation and minimizing knowledge asymmetries; assessing possible future developments that go against societal needs and moral values; and incorporating the resultant knowledge in the design or the outcomes of the R&I process. What can be noted in this definition is that it does not imply a mechanism for collective elaboration of the “normative template” that is to be followed. Probably that is why the report uses the word “orientation” towards societal needs (loose engagement) rather than “commitment”. Societal needs and moral values are construed as external and somehow “given” unquestionable 1 This kind of reports does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission; they nevertheless are elaborated within its structures and have great influence on the formation of policies in the sector.

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normative positions that need to be accommodated in the engineering/scientific endeavor. This corresponds to von Schomberg’s resort to normative anchor points that can be found in the EU political consensus on values. Given that, we might see RRI as instrumental in advancing the EU’s normative agenda into the realm of EU-funded RTDs and beyond. What is more interesting about the above-mentioned report is that it advances new institutional economics’ arguments for minimizing transaction costs and reducing the waste of resources in the governance of research and innovation. It calls for avoiding “failed investments in research and innovation” and preventing situations in which “research funding was wasted”. It aims “to better exploit the potential of considering societal needs in innovation” by paying attention to unattended fields ‒ which “have a high economic and societal potential, but market forces in itself are insufficient to provide the necessary incentives for investment in these fields”. Within this perspective, RRI is construed as better coordination mechanism than the market itself by reconciling economic (profit-oriented, value-creation) and societal (legitimacy-oriented, acceptability) logic. In this case, ethics within RRI can be economically expedient, because it would signal for innovation products that could be contested by societal actors; hence, it would minimize the waste of resources: “RRI has the potential to make research and innovation investments more efficient, while at the same time focusing on global societal challenges” [EUR 13, p. 16]. Here, we can clearly see the new institutionalist imprint on the notion of good governance, but projected to the realm of RTD. Simply put, it advances an understanding that the efficient functioning of the market needs proper institutional infrastructure, which is conducive to economic development – enabling institutions, effective civil service, efficient judiciary, transparency (communication, information), partnership (dialogue, ownership), etc. These conditions create the possibility of economizing transaction costs so that entrepreneurs would engage in productive economic activities. Therefore, we can see RRI’s instrumentality in the EU governance of RTD in this same light, as a new institutional economics strategy for economizing on transaction costs by ensuring acceptance at very early stages of the R&I process. Along with that, it engages with advancing institutional mechanisms (the governance key) that would promote the societal uptake of the marketable products of research (embed innovation). It aims to ensure acceptability, thereby minimizing costs and spending fewer resources for ex-post PR and marketing to the public. This is to be achieved by promoting

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a responsibilization process with certain features (deliberation, reflexivity, participation, etc.) and by doing so would cut on possible transaction costs in cases of irresponsible/failed innovation. RRI’s responsibilization agenda is also instrumental in attempts to sensitize the perceived neutrality of the scientific realm and conjoin scientific with human progress in the spirit of the Enlightenment tradition. One way it is being done within the EU RTD policy is by advancing different “… by design” configurations. We often encounter appeals for privacy-by-design, sustainability-by-design, responsibility-by-design, etc. They all assume that design can not only reflect but also have purposefully built-in value orientations provided there is a will to do that. However, is it possible to operationalize a value into an engineering solution and what is more, does the “… by design” ensure “… as effect”? Take the example of “transparency-by-design” and “transparency-as-effect” (see [BLO 18]). The ideal of transparency assumes the possibility for reducing information asymmetries. A process which builds-in transparency as an operational principle does not always lead to responsible outcomes. The problems around new surveillance aiming at transparency and visibility for potential and committed crimes are telling. We do not need to elaborate much on the troubles surrounding transparency in the corporate world (visibility does not contribute well to gaining strategic advantage). High margins of profit in market societies very often depend on huge information asymmetries as opposed to the assumption for the ideal efficient performance of the market. Then, is this language only a legitimizing trick or a genuine commitment with an impossible task? How, for example, is responsibility-by-design possible in a market society? Nevertheless, RRI’s instrumentality in advancing “… by design” solutions could have some positive effects. First, we need to note that the EU’s insistence on integrating values through value-sensitive design fits the institutionalist attitude of setting institutional arrangements that would advance certain political goal by gradually shaping behavior, even though at the beginning it could not be internalized and shared by the concerned parties. Thus, the hidden hope behind RRI as a framework of the responsibilization process is that it would eventually produce more responsible researchers (in terms of being more responsive to societal and ethical concerns). We need to acknowledge that “… by design” tries to solve the controversy between the consequentialist and substantivist approach to ethics in a technically friendly manner. “Design” in a more philosophical

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sense denotes a teleological normativity; but it also sounds very close to the field of scientific applications – technicians and engineers design products, devices, solutions, processes, etc. Therefore “… by design” can be used as a discursive strategy to promote politico-philosophical concepts as a response to the perceived normative neutrality of the market society. One problem, however, is that there are no actual guarantees that this appreciated value (privacy, equity, fairness, etc.) would be advanced “as effect” or that it will not get into conflict with other appreciated values (control, safety, etc.) when implemented. Promoting “… by design” policies as a condition for funding for different industries2 is also part of a trend of advancing non-judicial forms of regulation of the research-market dyad. Within the new governance line, RRI can be instrumental in incorporating value-oriented concerns into the knowledge-creation process as alternative to the traditional regulatory approaches based on setting standards, safety criteria, licenses, and imposing legal sanctions in cases of violation. Thus, RRI could offer some form of meta-regulation in the context of increasing economization of politics, accompanied by more and more reliance on non-judicial forms of accountability [MOR 03]. In the same vein, with its gradual institutionalization, it can also be regarded as a non-judicial form of regulation which, without having the status of a legal sanction or a legal instrument, have similar disciplining effects. On the one hand, the justification of the need for such a kind of non-judicial legality might be found in the already pinpointed temporal deficiencies of traditional legal regulation vis-à-vis a dynamic and uncertain world of innovation. In it timely regulatory responses seem technically impossible. Therefore, soft law comes to fill in the void and provide some initial normative orientation. On the other hand, as Bronwen Morgan noted, this offers opportunities for economization of politics since there is a need to constantly “translate” these soft law instruments into normative directions [MOR 03]. The interpretation process provides the necessary flexibility in a dynamic world, which traditional judicial legality cannot ensure. This opens vast room for dominant economistic discourses that reflect the normative orientation of contemporary market societies to creep in. Publicly significant matters might be meta-regulated by the means of non-judicial legality in terms of economic expediency and avoiding market failures instead on the basis of some clear 2 As is the case with the security sector – see [EUR 12c].

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normative tenets such as vulnerability, care, justice, etc. This helps us to understand why the institutionalization of RRI within European RTD is constantly crossing its path with market-centered concerns. The trend towards non-judicial legalization is also reflected in more profound conceptual debates about the deficiencies of formal rational legal systems whose emphasis on purposive, goal-oriented intervention seems to be in crisis due to complexity and deep normative fragmentation. This evokes a new approach to law, coined by Teubner as “reflexive law”, which restricts itself to procedural matters like the installation, correction and redefinition of democratic self-regulatory mechanisms [TEU 83]. As was already mentioned, soft law instruments (guidelines, codes of conducts, declarations, recommendations, etc.) can be very helpful in engaging the business world. It seems that RRI has more implementation prospects in the organization of the innovation process with respect to publicly funded programs. Not surprisingly, there are great impediments to transposing the concept to the corporate world. We could explain this with the incompatibilities between the driving logics of responsibilization and market behavior. Market agents operate according to specific consideration whose societal consequences are not necessarily taken on board. They are driven by competition, profit-making, cost-reduction motives. To appeal to the societal consciousness of the profit-making mind is not very hopeful endeavor unless the profit-making mind sees a PR opportunity that would lead to a greater market share and increasing customers’ trust and loyalty in the long run. Theoretical accounts on RRI, on the contrary, advance the imperative for responsibility as alertness and engagement beyond one’s sectorial interests. In spite of the difficulties, RRI is instrumental in engaging corporate actors in the EU-funded research with what the Union promotes as “fundamental ethical principles”. As participants of research projects, in order to obtain public funding for developing or deploying certain technologies and products, industry players have to comply with ethics requirements. The latter represent contractual obligation to respect the values and principles inscribed in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU). RRI is a recent endeavor in a long process of institutionalization of ethics. As such, it is expected to contribute to prompting the internalization of non-market concerns by market players.

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Lastly, RRI is instrumental in promoting a new research culture along the lines of what has been conceptualized as post-academic, post-normal or Mode-2 science. As an innovation governance approach that aims to bring together all societal actors and incorporate different epistemological perspectives, it is a means of opening up of the research and innovation process for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperation. This, as we will see below, is fraught with difficulties as well. First, I will focus on transdisciplinarity since it is implied in the appeal for participation and involvement of representatives of the non-scientific community. It is considered part and parcel of the quest for responsibilization and overcoming the spell of neutrality, advanced by both the research realm and the market. Transgressing the boundaries of disciplines in the knowledge production process is not only a way to diversify perspectives but also to contextualize science by setting a new mode of relationships with society [GIB 94, NOW 01]. To start with, research is increasingly carried out in the context of application. This entails that its meaning is not construed within the realm of science itself but in a dialogue between various stakeholders as to how it can contribute to solving publicly significant problems (setting legitimate research agenda). Knowledge production is seen as a problem-solving process (e.g. the EU account on R&I as seeking response to the pre-defined societal challenges). Second, there is the need of ensuring heterogeneity of expertise and skills by participation of multiple actors. The significance of this is epistemic as long as such configurations can ensure a good many perspectives and speculations on the possible effects of a certain solution. For example, more and more NGOs are engaged in providing societally informed expertise within the knowledge-creation process. Third, this changes the notion of accountability and stresses the responsibility of science as to the needs and desires of society in a world of pervasive communication and information technologies where those needs and desires can be easily conveyed. Opening the channels of communication allows the contextualization of science to take place at an early stage (laboratory work) rather than be estimated ex-post as implications and consequences. While transdisciplinarity can hardly deliver on reliable knowledge, it can surely contribute to producing a socially robust kind (see [NOW 06]). Then, new governance approaches in research and innovation, including RRI, promote interdisciplinarity. It is aimed to compensate for the shortcomings of a situation in which the increasing specialization and

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compartmentalization of research leads to more decision-making confusion rather than providing sound advice as to pertinent problems. In contradistinction to transdisciplinarity, which is expected to address the democratic deficit in the knowledge-creation process, interdisciplinarity is evoked to put the epistemological conflicts between disciplines aside for the sake of finding an adequate solution to socially significant problems through cross-fertilization of scientific theories, methods and tools. In this sense, it can be regarded as a means to overcome the costs of discipline over-specialization. The increasing compartmentalization of science poses difficulties as to providing clear-cut solutions to identified problems. If a policymaker needs to make an informed decision as to a complex problem, whose expertise and which perspective could he or she trust? And how can we reconcile the multiplicity of perspectives into a single policy solution? Interdisciplinarity promises a problem-oriented inquiry in which disciplines need to build a comprehensive picture rather than reflect conflicting positions [GRA 15, BAR 13]. It needs to elaborate an appropriate combination of knowledge which can shed a new light on an actual problem [BRE 99]. Furthermore, in economistic terms, interdisciplinarity can also be cost-effective. It requires pooling of intellectual and financial resources, talents and scientific infrastructure not in the arbitrary pursuit of general scientific truths but for assembling a concrete solution for a practically significant problem. It is quite another matter whether this “epistemological encounter” is realistic and possible, especially in view of the grave differences between the natural and social sciences ‒ not only in terms of how they conceive their objects of interest, but also in view of the stable presuppositions that constitute their respective “research programs”. They significantly differ in the way they construe key notions such as nature, human, reliable knowledge, methodological robustness, what constitutes “scientific”, responsibility, truth, utility, etc. I would say that today, in the current context of market societies, the natural and technical sciences are regarded as key for the imperative for profit and economic growth, which in its turn overemphasizes the “economic unproductivity” of the humanities and social sciences. The normative power of the market puts into question the societal relevance of SSH. At the very same time, due to the rising anxieties and public resistance to particular developments in the S&T field, in combination with the increasing

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commercialization of knowledge, they are being evoked as necessary in the legitimization efforts with respect to certain scientifically based or evidence-based solutions (see The Vilnius Declaration [VIL 13]). Unfortunately, in the context of market societies, SSH are considered useful only as long as they provide acceptance solutions or assign social relevance to an already accomplished research process and its marketable products. RRI could then be instrumental in advancing a new research culture along the lines of “societal challenges”, “societal impact” and “social relevance”. Again, within the context of market societies, this is not an unambiguously positive trend. One of the interesting inclinations when discussing RTD EU governance is the discursive emphasis on “challenges” as exhausting the social impact and the social relevance of the research endeavor. This is a way to put the knowledge-creation process in the problem-resolution mode of functioning, which perfectly fits the demand-supply logic of the market. Challenges are like “societal demands” that need to be fulfilled using research and innovation. And the market realization of R&I products seems to be crucial in that respect. On the one hand, this is part of the processes of re-orientation and conceptual justification of the new role of S&T, manifested in the accounts for Mode-2 science, post-normal science, post-modern science, etc. On the other hand, it is compatible with the EU institutional coupling of well-being and economic growth through the concept of innovation. Innovation is perceived as a means to mitigate the consequences of modernization and capitalist production, manifested in pollution, resource shortages and ultimately a breakdown of the current world system. And this is a prevailing intellectual attitude. For example, stepping on the tradition of world system analysis and global modeling, the Club of Rome is currently warning that if major changes do not happen (towards a powerful combination of enlightened entrepreneurialism, technology and innovative policy), the sustainability of the world system is at stake (due to demographic burden and deficiency of resources) [LOV 18]. This serves the market’s push for innovation well, by advancing precarious accounts for grand challenges and near-catastrophic scenarios for the future. In sum, there is a normative conflict within the EU’s advancement of RRI in terms of its instrumentality. RRI is imagined to help achieve what is believed to be compatible logics of responsibilization by contextualization, and marketization, which is to translate into societal well-being manifested in smart, sustainable and inclusive economic growth. The EU institutional discourse argues the inevitability of opening up the laboratories for public

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dialogue and democratizing the knowledge-creation process by community-based, user-led innovation that contests monopolies, knowledge asymmetries and IPR/property regimes of private and public innovation cycles. At the same time, there is a steady policy line of promoting R&I to be the engine of economic growth and as such demands to “embed science and innovation more strongly in society”. It needs to be given priority in terms of social climate (fostering culture that “promotes, welcomes and rewards innovation”) and where necessary “mitigate or entirely remove administrative, economic and social obstacles that stand in its way” [EUR 14c]. As can be seen, two major pillars in construing the identity of the EU get in conflict. The social and economic policy requires an institutional environment that would allow for R&I to strive with no impediments – for the purposes of sustaining the EU market position in a highly competitive global environment. Then the fundamental rights line, which permeates all policies including EU RTD, needs to install certain safeguards, hampering the free flourishing (understood as not imposing certain directions or procedural difficulties) of R&I. Well, discursively, at least on the part of ethics policies, this is not a conflict but an opportunity for innovation not to be stopped/censured but to undergo “an acceptability filter” that would actually ensure a higher chance of market uptake and avoid a waste of RTD resources. This, however, seems to be an impediment for the imperative for speedy economic time, which evades all regulatory or steering filters that can slow down the process of commoditization and marketization. The EU’s take on the matter implies approaching competition in terms of quality and acceptability rather than speed and discontinuity. Therefore, the invested hope in science and technology as an engine of economic growth, and by association with well-being, clashes with the respectful consideration of public skepticism as to science. These are at the heart of the contradictory institutionalization of the new governance of RTD, embodied in RRI – simultaneously relying on the instrumental value of science while trying to reinvigorate a commitment to renegotiate its intrinsic value by the process of responsibilization. 4.2. The RRI “keys”: keys to what? In this section, I will attempt to interpret the significance of the five key areas of RRI implementation, advanced by the European Commission,

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through the prism of what we already denoted as the “economic imprint” in the EU governance of RTD. This will reveal their expediency or their overall utility in view of new institutional economics or other governance approaches, applied to the realm of research and innovation. In this respect, we need to recognize that the EU institutional rationality advances the ideal of RRI as a coordination format, which is to integrate and advance different policy orientations that already exist within the efforts to address the regulatory difficulties and the democratic deficit within the Union. Therefore, RRI is perceived not as a conceptual breakthrough that is yet to clear up and unfold into hitherto unknown direction, but a governance mechanism that needs to bring together in a functional way five policy lines into what is believed to constitute a responsibilization endeavor. Neither public engagement and ethics, nor science education, open science and gender are new items within the EU agenda. The policy community tries to extend the reach of these normative directions onto the RTD realm under the auspices of the responsibility concept. 4.2.1. Public engagement The European Commission depicts the rationale of public engagement within the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) framework as “co-creating the future with citizens and civil society organizations, and also bringing on board the widest possible diversity of actors that would not normally interact with each other [emphasis added], on matters of science and technology” [EUR 18a]. It can be advanced by: establishing participatory formats in which different societal actors (researchers, policymakers, industry and civil society organizations, NGOs and citizens) realize an iterative and inclusive dialogue; fostering responsiveness (mutual understanding and co-creation) in the process of coming up with research agendas and innovation solutions that are to tackle societal challenges; and encouraging wider acceptability of results. The expected contribution of promoting public engagement is in building a more scientifically literate society that is to be active in the process of democratization in all its aspects, including that of knowledge-creation; in diversification of perspectives that can lead to creative research designs and results; and in producing more societally relevant and desirable research and innovation outcomes that are to address societal challenges.

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All this represents the EU institutional perspective on public engagement in the governance of RTD. As can be noted, the value of multi-actor participation is seen in epistemic (revealing hidden knowledge, creative solutions), axiological (reflecting variety of normative perspectives) and political (advancing democratization) terms. Public engagement is advanced as a response to the problem of the alienation between a distrustful public and a complacent scientific community. It is conceived as a certain stage in an evolutionary (and yet layered) process of bringing science and society closer. First, it is pursued within the PUS model – that is, educating and informing the public and covering gaps in the public’s knowledge of scientific facts. Then, it is evolving into what is described as a transition from a deficit model to dialogue (in FP6, the Science and Society program): “The science community has adopted a more conversational tone in its dealings with the public, if not always with enthusiasm, then at least out of a recognition that new forms of engagement are now a non-negotiable clause of their license to operate” [EUR 08, p. 16]. Currently, within both academic and institutional debates on RRI, the focus is on moving public engagement to earlier stages of the research and innovation process in order to open room for meaningful debate and opportunities for altering the trajectories of technology. The impetus for bridging the gap between the public and the scientific community through participatory approaches is not a self-generated process within the realm of RTD governance. It is part and parcel of grander conceptual and institutional changes within the evolution of the European political model and its orientation towards new governance. With the Lisbon Treaty (2009), the principle of representative democracy has been complemented with that of participatory democracy. Civil society has been expected to play a more important role in the legitimization of policies by being involved in shaping the latter. The official aim was to compensate for what was deemed to be the democratic deficit of the EU. However, the evoking of civil society as a remedy comes in the context of greater attention (since the 1980s) towards the new role of non-governmental organizations in the framework of national and global governance. The image of the actively engaged citizen comes to fill in the gaps and address the deficiencies of public rule in the context of governability crisis and incredulity towards metanarratives [LYO 93]. Then, the popularity of proceduralist scholarship emphasizing the importance of deliberation for achieving a normative agreement has also its significance in establishing the role of civil society in the policy-making process. Although the principle of participatory

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democracy is deemed to add up and compensate for the shortcomings of the representative model, we should seriously consider whether those two are not actually in conflict rather than remedying each other. Representativeness entails a particularistic notion of political life at the heart of which is delegation and trust in the representative; participation entails opening up the field for direct public expression and action for the citizens. The aim is to tap on their insights and concerns in order to elaborate legitimate policy; and then by denouncing the delegation principle, to elevate them to a position of sharing/partnering in political responsibility (by participating in the conception and engaging with the implementation of those policies). Тhe 1990s also heralded the advent of the Third Way model which opens more space for civil society organizations (CSOs) to contribute for more adequate problem-solving. In a way, we might grasp the new institutionalist roots of this – tapping on civil society’s resources for the purposes of good governance. Of course, we might not omit the fact that such a perspective was advanced with the insistence of Commissioner Prodi in cooperation with the Forward Studies Unit, which heavily worked on the notion of reflexive law and governance. This approach was continued with the Barroso Commission; however, reference was made to “stakeholders” as contributing to better legislation rather than to “civil society”. Then, related to that period, the Transparency Initiative (2005) treated all CSOs as “interest groups” [KOH 10]. This semantic change is very important and telling for the way public engagement would be understood from then on – more in the mode of representative democracy rather than in the emancipatory mode of participatory democracy. Nevertheless, as Beate Kohler-Koch points out, we cannot deny the improvements in the regime of participatory governance that the EC is trying to advance; however, it does not live up to the set normative standards [KOH 10, p. 12]. In terms of quality, it cannot reach what it promises. In terms of deliberative democracy, the case is not different. Although there are organizations adjoined to the Commission that are to provide continual reflection on matters of interest, participatory formats of public engagement such as citizen cafes, conferences and juries do not provide the necessary conditions for actual deliberative effort (time, continual engagement, face to face meetings, etc.). She provocatively concludes that participatory governance is actually part of the EC’s knowledge collection strategy, which

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aims integration and system transformation. Ironically, it could serve the consolidation of the EU elites instead of the actual empowerment of citizens. From the perspective of the new governance paradigm, public engagement can be construed as a mechanism for communicating and processing relevant information. In this line of thinking, Rowe and Frewer advance a classification of participatory mechanisms in view of how well they process “the relevant information (knowledge and/or opinions) from the maximum number of relevant sources and transferring this efficiently to the appropriate receivers” [ROW 05, p. 263]. This take on public engagement is in line with the assumptions of new governance approaches and their focus on coordination mechanism that can effectively pool and harness the diversity of resources, talents, skills and knowledge of the participating actors. Rowe and Frewer outline three types of mechanisms of public involvement: public communication (one-way information flow from the sponsor to the participants), public consultation (one-way information flow from the participants to the sponsor) and public participation (two-way flows, dialogue between the sponsors and the participants). Given that, public engagement within RRI can be conceptualized as more advanced coordination mechanism that promotes a meaningful dialogue between multiple social actors. As we saw, this is “key” to coming up with more creative and legitimate research processes, which may foster the acceptability of their marketable products. Explaining the particularities of the notion of public engagement the way it is advanced within European new governance policies, was much needed to illustrate that within its institutionalization, there could be found encoded distortions that make it possible to confine the promise of public involvement to the practice of narrow sectorial representation. This is also the case with the governance of RTD. RRI offers the notion of collective responsibility and engagement of a broad range of perspectives in the research and innovation process. However, the problems pertaining to the complex relations between discourses advancing participatory and representative elements of democracy could result in blurring the distinctions between terms like “stakeholders”, “end users”, “interest groups”, “civil society” and “the public”. Furthermore, in the context of the overall normative orientation of market societies, this definitional perplexity runs the risk of opening avenues for far-reaching misconceptions, such as construing economic growth as exhaustive of societal well-being, assuming

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industry interests to be in the general public interest, or advancing mere representation as sufficient for actual responsibilization. 4.2.2. Open access/open science The European Commission regards open access (making research findings available free of charge for readers) to be crucial for improving knowledge circulation. It is expected to make science more efficient and help innovation both in the public and private sector. The rationale for open access is outlined in [EUR 12b]. Since an economy based on knowledge and innovation is a priority, open access to publications and data from publicly funded research should be granted. Then, scientific results can be re-used, duplication of efforts could be reduced, time spent for searching for information and accessing could be minimized, scientific progress could be sped up, and businesses could benefit from wider access to scientific results which will allegedly improve their capacity to innovate. Crucial in this respect is building mechanisms and e-infrastructures for long-term preservation of research results and scientific data. As it can be seen, the rationale is quite economistic in the sense of aiming for optimization and effective use of resources (avoiding redundant efforts). Policies on open access need to address a wider range of issues such as infrastructure, intellectual property rights, content-mining, alternative metrics and various forms of collaboration (inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional and international) among all actors in the research and innovation realm. This prompted the European Commission to move from “open access” towards the broader issue of “open science” [EUR 18b]. In 2015, Commissioner Carlos Moeda announced a new strategy in the realm of European research and innovation, which promoted actual expansion of the principle of openness by advancing the policy triad “Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World” [EUR 15b]. If before openness was pursued in achieving physical integration, now it needs more work on the digital front. This is viewed as instrumental in: 1) successful commercialization of EU-produced research results (more openness to finances); 2) turning science into an open, collaborative and participative process by involving more actors, open access and open data (raises questions as to the availability of common standards for the quality of the data and the data

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collection practices), grappling with the problem of scientific misconduct head-on and launching an initiative on research integrity to “show to the public that European science is above reproach”); 3) more active science diplomacy and engagement in global scientific cooperation [EUR 15b]. The gist of the speech is the need for the policy-making world to follow suit when the practice of doing research and innovation is changing so drastically. One of the problems he noted as regards moving forward the ideal of open innovation is the regulation issue: “First, I believe we need to do more to create a regulatory environment for innovation to flourish. How do we make sure that legislative processes that take several years can adapt to technologies that evolve every month? How do we make sure that regulation is based on an innovation principle as well as a precautionary principle?” [EUR 15b]. Here, we can note the institutional sanction on the economic expediency of open science. In addition to that, a governance aporia we have previously noted surfaces again. How to elaborate an adequate regulatory framework for activities which aim to go beyond that framework? Is it a matter of legal normativity catching up with social change or a matter of loosening regulatory oversight? It is not quite clear in what regulatory environment innovation would flourish “above reproach” when reflexivity and forming even a provisional opinion on such a thorny matter requires time and vigilance. In sum, this comes to illustrate the normative conflict between the imperative for economic growth and the imperative for responsibilization. We need to be a little careful with the notion of open innovation and its actual social implications. Open innovation is a business-oriented mechanism, a kind of crowdsourcing tool to extract customers’ feedback and engage the consumer in the production and the design of the product3. It is usually hailed as a way to bridge the gap between the industry’s inertia and 3 “Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology” [CHE 06, p. 1].

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the specific users’ needs. However, we will not exaggerate its nature as socially sensitive innovation. Rather, it can be construed as preferencesensitive innovation, and by inclusion of stakeholders/consumers in the process, it seeks to find more adequate ways for product realization. We might say it is responsive but not socially responsible in the sense that its consequences are carefully examined or the benefits of the process are justly shared. At its end, it is an instrument in the overall profit-making strategies of a company, which would allow the acceleration of the economic time (with such adjustment of products, or by letting consumers devise their products, reducing costs, gain public trust – asking the consumers what they want, etc.). Such a vision of openness does not restore the common good status of knowledge. It reproduces well-known models of exclusivity and profit-seeking by opening the process for various channels and sources of information. Users co-innovate but do not consume the added value of their contribution. Therefore, open innovation is crucial to accelerated economic time. Economizing on acceptance costs entails involving the end-users as cocreators, thereby solving the uptake problem ex-ante instead of managing it ex-post. It is a resourceful way of harvesting ideas (for which management is usually paid) from below (user-led innovation, community of active users, co-creators, experience-based design input, employees’ involvement), thus reproducing existing social inequalities purported to be a result of the neutral effects of rewarding merit and contribution. The theme of openness has several connotations as to the research and innovation process and fits well with certain assumptions of the new governance theories. Be it advanced in the mode of open access, open science or open innovation, it nevertheless implies: – opening information channels (maximizing relevant information); – opening for outsiders’ perspectives (source of novel ideas, exploitation of free input); – co-construction with end-users (consumers designing the products, exploitation of free intellectual labor); – advancing mechanisms for accumulation of the scientific endeavor (avoiding duplication of effort);

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– cost-efficiency (avoiding redundancy in project proposals and multiple financing); – transparency (more visibility of the research process and outcomes for the purposes of gaining the public’s trust). The assumption is that unblocked information channels will lead to the availability of/access to more adequate information on a particular subject, hence to better knowledge in need for the decision-making process. Within this perspective the scientific realm is regarded as a communication system, in which the efficient allocation of information would lead to efficient performance, and – in new institutional economics’ terms – to minimizing transaction costs. 4.2.3. Gender Within Horizon 2020, the gender equality agenda of the Commission includes fostering gender balance in research teams, ensuring gender balance in decision-making (to reach the target of 40% of the under-represented sex in panels and groups and of 50% in advisory groups) and integrating the gender dimension in research and innovation content in order to boost scientific quality along with the societal relevance of the produced knowledge or technologies. The far-reaching goals are: long-term institutional change in research organizations; improving women’s scientific careers and empowering them as to decision-making; and using societal relevance of gender-sensitive research content in the production of goods and services better suited to potential markets [EUR 18c]. Gender equality represents a specific aspect of the responsibilization process not only in the realm of RTD but also in all the EU policies. Its peculiarity rests upon the fact that this issue is an intersection of several other topics. First, promoting and sustaining gender equality is a matter of democratization efforts, an inclusive approach emphasizing the equal worth of all citizens to political rights and responsibilities. In this sense, it is a diversity matter that targets the under-representation of women in science. Second, it implies a claim for neutrality, entails benevolent institutional blindness to sex and calls for overcoming “unconscious biases” oscillated in organizational forms (take, for example, the recruiting process) that can

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disadvantage certain individuals. Third, it is a matter with an ethics-related charge as long as it implies some notion of justice behind the claim for equal treatment, and targets unfair practices based on adhering to stereotypes (inequality in pay, working conditions, career opportunities, etc.). Fourth, it is tightly connected with other RRI keys besides participation and ethics. Science education aims popularization efforts to result in the involvement of more young people, irrespective of their gender, in the realm of science and technology – a new generation of innovators-entrepreneurs. Then, open access mechanisms can actually uphold the popularization efforts that would inspire more women and girls to find interest in research and take up a scientific career. Procedurally, the practical advancement of the gender key in the agenda of the EC to institutionally integrate a process of responsibilization implies two things mainly. First, the composition of consortiums which influences recruitment policies and personnel choices in the partnering organizations be they scientific or non-scientific (SMEs, NGOs, technological corporations, etc.). It is about representation and has democratic rationale. Second, the integration of the gender theme in the content of the research process and its products is to ensure a gender dimension of every analysis or even material item. For example, is a device or piece of software equally friendly towards both sexes? Does it convey discriminatory messages or unconscious biases? Does it reproduce gender-unfair practices? What are the gender aspects of a particular social phenomenon (e.g. new terrorism)? All this, however, cannot obviate the fact that the gender key is one more manifestation of the specific economistic nuances in the governance approach of the Commission when it comes to responsibility. On the one hand, the integration of the gender dimension relies on an institutionalist approach, based on the assumption that institutional arrangements shape behavior and could create new (more acceptable) stereotypes. As behavioral economist Iris Bohnet notes, it is very important to concentrate on procedural strategies aimed at de-biasing organizations rather than on efforts to change the mind-set of single individuals (through trainings, diversity programs, capacity building programs, etc.), and rely on the psychological effect of adopting fashionable management practices as part of the competition game ‒ procedures for un-rooting biases might be a good PR and marketization tool to gain customers’ trust and achieve competitive advantage (see [BOH 16]).

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The next remark is related to the previous one and it concerns the economization of the gender issue. It seems that for EU institutional rationality and many proponents of “gender equality by design”, the latter is socially beneficial in terms of some abstract ethical considerations pertaining to justice and in view of its potential to contribute to better economic results manifested in more efficiency, economic growth and innovation output. Gender equality is a means for broadening the talent and skills pool that any organization can benefit from. In other words, de-biasing is business efficient and fits well the ideal of the neutrality of the market as an engine for efficient distribution of resources (in this case – skills and competences on the labor market) and a promise for a better performance in a highly competitive global market, where thinking outside the box and constantly producing innovations is very important for keeping a competitive edge. Therefore, it is quite logical for the EU, which aspires to keep its status as a global economic player relying on the notion of an innovation union, to see gender equality in RTD not only in terms of its democratic value but also in view of its economic potential (tapping on diversity of talent). 4.2.4. Ethics In line with the EU RTD policy, ethics is now an integral part in all stages of the research and innovation process. It is considered to be crucial in achieving excellence of research. With the ethics key, the European Commission advances three levels of consideration as to the acceptability of the research and innovation process [EUR 18d]. The first one is application of fundamental ethical principles reflecting the normative and value consensus in the EU and inscribed in the texts of the ECHR and CFREU. The second one concerns hard law regulation and requires compliance with the provisions of national, EU and international laws. The third one refers to following research integrity standards by avoiding fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or other research misconduct. A source of official normative guidance with this respect is the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity [ALL 17]. However, we could also explore the contribution of ethics in new governance or economistic terms. Later in this book, we will pay more attention to the particularities of ethics institutionalization within the governance of RTD. As of now, it would suffice to quote an observation as to the instrumentality of ethics in the EU policy:

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“[Ethics] has been used at times by EU institutions to neutralize political issues, to introduce norms outside the traditional process of law-making, to evoke society without involving it, to pay lip service to democratic concerns while only expert processes were taking place, to control citizens’ behavior and even to allow direct intervention into their bodies, and to exempt the market from ethical criticism and debate” [EUR 07c, p. 47]. Its utility can be construed in terms of bridging science and society, as an instrument to de-politicize highly sensitive issues based on expert judgment, and recently, to boost competitiveness by ensuring societally and ethically acceptable products. 4.2.5. Science education Institutional rationality sees the expediency of science education in terms of building capacities and developing innovative ways of connecting science to society. The overall aim is to promote the reproduction and the sustainability of the scientific field by increasing its attractiveness to the public. This involves not only orientation towards the young people and stimulating their interest and career choice within the realm of research and innovation activities, but also a broader engagement with improving the overall science and technology literacy in our societies [EUR 18e]. Hence, bringing scientific truth in an attractive form to the public entails a complex, sustainable and cross-cutting interaction between relevant actors that are to accomplish together this translation effort: different levels of the education system, universities and other higher education establishments, research and innovation funding and performing organizations, civil society organizations and NGO’s, industry, policymakers, professors, teachers, students and pupils, science museums and science centers. The expected impact of science education is in the direction of developing scientific citizenship. For that end, it is crucial to conceive innovative pedagogies in science education that are to attract more people towards science, especially young people, and opening career possibilities in the realm of science, technology, engineering and innovation. Then, another goal is to integrate RRI into higher education curricula so that thorny issues

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of responsibilization are addressed at an early stage of education. In sum, science education is instrumental in creating a culture that celebrates and advances innovation. 4.3. Walking the responsibilization

tightrope

between

democratization

and

We already noted that the RRI responsibilization agenda is advanced in the context of an emerging new research culture, a research culture that it is to contribute to as well. Funtowicz and Ravetz describe it as post-normal science [FUN 93], as a research endeavor that promotes a new problem-solving strategy in a situation of system uncertainties (epistemological or ethical) and high decision stakes (reflecting conflicting purposes among stakeholders). Traditional problem-solving strategies, which rely on certainty and value neutrality such as core science (curiositymotivated), applied science (mission-oriented) and professional consultancy (client-serving), prove to be ineffective. In the context of “unpredictability, incomplete control and plurality of legitimate perspectives”, quality assurance of scientific input to the policy process requires “extended peer community” of all those with stakes in the dialogue on the issue at hand. The democratization of the knowledge-creation process is to responsibilize it as long as it advances a better contextualization and societal validation of scientific knowledge for the purposes of decision-making. Post-normal science is not to replace but only to complement traditional forms of problem-solving. It is issue-driven and entails scientific arguments that are based not on a formalized deduction but on interactive dialogue. As we can see, extended involvement of ever more legitimate participants as peer community is construed as a remedy for the lack of visibility and ethical disorientation. Thus, democratization of science is not an end in itself. Its contribution is sought in enriching scientific knowledge despite the reluctance of the scientific community to incorporate non-codified knowledge in its work. A manifestation of post-normal science is the notion of Citizen Science. It is promoted as one embracing the conceptual coupling of responsibilization and democratization: “The term Citizen Science has been used to define a series of activities that link the general public with scientific research.

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Volunteers and non-professionals contribute collectively in a diverse range of scientific projects to answer real-world questions” [SOC 13, p. 21]. It implies engagement of the general public with the scientific effort which in its turn advances participatory approaches in opening up the scientific realm for additional information flows and non-codified knowledge (producing better science and evidence-based research). It is supposed to democratize the research process (PES and PUS) and ensure better interaction with stakeholders and policymakers (networked science). This opens the doors of the highly professionalized field of science for amateurs, non-scientists and laypersons. Probably the rationale is not only in targeting the trust issue in Science–Society relations, but also in establishing channels for new ideas, inputs and contributions to the realm of innovation, whose creative potential could be fed by “thinking outside the box” enthusiasts. This insistence on the role of the non-professional scientist is somehow restorative in the sense that it aims to soften the rigidity of the contemporary research field by reintroducing it to its own tradition – that of scientific and technological progress driven by curiosity, non-professional experimentation, awe and inspiration from the harmless play of forces of nature in a simulated environment, or entrepreneurial invention. All this is regarded as an approach that aims for the democratization of science (the sixth principle of the European Citizen Science Association [ECS 15]). At the very same time, it nurtures a reverse direction of this collaboration – it allows science to be engaged in the democratic and policy process [LEW 04]. One problem is that the democratization of science within the new contract for science is very often understood in economistic terms – either as entrepreneurial science or as a process of democratizing the economy of research by the means of entities like science shops or science factories. In this context, responsibilization, as challenging the normative pressure of market regulation, becomes problematic. Another trouble is that under the auspices of citizen science highly unobtrusive democratization of the research realm could lead to dangerous practices and defying stringent criteria on safety and protection of the research subjects. For example, there are concerns about the well-being of research participants in patient-initiated medical experiments.

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When we take a closer look at the impetus for democratization of the knowledge-creation process, we might note that it presents us with certain challenges as to the promise for responsibilization as alertness and attentiveness as to the ambiguous nature of the scientific endeavor. Why? First, because the opening of the research process for exchanges with the public within participatory structures and bridging disciplinary perspectives as a problem-solving strategy can actually reduce the chances for reflexivity, which is a crucial element in the responsibilization process. This can be explained with the already mentioned efficacy paradox in reflexive governance. Second, the diversification of participants on the level of expertise (including laypersons, users, stakeholders) and on the level of epistemology (evoking alternative disciplinary perspectives) changes the notion of method. It does not take much effort to understand how method as practice depicts (claims for representation), explains (seeking visibility on the mechanisms in action) and produces (puts to political use) reality. The latter aspect is very important in the sense that it is a two-way door – it can sustain the responsibilization promise or it could lead to misuse under the pretext of democratization. The changing profile of the figure of the researcher, by including exogenous groups in the scientific process, puts rigidity of method into question. Very often such heterogeneous groups (e.g. EU projects) need to achieve some kind of reconciliation between their different approaches. Sometimes, this might come at the price of methodological compromise on the part of academic science. Thus, post-academic science allows for more experimentation with method, a playful attitude towards methodology, juggling with what seem like incompatible tools and approaches. This interaction is expected to produce what is believed to be a relevant and comprehensive solution for the local knowledge-production context. While some propose a normative account of the need to embrace the concept of methodological bricolage as a possibility for integrating critical reflexivity and ethics in research [ARA 14a], I am cautious in advancing such a perspective. Nevertheless, I recognize that methods as practices have performative function as well as representative. This opens opportunities to playfully integrate ethically relevant perspectives that would otherwise be perceived as irrelevant by technical and business partners in research consortiums. Still, that same opportunity allows for integrating other, interest-laden perspectives, which could be later enacted in the guise of objective methods for conceiving social phenomena and enacting certain

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practices/identities. We can indicate the example of novel security technologies, where the mere method (e.g. crime mapping) is already producing certain realities (categories of people, geographical and political divisions, etc.) [LOU 14]. Therefore, the democratization of the knowledge-creation process, which more or less mimics participatory mechanisms in representative democracies, could claim responsibilization while obscuring the ambiguous nature of the results it produces. Put plainly, experimental approaches to method pave the way for questionable legitimization strategies. And legitimization is not the same as responsibilization. In this new research culture of democratization of the knowledge-creation process, inter- and trans-disciplinarity is actualized around blurring the lines between academic and non-academic. Method becomes a negotiation of perspectives, an improvisation on creative assemblages of concepts, tools and empirical objects that would probably not sustain tests for reliable universal codified knowledge but is hoped to produce problem-relevant localized knowledge. This new research culture puts less emphasis on understanding than on change, less on pursuing the truth than on impacting reality (impact is a crucial criterion in EU-funded research). This allows for the abovementioned experimental approach regarding methods. The latter is perceived to be instrumental in improving real-life conditions rather than compiling what is perceived to be an abstract (detached) knowledge. In a way, participatory approaches in research, through the notion of democratization, bring the flavor of anti-elitism in the knowledge-creation process thus legitimizing different levels of insight as equally valuable in the conception of solutions. This denies any privileged epistemic viewpoint. Furthermore, such opening beyond the condescending gaze of academic science claims to expand responsibility onto a wider range of stakeholders in the process. Then we face the danger of responsibility being inflated. If responsibility is “shared”, then the normative commitment might not stay strong. In practice, it could lead to the opposite – dispersal of responsibility and weakening of the normative engagement with ethical and moral considerations, thereby dulling the vigilance and alertness we pinpointed to be crucial for the process of responsibilization. Experimentation blurs the line between the scientific approach and the artistic approach in method-conceiving. The playful attitude towards truth-

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seeking in research entails tremendous political responsibility. That is so because the loose approach to scientific rigorousness empties research ethics from its core normative underlining. Speculative knowledge will always lurk behind experimental methodological bricolages. This makes the soil fertile for grave political misuses as traditional scientific responsibility cannot be assumed. The third problem is whether a responsible transdisciplinary dialogue could be organized on the basis of radically differing competencies as to the matter in question. The EU institutional discourse on participation assumes that any non-scientific perspective is valuable and contains the potential to offer non-codified but still relevant knowledge that could be useful or eye-opening as to the context of application of the research results. For example, Horizon 2020 advances trans-disciplinarity as a necessary integration of “(a) theories, concepts, knowledge, data, and techniques from two or more scientific disciplines, and (b) non-academic and non-formalized knowledge” so that it could contribute to “advancing fundamental understanding or solving complex problems while fostering multi-actor engagement in the research and innovation process” [EUR 14b, p. 6]. Understandably, there are some difficulties with this approach. What if the input of laypersons is influenced by distorted media messages on a particular strand of technologies and their voice is either highly favorable without considering their problematic aspects, or vehemently rejectionist without understanding what this technology is all about? Then, what if the usefulness of those exogenous voices is actually reduced to legitimization purposes? The policy realm or the market realm can very easily make them just poster persons for the sake of fostering favorable public opinion. Then, another problem comes, as we showed in section 4.1, from the insistent reliance on the notion of stakeholder in advancing the new governance paradigm by EU institutions. Democratization is discursively advanced as a process of involving different stakeholders. The term comes from organizational theory and denotes subjects with legitimate interests and claims with respect to the success or failure of an organization [FRE 10]. The incorporation of the notion of stakeholder within institutional parlance on democratization/responsibilization of the research and innovation realm is a slippery slope in two respects. First, there is a danger that those social actors with clear interests in a project or other research endeavor (that are engaged but not as disinterested contributors but as subjects with stakes) are

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assumed to represent and express the public interest. The latter, obviously, can very often be in conflict with their particular organizational strategies (we assume that stakeholders in research represent organizational entities not personal positions, including the research organizations). Second, there is some danger that the notion of stakeholder will occupy the notion of societal actor – it will either confine the range of legitimate actors (e.g. people with local or tacit knowledge, etc.) or will re-conceptualize their respective roles in the process. One of the greatest challenges before the responsibilizaion endeavor actually comes from the crisis of contemporary democracy, which is manifested in institutional dysfunctions, “delegitimization” of authority, system overload, “disaggregation” of interests, ineffective government, demagogy, etc. [CRO 75, CUN 02, pp. 15–26]. The appeal for participation is not only driven by the demand for inclusion of a broader specter of societal actors in the decision-making process to assume responsibility (democratization as responsibilization) but also for a more active role in checking government action, pushing for or objecting to it. The problem is the lack of a collective political subject. One of the syndromes of contemporary democracies is the fragmented public, which practically means an absence of a consolidated political subject. In this context, Ralf Dahrendorf probably rightly notes that the actual challenge before democracy is how to re-establish an effective general political public under the changed conditions [DAH 75, pp. 188–195]. Put in our terms, how to restore the conditions for a normative confluence when democratic imagination regards participation only in particularistic terms? This is also a pending question for RRI implementation. Usually, institutional justification of the need for responsibilization of the techno-scientific advancement resorts to the notion of “the public” or “society” that needs to be engaged in the knowledge-creation process, thereby democratizing and enriching the latter with valuable external perspectives. This entails the (not very exhaustive) representation of particularistic visions and reproducing the above-mentioned problem – trying to reach a consensus and normative accord without having a collective subject. The practicalities of involving laypersons or end-users in the process go under the auspices of bridging the imagined collective agencies of “science” and “society”/“research & innovation” and “the public” thus performing only a rhetorical or legitimization function. It does not solve the issue of the democratic deficit in view of knowledge production, nor does it

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overcome the inherent normative fragmentation of such involvement. In reality, what appears to be steps for solving the problem for democratic governance of R&I reproduces the dysfunctionalities of contemporary democracies. It is a vicious cycle of misrecognition between the problem and the remedy. A theoretical response to the situation of the lack of a consolidated “public” has been suggested by Goodin and Dryzek who advance a perspective emphasizing the multiplicity of audiences [GOO 06]. They construe “the public” as a space rather than a subject ‒ a space where different “mini-publics” get involved depending on the issue at hand. Therefore, the public is a deliberative space where constantly shifting configurations of concerned particularistic voices are being heard. However, this vision is not devoid of problems as well. Can we stipulate that those voices are actually being heard or only being exploited for legitimization purposes towards a predetermined course of action? Then what about the claims and aims for reaching a consensus that reflects a unified position stemming from society? Is it aggregation, how does it reconcile conflicting positions, are the concessions made productive or, on the contrary, do they entail not very responsible governance of research and innovation? What about peer pressure, expert pressure, business pressure, cognitive biases, etc.? Furthermore, even though those considerations are being heard, how can those perspectives actually be integrated in the following implementation strategies so that the responsibilization effort is accomplished? Well, there are various conceptual answers to these questions, the most prominent of which is the strategy of humility of ambitions and “down-to-earth” concessions from the promissory ideal of participation. Even though the ideal of full normative adjustment and responsible collective action cannot be achieved, those same attempts are not futile; they could reach incremental changes here and there and make revealing findings that might serve future responsibilization efforts. In sum, it seems true that public engagement in terms of democratizing science policy presents dangers of “overpromising” [STI 14]. However, if we still cannot solve all the problems of responsibilization through democratization, does it mean that we have to question the prospective value of participation altogether? There is no final recipe for bridging the two. It requires constant experimentation and learning from each and every case. It accomplishes a humble progress, but progress nevertheless. There are voices [BUR 14] noticing that politicians need to be more involved in this process,

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or that the process needs to be more integrated in a political context. Then, politicians would not only be collectors of those voices, mediators and coordinators, but also actual participants. This will increase the chances of impact and will open room for more interventionist paths into reality. Engagement also needs to be politicized and exercised on the part of policymakers, not only demonstrated by bringing together segmental perspectives from the alleged body of the public. Therefore, democratization of the knowledge-creation process is not sufficient for advancing responsibilization. The latter stands no chances if the political realm perceives the latter only as coordination and mediation effort vis-à-vis the deep normative fragmentation of contemporary societies.

5 Ethics and the RRI Promise

5.1. Ethics in the EU governance of RTD: achievements, problems and challenges In the previous chapter, we briefly examined the features of the “ethics” key that is advanced within the implementation of RRI. We indicated the three main points of reference when examining the acceptability of a proposed research and innovation process and its eventual marketable products. First, it is the EU normative orientation towards fundamental rights, agreed and advanced as a legal obligation with the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 and inscribed in the provisions of the EUFRC and ECHR. Then, acceptability entails compliance with the existing legal normative framework composed of national, European and international laws. Last but not least, vigilance on ethics in RDT cannot omit what has traditionally been regarded as standards of research integrity. They pertain to research conduct for ensuring the quality and reliability of the research results and treat questions such as plagiarism, falsification of data and misinterpretation of results. In this section, I will focus on two very important manifestations of the integration of ethics as expertise in EU governance of RTD – as policy advice and as assessment of research projects (Ethics Appraisal). The way ethics is being activated on those two levels greatly influences the way it is being incorporated within the actual work of the research projects. And although the RRI community often laments the insufficiency of the institutional operationalization of ethics along the lines of compliance with existing legal normative base (legal compliance), we cannot deny that the progressive codification of ethics standards as to the research realm from the

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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last few decades is an achievement nonetheless. The features of the Ethics Appraisal procedure, as we will see below, demonstrate that. But first, let us start with the achievements, problems and challenges concerning the first mode of integration of ethics. It advances an advisory mechanism in the service of the policy-making world and is embodied in the European Group on Ethics (EGE), which is currently reformulated as EGE on Science and New Technologies. EGE is an advisory body to the President of the EC and its main role is in producing statements and opinions as to the intersection of S&T progress with ethical, societal and fundamental rights issues. It provides an ex ante perspective on the ethical aspects of the development and application of novel technologies (e.g. nanomedicine, genetic testing in the workplace, doping in sports and animal cloning for food supply). This is in line with new governance approaches because it seeks for building a better coordination mechanism that offers more relevant knowledge to decision-making bodies prior to issuing a political and juridical sanction. EGE started its existence in 1991 as a body whose aim was to exert ethical oversight in the realm of biotechnological innovation (Group of Advisers on the Ethical Implications of Biotechnology [GAEIB]). As of now, its scope of scrutiny has been expanded to other fields of new and emerging technologies. What is particular about this level of integration of ethics is that it is under the form of consultation with privileged epistemic perspectives (high-level expertise). Although its statements have no binding judicial force, it is important to note that the documents issued by EGE are taken under consideration in courts, the most notable example being the European Court on Human Rights, thus introducing what is considered ethics expertise into the operating legal order. Of course, its expertness could be questioned regarding several sources of possible distortion: the composition of EGE, the particular normative orientations of its members, the mechanisms of appointing and so on. Its composition is along the uses of the spirit of the new research culture of post-academic science that advances problem-oriented comprehensive understanding of a complex problem by nurturing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary exploration. The ethical perspective is supposed to emerge in the deliberative encounter of different disciplinary perspectives (law, medicine, theology, etc.). As can be seen, this situation advances a particular view on the status of ethics. The latter is not expected to provide a privileged perspective on moral issues but to ensure a democratic discussion between equally weighing normative orientations.

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So ethics is understood more as a procedural possibility for a conversation between different value-orientations rather than providing a substantial answer on what constitutes “the right” or “the acceptable”. Then again, we cannot escape the usual traps of deliberative mechanisms. There are worries about the representativeness of EGE, although the focus is on its expertness (i.e. the religious views of the members is a second-order consideration). As to the normative orientations of its members, it would suffice to say that there have been outcries that the majority were representatives of the catholic faith [PLO 08, p. 844]. As to the recruitment mechanism, members are appointed ad personam by the President of the EC, and currently by the Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation using a three-member Identification Commission. All these issues raise questions not only about the legitimacy and methodological rigorousness of the procedure by which a conclusion is being reached, but also about the blurring of normative ethical and legal orders (by the “quasi-legislative” flavor of their opinions) regarding areas that are potentially highly charged [PLO 08, p. 846]. We can put the expediency of EGE in the context of the efforts of the EU to address public concerns and facilitate dialogue while promoting competitiveness and economic investment in the opening market field of biotechnologies. To put this in other terms, it can be instrumental in addressing the issue of acceptance as to the possible marketable products of the late biotechnological revolution1. On the contrary, it fits well with the new governance approaches that conceive of regulation as a learning and collective experimentation process. As Jim Dratwa noted, EGE is part of an experiment, it is an experimenter and an experimentee, raising the problem of the ethics of emerging technologies simultaneously as something to be subjected to regulation by European institutions and an occasion for identification of European values [DRA 94, p. 111]. At the same time, EGE demonstrates the pitfalls of this new governance culture in which under the auspices of achieving governability of contentious and seemingly unmanageable problems, the thirst for ethics can be exploited and instrumentalized to procure a desirable legitimization of controversial policies.

1 In relation to this, see [EUR 91, EUR 94].

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Of course, given all this, concerns as to the political instrumentalization of the EGE group are understandable. It could serve as a restarter in the cases of political stalemate and play the role of an ethics by-pass when consensus on highly contentious policies cannot be reached (e.g. on embryonic stem cells or the 2010–2013 energy case). And here we can highlight one crucial problem that pertains to the limited space for ethics reflexivity. Institutionalization of ethics inevitably changes the nature of ethics exploration and, as Dratwa notes, presents the EC with opportunities to turn “morality policies” into technocratic solutions [DRA 14]. Thus, what is advanced as ethics expertise can turn into a political instrument for reconfiguring the policy-making process by weakening value-laden normative stances (manifested as political positions) or political positions (disguised as morality-based normative stances) and provide quasi-legislative opinions that rearrange the political terrain. The other level on which ethics is integrated as expertise in the European governance of RTD is what is commonly known as an Ethics Review/Ethics Appraisal procedure. We cannot deny that ethics scrutiny on research activities from FP5 to Horizon 2020 has evolved in many respects. If before an ethics review was an occasional procedure initiated as to problematic research into the realm of life sciences, as of now, it is a comprehensive and compulsory2 case-to-case assessment of research projects in all scientific domains. It aims to: ensure protection of research subjects, research staff, vulnerable populations, animals and the environment; advance precautionary measures against malevolent use of research results (misuse or dual use); limit research activities to acceptable areas of exploration (financing research exclusively for civilian purposes, defining areas of forbidden research) and be vigilant on matters of research integrity (originality and reliability of the research content). As was already mentioned, the normative points of reference are the fundamental ethical principles in CFREU and ECHR; the legal restrictions and opportunities in existing legal provisions (national, EU, international) and professional ethics guidelines offered by the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Currently, what constitutes the Ethics Appraisal procedure [EUR 18f] is much in line with the new governance principles, advanced in all 2 Since FP7 observing ethics considerations in EU-funded research has become a legal obligation, reflected as a contractual obligation in the provisions of the project Grant Agreements.

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EU policies. First, it involves the researchers in the process of assessment against pre-defined ethics issues (those being human embryos/fetuses, human participants, human cells/tissues, personal data, animals, third countries, environment, health and safety, dual use, misuse and other3) in the phase of project application. This gives the chance to construe ethical considerations as part and parcel of the overall research endeavor and ultimately helps scientists trigger a reflex of thinking about the broader societal implication of their work. Then, it attempts to turn the ethics assessment from a one-time act of external sanction into a continuous process of collective regulation by researchers and ethics experts together through all phases of the project. This entails a temporal readjustment of the governance of research and innovation. It advances an ex ante consideration of problematic aspects and their management within the research process. The self-assessment (by researchers), the Ethics Screening (external, by experts) and Ethics Assessment (external, by experts) phases allow addressing those well in advance. Then, the Ethics Check and Ethics Audit procedures help in doing that during the implementation phase of the project and give opportunities to tackle unforeseen ethics issues that emerged in the process of research. As we already saw, new governance approaches attempt to exploit the richness of perspectives into elaborating solutions, thus stimulating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary exchanges. By the same token, various disciplinary perspectives are sought in the composition of Ethics Boards or other advisory bodies within the research projects. They are expected to supervise and guide them with expertise on issues of concern. On this level of integration, we can identify very similar sources of distortion as to ethics reflexivity – scientific myopathy as to broader ethical and societal effects of the proposed research (the self-assessment phase), the profile and the disciplinary biases of the appointed ethics experts (many of which have no philosophical background) at the phases of Ethics Screening and Ethics Assessment, turning morality issues into technocratic solutions by project internal Ethics boards, difficulties for achieving genuine 3 The “Other ethics issues” field in the Ethics Issues checklist offers procedural possibility to integrate ethics reflexivity in a way not determined by institutional rationality. It allows us to identify hidden and unnoticed problematic aspects of the proposed research project and focus the attention of the European Commission’s administration to them ‒ see [EUR 18g, p. 42].

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inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary accord within assessment or advisory bodies (Ethics Panels, Ethics Boards), shortcomings of the legal compliance approach in examining what is acceptable and so on. As can be seen, within the overall integration of ethics in EU governance of RTD, ethics expertise is being assigned with the responsibility to offer political advice, to ensure compliance with the existing legal normative framework and to exacerbate researchers’ sensitivity regarding the broader ethical and societal effects of their activities. This entails technocratic, disciplining and pedagogical function, respectively. However, the mere notion of “ethics expertise” embodies certain contradictions that could explain some of the problems accompanying the responsibilization endeavor. The phrase tries to embrace and reconcile two very distinct orientations – a normative stance (ethics) and a commitment with evidence-based (i.e. empirically manifested) scientific perspective. It is elitist and technocratic, value-laden and factual as well as sanctioning and critical. EU governance of RTD opens possibilities ethics to be instrumentalized exactly because, as we mentioned above, it has been institutionalized in a technocratic form, as expertise. This form, in its sanctioning capacity through the pretense of providing objective and reliable knowledge on ethically contested areas, has a normative power that can easily be utilized for yielding a consensus on controversial value-based issues or for legitimizing questionable policy choices in these areas [LIT 15]. As expertise carries strong connotations of reliability, indisputability and trustfulness, the notion of ethics expertise can be easily instrumentalized as: – a legitimizing device – for advancing policy choices in the absence (or weak presence) of democratic sources of legitimacy. This means that when usual mechanisms of democratic decision-making cannot produce acceptable policy orientations, ethics becomes handy in legitimizing certain directions on the basis of the assumed neutrality and privileged epistemic stance of the “expertise” perspective it provides; – a tool to change the logic of policymaking in a given issue area – resorting to expertise can be a good way of technicalizing/re-technicalizing certain policy issues, thus escaping usual approaches weighing conflicting interest; – an efficient conflict settlement mechanism – in the cases of high political charge, it could be used to transfer the conflict onto an alternative

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arena for building a consensus, one that would possibly produce much needed compromise (such as expert groups) [LIT 15, p. 361]. As can be seen, presenting ethics as expert knowledge, as an embodiment of factual knowledge, could serve to open spaces for political neutralization by re-technocratizing the policy process when it is escaping control (as is the case with highly charged matters such as hESC research) [LIT 15, p. 358]. This is not the age-old goal to find a neutral area where all contestation stops4; rather, it is an attempt to come up with some regulatory solution in a situation of normative disorientation. As Littoz-Monnet noted, it is not so much that the European Commission “depoliticized” the issue but that it was able to control the policy process despite the presence of a salient and publicly debated conflict. This, according to her, represents a new governance mode, which combines a high level of political exposure and a technocratic mode of conflict settlement [LIT 15, p. 369]. Thus, ethics expertise is expected to produce uncontestable and seemingly apolitical “truths” that do not need to be questioned by the means of democratic decision-making. Quite the contrary, by virtue of the interdisciplinary representation in the bodies that elaborate those truths, the latter are thought to produce an approximation of a democratic consensus. Hence, entities like EGE can help in defusing political tensions while the reclassification of ethical and political problems as technical helps in smoothing the initial controversies [BUS 08]. Furthermore, bodies providing “ethics expertise” can be very useful in advancing the interests of the industry. EGE can be construed as a broker mediating between the imperative for economic growth, which is driving the European project as competitive global player, and the societal uptake of new technologies that are supposed to be at the heart of that growth. As is the case with biotechnology, it sought to provide interpretation of the ethical considerations (value-oriented analysis); however, it did not seek to thwart the aspirations of the biotechnology industry as well, especially when the EU relies on the latter to be one of the key engines for achieving its strategic goals.

4 Carl Schmitt’s contention is that the last few centuries in European history are marked with consequent neutralizations and depoliticizations in the search of a sphere where all disputes stop ‒ from 16th-Century theology to 17th-Century metaphysics, to 18th-Century moral philosophy, to 19th-Century economics and to 20th-Century technique [SCH 29].

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The process of institutionalization of ethics is crucial for the effectuation of values [DRA 14] and its evolution represents progress indeed. At the very same time, it has its shortcomings in view of the fact that ethics is promoted in the form of expertise. It can be instrumentalized for underemphasizing important issues, for overdramatizing the importance of others, for neutralizing thorny ethics problems by technocratization, for re-gaining control over the policy process, for containing the discussion along the lines of existing legal provisions, for advancing quasi-legislative soft law instruments, for enacting democratic deliberation without adequate representation and so on. In relation to this, I will quote a paragraph from the MASIS report: “[e]thics has become a political instrument to normalize innovation and to facilitate change. It has been instantiated and captured through numerous ethics committees that have consequently become privileged places to speak in the name of society. Yet, the new type of ethical expertise being created means that in most cases ethical deliberation is by no means a broader participatory exercise, but rather should be understood as a boundary drawing exercise [emphasis added]” [EUR 09, p. 38]. In summary, the current section aimed to reveal a very important aspect of the process of integration of ethics in EU governance of RTD, namely the possible avenues for its instrumentalization. Again, this does not deny the tremendous progress manifested in the gradual codification and implementation of ethics considerations on different levels concerning the research and innovation process. In this respect, our short analysis here might appear rather imbalanced. However, it was done so not with the purpose of concealing the undeniable achievements of EU institutional integration of ethics, but to strongly emphasise the danger of misusing ethics under the auspices of expert knowledge. The latter aspect deserves serious attention as it could eventually result in confining the space for ethics reflexivity and by-passing market-oriented solutions to policy problems, thus increasing the tension between the imperative for responsibility and the specific normative pressures of contemporary market societies.

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5.2. RRI and rediscovering the promises of the Nuremberg Code (1947) As has been noted previously, when it comes to the advancement of ethics in EU RTD, the normative reference is the notion of “fundamental ethical principles” [OFF 99, OFF 02, OFF 06, OFF 13] and “fundamental rights”. It is not by chance that CFREU and ECHR are indicated as leading documents with that respects. The human rights theme is the inevitable aspect in the institutionalized responsibilization of R&I, and can be traced back to the provisions of the so-called Nuremberg Code (1947) that marked a significant moment in the codification of research ethics standards. Internationally, the human rights paradigm was brought forward very strongly after World War II (WWII). Monstrous consequences of Nazi extermination and medical experimentation policies urged a prompt political and legal response to reestablish the inviolability and sanctity of human life against public authorities’ abuse. The Nuremberg trials and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) are outcomes of those efforts to re-conceptualize public authorities’ accountabilities and the due respect for individuals’ dignity. This had its implications for the research realm as well, especially within what we consider today to be the field of the life sciences. The Nuremberg Code (1947) is a resultant document from the trials against people involved in medical experimentations in Nazi Germany. Its contribution in establishing a new research ethics tradition can be sought mainly in inverting the hierarchy of legitimate concerns as to any research activity involving human beings. It explicitly denounces the primacy of the research problem vis-à-vis the primacy of the research subject; the authority of the truth-seeking scientist vis-à-vis the free will of the research participant and the progress of science vis-à-vis the welfare of the human being. It advances a research ethics tradition around the imperative for protection of vulnerability. Of course, this does not mean that the problem of researchers abusing their authority and misusing their knowledge while harming individuals has been solved. Tuskegee syphilis experiments, MKUltra project and many other surreptitious and illegal instances of crossing the line of acceptable research conduct actualize the poignancy of the problem repeatedly. And today, although the international research community can boast pretty straightforward guidelines for research conduct, in the context of hectic

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capital accumulation relying on scientific discoveries, this issue is still relevant. We already mentioned the acute problem of ethics-free zones and exploitation of the weaknesses of legal regulation within developing countries. The Nuremberg Code, however, establishes the first official guidelines as to the rights of the research subjects. Its main legacy is in this direction. There is, however, one other aspect that has been advanced within the 10 points below. It corresponds well to the RRI claim to renegotiate the meaning of scientific responsibility along the needs, values and desires of society. Here are the provisions of the Code: 1) the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility that may not be delegated to another with impunity; 2) the experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature; 3) the experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment; 4) the experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury;

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5) no experiment should be conducted, where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur, except perhaps in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects; 6) the degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment; 7) proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death; 8) the experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment; 9) during the course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible; 10) during the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability or death to the experimental subject (all emphases added) [NUR 49, pp. 181–182]. As can be seen, the researcher has been assigned the main responsibility to ensure due protection of the research subjects. It outweighs all other concerns. This constitutes codification of the status of the human from an object of research to a research subject proper. And here comes the normative intersection with the human rights paradigm. Human participants are entitled with rights; they are the primary decision-makers as to the extent and timeline of their contribution in a particular study. We need to note that the Nuremberg legacy, with regard to advancing a research culture of protection, has widened. On the one hand, with the evolution of the human rights regime from the 1970s onwards, responsibilities of researchers expanded and included considering a broader range of subjects with rights (sentient beings, future generations, etc.), and vigilance on the well-being of animals, protection of the environment and safety of research personnel. These currently represent some of the main

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ethics issues within the EU Ethics Appraisal procedure. With the advancement of new technologies and their impact on our life, including in creating more vulnerabilities, the realm of rights is also expanding ‒ from avoiding physical harm and damage to encompass issues like privacy and personal information protection for the participants (the research subjects are legally protected as data subjects), avoiding exploitation in developing countries, advancing mechanisms for tackling inequality, and so on. Then, the responsibilities of the researchers are expanding as well – they encompass ensuring the quality of the research results, compliance with existing legal normative frameworks, the well-being of anyone involved in the study (participants, research team), the sustainability of the environment, vigilance as to dual use and potential for misuse, protection of sensitive data and so on. The guiding “ethics principles” advanced in Horizon 2020 are: the principle of proportionality, the right to privacy, the right to the protection of personal data, the right to the physical and mental integrity of a person, the right to non-discrimination and the need to ensure high levels of human health protection [OFF 13, Article 19]. We can regard the extension of the human rights parameter of protection as a policy and institutional gesture of advancing ethics in the context of normative disorientation and lost regulatory control coming with the increasing technologization and digitalization of social practices. This prompts certain responsibilizing legislative reactions that aim to introduce some regulatory stability in the face of uncertainty. For example, in protecting the digital rights of the citizens, certain “safeguards” are being put in place through a series of normative acts in light of the increasing power of new surveillance technologies. The “right to be forgotten” and the “right of explanation” have been codified against the backdrop of massive data collection, algorithmic decision-making and profiling [GOO 17]. This also has its repercussions for research activities aiming to collect large amounts of data or trying to use ones that are already in existence. There is a demand for scrutiny and more visibility of the practical uses of advanced technologies (or as Cathy O’Neil calls them “weapons of math destruction” [ONE 16]) and challenging the authority of those digital tools to avoid social sorting, categorizing and reproducing existing social inequalities. In the context of EU research practices, all this falls under the category of possible misuse of research data and results. So, expanding the realm of rights, following the legacy of the Nuremberg code, is one governance strategy as to responsibilizing EU-funded RTD.

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Another is to orient and fund RTD only for civilian purposes and exclude problematic research (contradictory, with possible non-civilian purposes) from the research agenda. When it comes to research with plausible dramatic implications, one that touches on the question of the human condition (or some interpretation on human nature), the EC has outlined areas of research that shall not be financed. Currently, under Horizon 2020, this includes: 1) research activity aimed at human cloning for reproductive purposes; 2) research activity intended to modify the genetic heritage of human beings, which could make such changes heritable; 3) research activities intended to create human embryos solely for the purpose of research or for the purpose of stem cell procurement, including by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer [OFF 13, Article 19]. As can be seen, what is defined as ethically unacceptable is in the field of what can be considered attempts for manipulating human nature. The repulsiveness of such research endeavors is found in three dimensions of the issue for reproducing human life – identical reproduction (cloning), reproduction by purposeful and heritable modification of human nature (eugenics) and reproduction of life for the sole purpose of studying life by turning it into a mere laboratory consumable (exploitation). We mentioned earlier that the legacy of the Nuremberg Code is not only in advancing research responsibility in the mode of protection, but it has also integrated a point on the needed societal justifiability of research (“The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature”). Put in contemporary language, it pertains not only to seeking “the right impacts” manifested in fruitful results for the good of society, but also in the spirit of the new research culture, to reorienting the research endeavor towards producing reliable and socially robust knowledge. Making science for itself could lead to monstrous instrumentalization of human life; orienting it towards some notion of societal good could give it a more meaningful role. This same impetus can be found in the current promotion of Responsible Research and Innovation. It is true that the progressive codification of research ethics standards is focused mainly on protecting the individual from abuses within the research process. In this respect, the developments in the

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field of biomedical ethics are exclusively influential in defining what constitutes a good and acceptable research practice (see [EUR 18g]). However, this focus has gradually been changing towards engagement with broader societal issues by the means of involving the public. The current promotion of RRI as a novel governance approach is part and parcel of a long process of institutionalizing the relevance of ethical, societal and legal issues with regard to research and innovation. It advances an interpretation of responsibility as to the research and innovation process that opens possibilities for reconceptualizing the mere notion of research ethics and extending the commitment of the scientist to the projections of their work beyond the laboratory. In a way, RRI reinvigorates the legacy of the Nuremberg Code in its entirety by advancing the human rights paradigm within the research process (protecting participating individuals) while trying to sustain the societal justifiability of research by stimulating various forms of dialogue with the non-scientific community (end-users, stakeholders, laymen, concerned citizens, etc.). These forms of interaction between science and society are expected to renegotiate the meaning of the research results or the technologies and innovation that are to be realized. The Nuremberg Code’s mentioning of “fruitful results for the good of society” pertains not only to steering research to knowledge production oriented towards solving significant social problems (i.e. not being random and guided by pure scientific interest only) but also to considering the overall direction of the societal development. In view of the inevitable societal embeddedness of science, this prompts reflection on the future and the particular societal visions certain research and innovation processes promote. “The good of society” is a notion with axiological significance. It is not a matter of fact but an occasion of incessant deliberations and politico-philosophical battles around what constitutes “the good life” and how certain scientific activities and their marketable products advance or hinder those visions for the good life. In essence, this entails that the meaning of science needs to be reconsidered in the light of a deeper engagement with societal needs and desires notwithstanding its value-neutral stance. This represents the basis of expanding the notion of responsibility beyond what is considered traditional research ethics. Furthermore, the RRI’s theoretical re-interpretation of responsibility also diversifies the subjects of responsibility by advancing the notion of collective responsibility. Then, responsibility as to advancing a particular vision of the good of society using science and technology is also shared among different societal actors in a process of collective deliberation

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and experimentation. Mechanisms for democratization of the knowledge creation process by advancing not only consultation, but also participation of exogenous groups extend responsibility beyond the laboratory. In the spirit of postacademic science as new research culture, adherence to stringent research methodologies is complemented with opening spaces for external input in a process of knowledge co-creation, design co-construction and collective policy elaboration. We already mentioned that the governability crisis with all its sources and accompanying effects exacerbates the issue of responsibility. Uncertainty, loss of control, discontinuity, speedy economic time, competition pressures, decreasing public financing, complex innovation ecosystems, challenged regulation – they all led to the need to conceptualize responsibility as “in advance” commitment with the direction of social change, rather than as an act of post-factum assumption of accountability for inflicted harm, damages or costs. Therefore, the societal component of the Nuremberg Code’s legacy becomes acutely relevant once again, this time in the face of the palpable problematic effects of presumably neutral technology left to the invisible hand of the allegedly neutral market mechanism. If in the context of postwar efforts to restore the trust in the scientific community the focus was on reinstating the human rights status of the individuals participating in experiments, today the efforts need to be directed towards “steering” innovation onto societally safe and acceptable paths. By virtue of global connectedness and the intricate dependencies between complex systems, the scientific act has a larger projection range of intended, unintended, hidden and surprising effects that put researchers’ responsibility in another perspective. This is also reflected in the Code of Conduct for Research Integrity from 2011, which is a soft law precursor of the official institutional adoption of the RRI approach and which embraces this extended notion of researchers’ responsibility. The integrity of the scientists is not solely a matter of stringent observance of the quality of the research production and the protection of the research participants. The document introduces the notion of responsible research practices. The latter entail: the duty of care and respect for all research subjects (human, animal, cultural, biological, environmental or physical); the health, safety or welfare of the community and everyone engaged with the research process; evinced sensitivity to age, gender, culture, religion, ethnic origin and social class of research subjects; sustaining the highest standards of informed consent procedures and research

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on animals restricted to when there are no alternative paths of examining the problem at hand, minimizing as much as possible harm or distress inflicted on them [ESF 11]. It also concerns some wider responsibilities as the broader societal context: “It is the responsibility of scientists and researchers to do what they can to ensure that research is for the universal wellbeing of mankind and the good of society” [ESF 11, p. 10]. Furthermore, the Code questions the common assumptions about value neutrality of science and its connection with interest-led entities. It advances the same concerns that drive the responsibilization effort of RRI with regard to the autonomy of research activities within market societies and the inevitable connection with the value-laden context: “Coercion of powerful persons or institutions, religious or political pressure, economic or financial interests can corrupt science. Science should, therefore, be as “disinterested” and independent as possible and always impartial, and should have the freedom to adhere to its own laws and criteria. At the same time we have to acknowledge that scientists operate in a value-bound context. Their paradigmatic presumptions, their choice of subjects to be studied, the way they collect their data, the impact of their discoveries on the society all refer to the ethical and social context in which science proceeds” [ESF 11, p. 10]. We need to note that this interpretation is part and parcel of the overall reconsideration of the relations between science and society within the new governance paradigm and the emerging post-Mertonian ethos of science. The gradual process of opening up the research realm for exogenous considerations put the responsibility of the researchers into a different perspective. The “Science and Society” theme in FP6 establishes the responsibility of the researchers to familiarize the public with a stylized/simplified version of their esoteric knowledge; the “Science in Society” line in FP7 advances responsibilities of the researchers to take into account the concerns of the public; Horizon 2020’s “Science with and for Society” theme attempts to promote collective responsibility of the

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researchers and the public to work together within the R&I process. This reinvigorates and further develops the Nuremberg Code’s legacy and advances a comprehensive care for “the other” within the research and innovation process. That could be the research subject or some abstract societal “other”. Nevertheless, the mode of doing research with and for the other demonstrates the ethical relevance of this particular view on the nature of the scientific endeavor, one that very much brings to mind an element of Ricoeur’s interpretation on the nature of the ethical intention – “aiming at the “good life” with and for the others, in just institutions” [RIC 92, p. 172]. Ethical aims are achieved in a relationship with the other. This relationship is the focus of RRI’s strivings for responsibilization and steering of the S&T realm towards the acceptable impacts. However, we need to indicate two serious problems that hinder RRI regarding the promises of the Nuremberg Code. The first one is that when it comes to responsibilization in view of bridging the gap between interests of the scientific field and the public domain, society is assumed to be a coherent agency whose values, needs and concerns can be generalized. Elaborating common normative orientation, along which science needs to align its processes and outcomes, in an interest-bargaining polyarchy (to use Robert Dahl’s term “polyarchy” instead of “society”) is a difficult task, even when it comes to politically agreed value consensus on a European level. However, is this consensus enough? There is not much to consent on something that has been advanced as the standard legal safeguard for citizens after the atrocities of the World War II. The problem is that there is no specific societal ideal or vision at the EU level, which is also evident in undergoing debates about the future of the European project. Hence, there is no notion of the good life that needs to be achieved and that needs to guide the governance of innovation. Normativity is supposed to emerge in the conversation between different interests; therefore, it would not be commonly generated and appreciated. Instead, it would be acknowledged as such by the virtue of majority power or the bargaining abilities of particularistic group interests. Then “with and for society” can easily turn into “with and for some”. Second, in the context of normative fragmentation, sweeping individualism and the demise of grand narratives that claim to offer a vision for “the good of society”, the societally oriented promise of the Nuremberg code is very difficult to sustain. With the ongoing processes of privatization and commercialization of the knowledge-generation process, knowledge is losing its appeal as a public good. It is increasingly viewed as capital

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generation engine. As a result, the claim for the good of society is not valid, or is valid as long as “the good” is not understood as much as “the right” but as the economically expedient. In conclusion, this section aimed to show that the interpretations of the functionality of ethics as a corrector have been changing – from establishing standards of proper research conduct as to human participants in research towards nurturing responsible practices within a marketized knowledge creation process. While it was much needed to humanize scientific curiosity before, currently, it is crucial in challenging the market’s social indifference. Behind the codification of research ethics, which started with the Nuremberg Code, lies the need to provide a protective legal normative framework in view of the fact that science reached a point that it is not any more a matter of playful simulation of evoking of natural phenomena (e.g. electricity induction). It had made the human being an object of research. Ethics becomes unavoidable since “[a]s soon as animate, feeling beings become the subjects of experiment, as they do in the life sciences and especially in medical research, this innocence of the search for knowledge is lost and questions of conscience arise [emphasis added]” [JON 69, p. 219]. The object–subject line has been crossed. And as Jonas rightly noted, serious obligations arise exactly because one is not re-creating a vicarious model of the object of research (e.g. nature). One is dealing with the true object and this is “[a] responsible, nonexperimental, definitive dealing with the subject himself” [JON 69, p. 220]. The Nuremberg Code’s sanctioning of the limits of scientific curiosity is done along the lines of the ongoing emergence of the post-war international human rights regime [CON 04], which advances a legal protectionist stance as to the individual vis-à-vis state authority. It is based on the idea of the inviolability of the individual. It denounces the legitimacy of public philosophies that would stipulate that the latter is expendable for the sake of the greater majority. Through the requirement for informed consent, the Nuremberg Code puts the will of the human subject at the center of the legitimization strategies of the scientific ambitions. The human, as an object of experiment, is legally recognized as a subject of political rights. The primacy of scientific curiosity and expertise is overruled. Furthermore, the rights regime has developed in a way that currently encompasses some inanimate objects (the environment) and sentient beings (animals) as subjects of rights.

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The leading principle is protecting vulnerability ‒ when rational individuals are not well informed, when disabled and mentally challenged people or children are recruited for experimentation, when the environment is threatened, animals are exploited and so on. And since the span of vulnerability is expanding with new technologies, with market deregulation, the increasing complexity of techno-social systems and the constantly emphasized role of uncertainty, the notion of research ethics is extending as well. It now needs to incorporate concerns as to the broader effects of grand research and innovation projects (e.g. brain mapping), new innovation solutions (e.g. nanotechnology) and emerging technologies. RRI comes to compensate for part of the Nuremberg legacy that has not been dealt with after WWII the way it has been done with human research. It refers to tremendous breakthroughs concerning inanimate objects of research. The sector of nuclear energy experimentation is illustrative in this respect. It becomes clear that with the increasing scientific and technological capacities non-human research becomes very dangerous and could potentially create an array of expected or unforeseen vulnerabilities. As Arendt noted, humankind not only explores natural processes, its might has reached a point at which it can initiate natural processes [ARE 07]; therefore, “[i]n addition to his ageless obligation to meet the threat of things, he bears for the first time the responsibility of prime agent in the threatening disposition of things” [JON 79, p. 41]. Hence, Jonas, in face of the fact that both “the image of man” and possibly the survival of the species are in jeopardy, makes the remark that “[e]thical theory must plumb the very foundations of value, obligation and human good” [JON 79]. Not the societal good, the common good or the public good, but the human good! In the context of risk societies, we need a reconceptualized research ethics that could reform its protectionist mode in such a way that adequately responds to the new situation. This explains why RRI theoretical accounts advance a prospective interpretation on responsibility. However, within the actual implementation effort in a market society, this temporal adjustment may not work, because there is no guarantee that even preliminary, the deliberations on the potential detrimental effects will not be distorted or tainted by the logic of market regulation.

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5.3. The future of ethics in the context of RRI: a gatekeeper of an open door? This section will explore the prospects of ethics reflexivity as a truth-telling procedure in the context of undergoing institutionalization of the six keys of responsible innovation and the normative profile of market societies. Currently, the future of ethics as part of the RRI endeavor very much depends on whether the latter can fulfill its potential as social critique. If in the context of the intricate integration of the different aspects of the responsibilization effort the space for social change triggered by ethics reflexivity diminishes, we might suppose that ethics will be emptied of its meaning and instrumentalized as an acceptability stamp for the innovation production process. Thus, its role as an alert mechanism regarding the evolution of the S&T realm will be silenced. Then, within the EU governance of RTD, it can perform a nominal gatekeeping function while problematic research and innovation products are being allowed under the auspices of economic expediency (“smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”), democratization of the knowledge creation process (by the means of open innovation, user-centered design, stakeholder involvement) or technocratization (by the means of providing ethics expertise). Ethics has been currently conceptualized as one of the key areas of implementation of RRI. As such, its future seems to be dependent on the future of RRI. One source of concern is that within the institutional promotion of the latter, the focus on ethics would fade away and its importance would diminish because of the comprehensive pursuit of all five keys together. Of course, the prospects for genuine ethics reflexivity regardless of the configuration would nevertheless be slim if governance of RTD is under the spell of economic expediency or democratization of the knowledge creation process5. However, it is quite unlikely that ethics will disappear as a policy consideration altogether. First, it is because the “normative substance” of the European project is tightly connected with the notion of fundamental rights that introduces the ethics component in every policy. A second plausible reason can be found in the manner in which RRI was advanced in the governance of RTD – as a comprehensive approach that aims to simultaneously integrate several lines of the new governance vision.

5 Due to distortions introduced by participatory structures.

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In this respect it is interesting to trace how ethics was placed within the evolution the science–society relations. The movement from PUS to PES, or from “Science and Society” to “Science in Society” and “Science with and for Society”, is not necessarily a progressive one in terms of democratization (understood as greater societal integration). The policy process on the science–society relations has a sedimentary character – new layers are being added, old ones always remain present and are even activated in certain moments [ESF 13, p. 12]. We can also see that what is now deemed to be the RRI keys of implementations has already been articulated in institutional discourse long before the RRI notion was promoted by the European Commission, in the Science, society and the citizen in Europe (2000) report6. Interestingly, in the latter, ethics was not considered in the list of necessary steps to shrink the mistrust gap between the research community and the public. However, this is not surprising keeping in mind that it has already had its own steady path of institutionalization. In the light of this, RRI seems to be advanced as a wrapping up policy framework that puts together what was long before under discussion as to science–society relations and the new governance orientation of the EU. The fate of ethics reflects this sedimentary policy process – it is tackled independently within the ethics scrutiny process on the different levels – policy advice, ethics review, ethicists within projects and so on. However, its advancement within the RRI framework is expected to constitute the soldering that makes responsibilization and democratization two sides of the same coin. In this respect, ethics and participation are viewed as inseparable and crucial in attempting to overcome the usual “privileged epistemic position” of ethics experts. Participatory structures are expected to democratize the reflexive examination of technologies and innovation products. In such configuration, ethics becomes intimately connected with the democratization of the knowledge creation process. This is perceived to be at the heart of responsibilization. We paid attention to the questionable moments in the conceptual coupling of 6 In the Science, society and the citizen in Europe report from 2000, means of stepping up the science society dialogue are outlined by the following: new forms of dialogue (i.e. participation), improving public’s knowledge of science (i.e. science communication), scientific information system for Europe (i.e. open science), boosting the attractiveness of science and careers in science (i.e. science communication) and women in science and research (i.e. gender) [COM 00b, pp. 16–19].

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responsibilization and democratization. In any case, it is not the future of ethics that depends on RRI, rather RRI’s future very much depends on whether it will succeed in opening spaces for ethics reflexivity, for the emancipatory and uneasy act of truth-telling and for its own promise of providing social critique. When I emphasize truth-telling, I do not refer to some claim to hail the objective, scientific or ultimate truth; I think more of benevolent disruption of what is deemed to be the objective, scientific or ultimate truth. It is more in the spirit of daring to transgress the obvious and benignly sabotage a situation to open space for contestation of established interpretations. Given that, we might suggest that if RRI is to fulfill its promise, it is incumbent on it to open up space for truth-telling. Of course, it is easier said than done. Such a claim sounds quite extreme in its emancipatory ambitions, especially in the context of institutionally bound endeavors to incorporate ethics reflexivity along the lines of legal compliance. However, the theme of truth-telling is not absent even in the institutional justification of the need for ethics. In between FP6 and FP7, a preparatory document that aimed to provide guidance for researchers on how to “activate” ethics has made a reference to the “Emperors’ new clothes” [EUR 07b]. Ethics is considered to be like the child in the tale, which disturbs a situation of social conformity by uttering the truth. Ethics is construed as a “state of mind” that leads to truth-telling. The problem is that truth-telling is interpreted more as initiating self-reflection vis-à-vis the provisions of the relevant legal basis. It calls for researchers to be honest with themselves in view of predetermined “ethics issues” (that are assumed to provide compliance with fundamental ethical principles) rather than confronting the deeper societal and ethical meaning of their research plans. If RRI implementation efforts are to make a further step in this respect, they need to justify a source of truth-telling outside the narrow interpretation of research integrity and appeal to the consciousness of scientists as citizens, that is, to blur the distinction between their professional responsibilities and their political (civic) responsibilities. And this is much needed in view of the ambiguous nature of scientific advancement and its technological projections. On the one hand, it is the promissory character of science as a problem-solving tool, as a method and

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instrument for expanding human freedom, not only negatively (as to the grasp of nature forces) but also positively (as initiating our own natural processes). This is the Enlightenment emancipatory promise. On the other hand, there are the dystopian concerns that foresee how these great hopes turn into nightmares. Misuses of otherwise beneficently conceived technology, uncritically accepting any emerging technology or the willful pursuit of technological substitutions of all human activities just for the sake of technology and in the name of mighty science are all sources of concern. It is not necessary to go deeply into the discussion of possible harms, detrimental effects, risks, dangers, damages or even apocalyptic scenarios of the demise of different aspects of what we consider to be human today. However, the inevitable entering of scientific knowledge into the world expands the scientist’s responsibility beyond research integrity. The consequences of this worldly translation of scientific knowledge into society condition the research community’s responsibility, a responsibility that is shared with other partners in society [ESF 12, p. 4]. This brings forward the importance of ethics as a truth-revealing force. It also bridges two public roles of individuals: the role of a citizen and the role of the scientist. It prompts professional researchers to voice their concerns as citizens, and it stimulates citizens without scientific expertise to question the societal meaning, the direction and the conceptual assumptions of established scientific fields. Therefore, the notion of citizen science could be very helpful in the quest for ethics as truth-telling within RRI implementation. First, there is some quest for truth-telling in the sense of transgressing what is deemed to be objective knowledge. Such is the case of the civil society sector that develops its own research capacities because normal science cannot meet their specific needs (e.g. non-scientists doing their research and patients running their own clinical trials bringing in self-obtained expert knowledge and tacit, local knowledge) [STI 09]. Part of the RRI responsibilization effort can be in exploring these blank spots in the knowledge creation process that citizen science initiatives are trying to address. Very often it concerns challenging established RTD structures that do not invest in social problems since the latter are deemed economically unsustainable (like rare diseases, alternative treatment procedures for widely known illnesses, etc.). These acts of citizen science are ethical in the sense that they reveal some truth about

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the implicit unfairness of the current innovation cycles. Ideally7, they are about complementing and sensitizing the process of producing scientific truth. This trend in citizen science is in accordance with the overall orientation towards participation in the EU governance of RTD. The democratization of the knowledge-creation process is expected not only to deliver on legitimacy but also to reveal the hidden and unnoticed truths about a problem, which in turn could hopefully result in a comprehensive and much more adequate solution. Second, we need to pay attention to another figure that illustrates citizen science as one possible way of truth-telling. It is the professional scientist who engages with “public interest science” while emancipating from the protocol constraints of “normal” (bench) scientific activity. This is the researcher who does not see his professional and civic roles as something disparate. It is the scientist who can see the significance and meaning of their own acts regarding the overall direction of human development (progressive or regressive). That figure could be the rebelling scientist that, notwithstanding the sacrifices with their reputation among “normal science”, tries to put his/her skills and knowledge at the service of the greater societal context and participates in bottom-up initiatives, working with context-produced and tacit knowledge. It could also be somebody that turns his/her back on commercial interests and profit and defends the public good character of their invention8. Last but not least, it could be the reflective scientist driven by his/her own civic consciousness – the one that warns against the dangers of scientific discoveries and their applications. Prominent case in this respect, one that even established a tradition of S&T introspection combined with clear political statement, is the Russell–Einstein Manifesto (1955) on the perils posed by weapons of mass destruction [PUG 55]. It set the beginning of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The latter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, together with one of its founders ‒ Sir Joseph Rotblat ‒ a physicist who is considered to have left the Manhattan project on moral grounds. It is interesting that Rotblat proposed a pledge, something like a Hippocratic Oath for the scientist. It

7 Ideally, because they have their own problems and misuses ‒ charlatanism under the pretense of science, exploitation of desperate and vulnerable people, neglected safety measures and so on. 8 Figures like Jonas Salk; endeavours like the Human Genome Project; or daring whistle-blowers as to privately funded research.

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advances a scientific ethos that grasps the fact of the societal embeddedness of the research endeavor: “I promise to work for a better world, where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways [emphasis added]. I will not use my education for any purpose intended to harm human beings or the environment. Throughout my career, I will consider the ethical implications of my work before I take action [emphasis added]. While the demands placed upon me may be great, I sign this declaration because I recognize that individual responsibility is the first step on the path to peace” [ROT 99]. As can be seen, this pledge is much in the spirit of RRI’s conceptualizations on the social nature of researchers’ responsibility on the one hand and the prospective notion of responsibility on the other (considering ethical implications in advance). However, its significance lies in the act of introspection that embraces ethics reflexivity as inseparable component of scientific activity. Given that, the future of ethics in the context of RRI is dependent on whether, in the spirit of citizen science, professional researchers would emancipate from the constraints of normal science, the biggest of all being its claim for neutrality (interpreted as indifference to societal and ethical concerns) and utility (interpreted as infinite source of economic value of marketable products). It is undeniably a tremendous task. Opening space for ethics as truth-telling within EU-funded RTD (and more) faces a myriad of impediments, unfortunately. One is that within the EU institutional integration of RRI, the role of ethics as truth-telling is being mitigated. Since it is usually perceived by scientists and engineers as a disturbing intruder and censor of the very curiosity and passion that have been driving human progress, its meaning is being renegotiated in the direction of expediency in delivering public acceptance and stability for the innovation cycle in a world of uncertainty and constant change. The problematic assumption here is that ethics will provide clear answers and solutions to ensure public’s approval and thereby market realization of the innovation products. This, of course, would diminish its power as revealing and emancipatory procedure. Again, the future of ethics in the context of RRI is dependent on whether the latter would succeed in fulfilling its social critique potential.

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This is a difficult task in the context of market societies, in which truth-telling might be considered as not very productive. Here, I refer to the epistemological aspects of the coordination challenge, which is part of the governability issue. As O’Neill rightly suggests, the coordination problem is not so much a manifestation of the increasing complexity of techno-scientific systems or change, but a result of the fact that the market is not a very efficient communicative device [ONE 98, p. 137]. Instead of overcoming the problems of ignorance, it is “feeding” them by the virtue of the competitive drive that stimulates a proprietary attitude towards information and misinformation altogether. For Hayek, the source of ignorance is the epistemic pluralism (incremental, partial knowledge, skills and talents dispersed throughout society). The market is supposed to efficiently orchestrate this epistemological pluralism. It is also believed to be a “discovery procedure” with regard to uncertain future developments and states. They are to be enacted through entrepreneurship and tested as market products. So, the societal significance of the market is not only economic in the narrow sense of the term – it is believed to be a “communicative device” as to unarticulated knowledge, “coordination device” as to dispersed partial knowledge and actors’ plans and a “sanctioning device” as to future states of the world. One of the reasons that this strongly appeals to the contemporary S&T ethos is that it is reminiscient of the functioning of the scientific method ‒ hypotheses are tested and then confirmed or falsified by experimentation. The problem that pertains to our take on responsibilization, and that is explored in-depth by O’Neill, is that the market mechanism fails those three claims – to communicate, coordinate and reveal. By virtue of the imperative for competition, it introduces distortions itself. It is of no interest to the market players to display and share all the relevant information so that the market efficiently aggregates and distributes it. There are at least two kinds of information that competitors will attempt to keep from being communicated: technical and scientific information and information of their plans [ONE 98, p. 134]. Another source of problems is the uneven market power of different actors. Market inequalities introduce distortions in information, communication and coordination and could affect the sanctioning of future wants and needs. Our difficulty in opening space for ethics as a “truth-telling procedure” within the research process is evident in those two points. Both are justified with keeping a competitive advantage over other market players – one on new sources of added value, and the other on strategy. Both entail withholding of information.

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In the context of EU-funded research, this leads to problems in establishing an atmosphere of mutual trust and open discussion on techno-scientific products so that a proper ethics discussion can take place. Against the backdrop of nurtured science–industry relations, truth-telling is competition-averse. Thus, one of the major conflicts in this situation is between confidentiality as a key feature of proprietary knowledge in the private sector and openness as a characteristic feature of traditional science. Two orders of responsibility are clashing – academic and corporate. Then, what place is there for ethics when secrecy and openness are incompatible but simultaneously promoted within research endeavors? The market advances a non-dialogical model of coordination9, one in which the right direction will emerge in the interaction of societal actors on the marketplace. Then, RRI advances a dialogical form (responsibilization through democratization) of coordination in which the interaction will prompt the collective and purposeful revealing of the right direction. Having in mind that within EU-funded RTD it aims to reconcile with the market by exporting the notion of responsible innovation into the business world, the future of ethics may not be very bright due to the danger of co-optation. Along the institutional promotion of RRI and making compliance with fundamental ethical principles a legal obligation for EU-funded RTD, we may witness an undergoing marketization of ethics as well. It is becoming a very promising business niche for private consultancy agencies or university units interested in EU funding because of national budget constraints. Since EU research and innovation needs to be “ethics approved”, those aiming to provide ethics guidance may fall into a situation in which they perceive themselves as sellers of ethics expertise or solutions for acceptance. Then the danger of turning ethics from a disturbing factor in terms of initiating reflexivity into a social anaesthetic, appeasing concerns and legitimizing already made decisions when it comes to the direction of the techno-science progress, will always be lurking in the context of market societies. Another challenge before the future of ethics as a truth-revealing procedure in the context of RRI comes from the concern that the democratization of the knowledge creation process can undermine responsibilization efforts. The conceptual transition from polite partnership 9 For more details about O’Neill’s account on the market as a site of non-dialogical model of coordination and the forum as a site of dialogical mode of coordination, see [ONE 98, pp.16–34].

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(science and society) to a two-way interaction in which the focus is on the needs and concerns of the society (science with and for society) is a positive step further in establishing participatory structures. However, it does not solve the problem of ensuring the quality of the deliberation as to the research and innovation process. On the one hand, initiating ethics reflexivity entails a leading and somewhat a pedagogical role of the ethicists in creating necessary conditions for truth-telling, learning and readjusting of the normative orientations. On the other hand, the democratization of the knowledge creation process assumes the equal weight of normative perspectives, in other words, the possibility for an overall rejection of the relevance of ethics within the consortium’s R&I process. A persistent question as to the future of ethics is how RRI would reconcile the inevitable initial epistemological asymmetry into horizontal modes of knowledge creation. A possible answer lies on the level of education of scientists. One of the problems ahead of responsibilization vis-à-vis the market logic in contemporary societies is that young researchers, stepping into their science careers, have not been introduced to ethics-oriented classes or any courses that stimulate reflexivity regarding the multidimensional societal nature of technologies. From secondary school on, in line with post-WWII modernization-oriented curricula, technology is regarded and celebrated not only as a solution, but also as the solution of all human troubles, as the “great fix”. So, part of the troubles of initiating reflexivity on the level of the research process are rooted in the specifics of the education systems today whose adjustment cannot catch up with the profound global transformations. They require the cultivation of an early-age habit to reflect and anticipate (see [TOF 70]). Therefore, opening some room for ethics reflexivity entails some effort of pedagogical character. Conceiving a new ethos of science cannot be expected to self-generate from a field that adheres to the axiom of neutrality. Such a process calls for institutional arrangements that would foster standard-setting actions, capacity building and awareness raising. Here there have also been discussions regarding the need to integrate ethics on the level where the scientific outlook is being initially formed – studentship in science and engineering10.

10 Such a need was identified during the UNESCO and International Council of Science (ICSU) World Conference on Science (WCS) held in Budapest in 1999. It recommended

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In sum, the future of ethics in the context of RRI very much depends on whether the latter would emancipate from the colonizing logic of the market and defend certain spheres as inviolable for its commodification ambitions. Ethics as truth-telling can be a counter-reaction in the sense of Polanyi’s “double movement” ‒ a push-back against the extension of the market into spheres of social life previously untouched by it. It is also dependent on efforts to stimulate the civic consciousness of scientists so that they do not separate their professional being from their political being thus considering their occupational responsibility in the light of their worries and opinions as citizens. This, of course, is not to be done without nurturing ethics reflexivity within the different educational levels towards entering the scientific profession.

ethics courses be included in education so that alertness, reflection and awareness of ethical dilemmas are promoted within the training of all scientists [UNE 99].

6 Responsibilization in Tension with Market Regulation

6.1. Ethics in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms: innovation, responsibility and the perennial reinvention of capitalism The 2008 crisis was a significant event in the sense that it made the normative vacuum that we already mentioned very palpable. It also directed the attention of the global public to the problem of morality, thus emphasizing the societal significance of economic activities and their ethical implications. It is not by chance that after the crash, some financial institutions even considered emphasizing the ethical aspects of the economist’s profession by adopting a banker’s oath1. This is very telling for a general problem concerning contemporary market societies. Ethics seems to be fading away as a consideration, or it is just being instrumentalized in the context of innovation-driven capitalism. Furthermore, it seems rather difficult for the discipline of economics to uphold its own tradition of good old political economy in its never-ending conversation with moral philosophy. Ethics has been lost in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms. In the context of hectic capital accumulation and capital 1 The practice of oath in certain occupations comes to recognize the public significance of their moral agency in practicing the profession (e.g. physicians, military personnel, public officials). The proposal concerning the economic profession and in particular the banking sector is an attempt to restore the trust in them by reinstating their ethical relevance and acknowledging the wider societal implications of their work. For instances of such oaths, see [TUC 15, BFO 15].

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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realization that turn the wheels of incessant innovation cycles, responsibility is predominantly construed as commitment to the profit-generating mechanism. This also has its repercussions as to the attempts to responsibilize the knowledge-creation process and restore the status of ethics as inevitable and even productive component in the latter. The culture of capitalism has been changing along the normative profile of market societies as well. It diminishes the space for ethics. The speed of the economic cycle is very important; and technologies, popularly regarded as novel, better and efficient ways to do things, are key components in running the engine of fast capital accumulation. Then ethics could very easily be perceived as a counter-profit, risk-averse censor that only impedes innovation cycles due to the fact that even though it is considered necessary, ethics reflexivity takes time. So, in a way, the problem with ethics is temporal. However, it is also a problem with the absence of a stable normative background against which its meaning and significance can be construed. We all witness the increasing incapability of markets to utilize the high productivity of technology towards some common and shared idea for societal well-being. At the same time, the politico-philosophical foundations of economic activities have been changing. This concerns attitudes on the motive of the market agents, the rationale of the economic realm and its social function. Along the debates following the 2008 crisis, those have been seriously deplored ‒ the shifts from focusing on use value to exchange value; from satisfying actual needs to accumulating capital; from loyalty to the customer to the primacy of self-interest, irrespective of broader effects; from longterm strategies of resource allocation to short-term activities of capital extraction and gain; from respecting the rules of the game to bending them and relying on shadowy and borderline practices (in legal terms). What is interesting for us in view of the prospects of RRI as a responsibilization endeavor, which restores the status of ethics as to R&I in a market-driven context, is how it sometimes encompasses conflicting accounts on innovation. They give different meanings to the relevance of ethics and responsibility. Our world is driven by narratives, which naturalize and solidify certain imageries into practices and orientations, and entail particular policy and public stances. The first very broad account is about innovation as an economic engine of capitalism. Novel products and processes create new market niches, expand old ones, construct new

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consumer needs and provide opportunity for capital realization, which generates profit and overall economic growth. Here, innovation is considered responsible by default since it contributes to the economic development of societies by expanding their material reproduction. The question of ethics becomes unnecessary as long as the economic expediency of innovation is thought to exhaust its societal relevance. Then, there is another popular account on innovation, which concentrates on the “destabilizing” features of innovation as to the existing modes of production and social practices. It is based on the famous notion for “creative destruction” which Schumpeter considered to be an “essential fact about capitalism” [SCH 50, p. 83; ELL 80]. It allows for restructurings and overall advancement of change as reproducing capitalistic practices. In this perspective, innovation is the means through which capitalism reinvents and further stabilizes itself. It is perceived as amoral (i.e. a-responsible) as long as it takes part in the evolutionary cycles of capitalism. They cannot be deemed good or bad, but a neutral result of the combined destabilizing and regulatory power of the market. The third popular account of innovation is the one highly charged with concerns and uneasiness with the potential of science to interfere with natural processes. These concerns exacerbate even more so in the context of the global age2 in which the results of wicked experimentation are not confined to the walls of the laboratory but might have tremendous worldly consequences (e.g. viral experimentation and pandemics). In such cases of potentially problematic innovation, the notion of responsibility is easily and unequivocally conjured up. The content of terms such as “morality”, “intent” and “consequences” cannot be reduced to economic rationality. Ethics becomes relevant again, especially in steering S&T towards “the right impacts”. All three accounts implicitly relate innovation to some notion of crisis understood as “critical” eventuality ‒ simultaneously destabilizing, revealing and decisive for the future. The first account sees innovation as the remedy for the ills of capitalism. By devising a new means of capital generation, it can contribute to economic growth in times of recession and financial austerity. In other words, but along the same principle, this hope is expressed in the accounts that see innovation as the source of S&T breakthroughs that can provide “jump over” solutions to avert the inevitable collapse of the world system (the legacy of the club of Rome). In those, innovation is 2 For the specifics of the notion of global age, see [ALB 96].

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perceived as instrumental in providing economic health of societies and as a way out of global crises. The second account regards innovation as essential for turning the wheel of capitalism by perpetual introduction of social change. Although the social price of creative destruction is deemed irrelevant for some, this account gives opportunities to conceptualize innovation as responsible for the reproduction of inequality mechanisms or for the introduction of new ones. Here, innovation-as-crisis reinvigorates the socio-economic system and reinstates the relevance of responsibility as to the fairness and the stability of the social structure in view of existing and expanding inequalities. The third account fears the catastrophic and uncontrollable consequences of neutral scientific rationality, claiming to be indifferent to the broader socio-ethical context. Innovation is construed as a source of critical fault lines that open spaces for apocalyptic scenarios which might challenge the human condition. This easily evokes Hans Jonas’s imperative for responsibility [JON 84], the precautionary principle, or Dupuy’s notion of enlightened catastrophism [DUP 05]. Although we can find enough reasons to argue the ethical relevance of innovation in all the three accounts, its politico-philosophical significance can be effaced by the culture of contemporary market societies that mostly deem innovation as profit-generating transgression. It is transgression indeed – as to ideas, habits and practices. It is pushing against boundaries and creating discontinuities. In this sense, it can be regarded as a source of anomie manifested in normative disorientation3. At the same time, in the context of market societies, it is an endless source of items for commodification. It is true that sometimes it can be an empty gesture of introducing novelty – redesigning old products or creating hollow consumerism, that is, introducing products with questionable use value; however, it is instrumental in keeping the profit-mechanism moving. Innovation is also crucial in promoting a proprietary attitude on the sources of change. It is crucial in activating regimes of exclusion around property rights and knowledge (patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc.). In the context of innovation-led capitalism, based on transgression and commodification, the traces of ethics could be very easily lost. 3 It is interesting that Robert Merton conceptualizes anomie as a disjunction between culturally defined goals, purposes and interests, and norms concerning the appropriate means to attain these goals, purposes and interests. Given this, innovation is construed as one particular mode of adaptation to anomie that keeps the relevance of societal goals but introduces changes as to the means to achieve these goals [MER 38].

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When we talk about the normative profile of contemporary market societies and the diminished space for ethics, we cannot omit the impact of the principle of efficiency. Its appeal is rather strong, in comparison with other normative orientations, probably because it evokes some association with neutrality. It entails a certain technical criterion in initiating and assessing social change. We might speculate whether it is actually a guiding principle, a value, a politico-philosophical concept or else; nevertheless, in common perceptions, it remains very close to techno-scientific rationality, which always aims at optimization, improvement of performance and betterment of mechanisms. So, the imagery of efficiency as to the market mechanism fits the spirit of engineering rationality well. Ethics reflexivity does not appeal much to this attitude. Techno-scientific rationality, as well as business rationality, is thirsty for clarity. This could explain why both fields embrace legal compliance as the only legitimate reference when considering the line between right and wrong. The problem with the ethics challenge is that, unlike the provisions of the law, it seems quite obscure and does not provide a straightforward algorithm of what to do and how to do it. This explains why it is not warmly welcomed by the “hard sciences”, engineers and business partners alike in EU research consortiums. Sometimes it is very difficult for scientists to swallow the idea about ethics reflexivity as part and parcel of research ethics exactly because the former entails decisionist uncertainty and disaccord as to the acceptable direction of the process4. Thus, most often, ethics is highly contested as impractical. This is because it does not satiate the outright need for clear answers, practical solutions and protocol-like guidance. In this respect, the law is regarded as doing a much better job. Many scientists believe that ethics is already inscribed in it, so why go to the trouble of adding additional and very often uneasy considerations? There is no need to explain why the same holds true as to market players for which the law is the moral limit of the profit-making mechanism. In summary, ethics seems to be fading away: first, along the researchers’ reluctance to reconceptualize their responsibilities beyond narrow research conduct duties, and second, along market players’ disinclination to 4 This comes into conflict with the common understanding about research ethics as dealing only with traditional obligations as to the quality and reliability of scientific production. Research ethics is believed to be disciplining and not destabilizing, questioning and unsettling.

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reconsider the notion of business ethics beyond the confines of the law and the commitment to efficiency and profit. The refutation of responsibilities beyond compliance is premised on the overconfidence that the invisible hand of the market mechanism will inevitably produce social welfare5. As Friedman claimed, the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, but in the confines of the law6. It seems very challenging to conceive of a business ethics that construes ethics beyond legal regulation7. Of course, legal responsibility has its place and can be activated where necessary provided there is knowledge about harm, damages, illegal practices and illicit behavior, etc. Legal regulation often aims to restrict negative externalities (e.g. what is detrimental to the health of citizens) at managing expected effects. However, the legal system, when it comes to sanctioning uncertain impacts of innovation, is usually a follow-up social regulatory mechanism (with the exception of moratoriums based on the precautionary principle). Furthermore, we cannot be even sure about the reliability of the so-called evidence-based regulation, because the advances in scientific knowledge very rarely lead to a consensus, unless it is politically fostered8, and can hardly be an indisputable basis for adequate legal sanction. Thus, is the fight for the right impacts not just reliance on moral luck? And if it is so, how can we justify the reality of ethics reflexivity? One of the reasons for this situation of “ethics closure” is that innovation initiates a peculiar temporal regime in which its conception, application, 5 There is a long tradition of believing in the overall positive effects of the markets – from Adam Smith to the Austrian and Chicago schools in more recent times. They all assume a negative notion of freedom and construe the market as an emancipatory means for overcoming traditional ties, established social relations and hierarchies. Its perceived blindness as to social status emphasizes the virtue of its neutrality. It is assumed to produce societally beneficial effects from individuals’ single activities, and the presumption about its ethical acceptability is based on this. 6 “There is one and only one social responsibility of business ‒ to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” [FRI 07]. 7 There are accounts that advance a market failure approach to business ethics while advocating for voluntary acting beyond legal compliance. Such is Joseph Heath’s. He argues that if the market is failing to promote Pareto efficiency outcomes, actors should act beyond legal compliance (i.e. assume responsibilities beyond the legally prescribed provisions on what is acceptable) in order to prevent the market from operating against its own principles [HEA 14]. 8 The consensus on human-induced climate change is a case in point.

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effects and due political and legal sanctions are out of sync due to the messiness of the “real” world [NOW 10]. This produces inconsistency between intent (of the creators) and effects (from application), and additional dispersion of responsibility. Therefore, it is difficult to escape the moral luck paradigm because, even though the public is included in the research and innovation process, we might still never know what could be the actual impacts or how the technology will be adapted by the users. So, ethics reflexivity might be perceived as futile because it cannot rely on perfect consequentialist calculation that excludes the role of uncertainty. Furthermore, this outlook is additionally advanced by the fact that the mere notion of responsibility is being questioned by the promotion of market-inspired visions for the evolution of the S&T field. This is something that RRI accounts need to vehemently challenge by arguing that uncertainty is what opens spaces for ethics reflexivity instead of confining them to the mercy of moral luck. We need to recognize that the perceived irrelevance of ethics as to the outcomes of the market mechanism in contemporary economic thinking is quite often connected with the name of Friedrich Hayek. His theoretical legacy is usually associated with the claim for normative neutrality when it comes to market regulation. However, this does not mean that his account lacks an ethical component, or that it excludes moral philosophy as not germane to economic knowledge. For example, in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976), where “the mirage of social justice” is subjected to severe critique, Hayek aims to reaffirm classical principles of political economy9 and escape the trap of consequentialist ethics that he considers to be at the heart of the failures of state management and the governability crisis that we mentioned earlier. He insists on ethics in which, following John Locke, what is relevant is the way competition is carried out, not the results it produces. Thus, the burden of the market agent as a moral agent falls on intent and rules rather than effects/results. It is not about “bringing about a particular state of affairs that is regarded as just” [HAY 76, p. 39]. The impact of the operation of the market is not considered ethically relevant. It is enough that the intent is benevolent (at least not willfully malevolent) and the rules are respected (lawfulness, legal compliance). The pursuit of a societal ideal is meaningless because of the 9 Its subtitle reads: “A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy”.

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inherent flaw in utilitarianism – the assumption of omniscience [HAY 76, p. 20]. Here, as in the case with Keynes, the key problem is our ignorance as human beings. While Keynes responds to this difficulty with the need for a knowledgeable institutional intervention, Hayek concentrates on the means, not ends – the rules that we need in view of our epistemic deficiency. In the Hayekian perspective, justice is an attribute of human conduct, and not a resultant social state. The latter is not ethically relevant – “as long as it remains a spontaneous order, the particular results of the social process cannot be just or unjust” [HAY 76, p. 32]. In this sense, it is neutral or socially indifferent, just like evolutionary whims of nature can be “neither just nor unjust... it is meaningless to describe a factual situation as just or unjust” [HAY 76, p. 32]. As we can see, this is in line with the classical dream of the autonomous economic sphere (spontaneous order). However, it is in contradiction with RRI’s ambition not to leave the S&T advancement on its own. Hayek tries to reinstate the principles of old liberalism in which the just individual conduct was ethically significant. He contests the practice of his day that places the duty of justice on authorities. It makes the concept of social justice “empty and meaningless, because in it nobody’s will can determine the relevant outcomes of the different people, or prevent that they be partly dependent on accident” [HAY 76, p. 69]. There is something to think about in his argument, because in the context of the crisis of governability (as to the effects in complex systems) and the irrelevance of just individual conduct, the mere possibility for ethics seems to be disappearing altogether. This is also expressed in Bürgenmeier’s concern that the discipline of economics has abandoned its own good traditions. It has reduced its conceptual scope to rigid economistic assumptions while expanding its normative ambitions to non-economic spheres, thus questioning the need for ethics. He contends that the market is “indissociable from democracy” as long as the positive and normative aspects of the economy sustain the conceptual link between efficiency and economics, on the one hand, and equity and politics, on the other hand. Thus, the strict application of both the principles of market economy and political democracy will eliminate the need for a separate ethical approach to economics. The assumption is that ethical questions will be taken into account simply by sustaining these two decision-making mechanisms [BÜR 92].

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But this, as we all know, is not an easy task. The tendency to reduce economic policy to the tenets of positive economic theory only expels ethical considerations as external for the domain of economics. However, democracy is not functioning very well as a procedure for building a normative consensus and producing equity (also due to distortions introduced by economic inequalities). Both fields are intermingling, blurring the lines between positive and normative, between efficiency and equity. So, ethics, although possible, is fading away in the complex interaction between the market mechanism and the democratic procedure as coordination decision-making processes. Democracy and the market are compatible but not necessarily mutually reinforcing. Democracy can provide the normative template for the market mechanism, thus allowing ethics to be activated in economic relations. But it can also suffer from the market mechanism10. At the same time, economic growth is not inevitably dependent on a democratic political order11. Therefore, there is no guaranteed space for ethics within the quest for responsibilization in the context of market societies. Another problem pertaining to the diminishing space for ethics in contemporary market societies is that value pluralism is often conceptualized in terms of emotivism. The latter entails that all moral judgments are nothing but the expression of preferences, attitudes and feelings. Ethics runs the risk of becoming a manipulative instrument through which certain group rationality is construed as dominant social rationality. Moral debate may become a struggle in which we attempt to align the attitudes, feelings or preferences of others with our own, while moral authority becomes nothing more than successful power over others [GRA 07, pp. 6–7]. In view of this, part of the RRI challenge concerns how to sustain moral grounds to address our responsibility in such a context where the appeal to emotivism leads to disconnection between economics and ethics and where neoclassical economics eliminates the possibility of personal economic accountability: “The neoclassical economist tends to explain the economic reality only in terms of changes in data and not in terms of accountability of economic agents. When modern economics explains something, such as an increase in unemployment, it never raises the question of who has caused the rise in 10 Neoliberalism is considered one of the inner enemies of democracy [TOD 14]. 11 This is something that Francis Fukuyama demonstrated in one of his works [FUK 04].

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unemployment, but what has caused it. It rejects any possibility of assigning the responsibility for economic damages to their economic agents and understands economic consequences solely as effects of the good or bad functioning of the market mechanism” [GRA 07, p. 8]. These references are all evoked to support our initial suspicion that market societies produce certain cognitive closures, which eventually produce perceptions on ethics as either irrelevant or futile. Of course, the economic field has addressed, in one way or another, its own epistemic limitations. In this direction, the recent interest in the theory of bounded rationality is to interpret the decision-making process. As Herbert Simon has put it: “Bounded rationality is simply the idea that the choices people make are determined not only by some consistent overall goal and the properties of the external world, but also by the knowledge that decision makers do and don’t have of the world, their ability or inability to evoke that knowledge when it is relevant, to work out the consequences of their actions, to conjure up possible courses of action, to cope with uncertainty (including uncertainty deriving from the possible responses of other actors), and to adjudicate among their many competing wants. Rationality is bounded because these abilities are severely limited. Consequently, rational behavior in the real world is as much determined by the ‘inner environment’ of people’s minds, both their memory contents and their processes, as by the ‘outer environment’ of the world on which they act, and which acts on them” [SIM 00, p. 25]. What we have tried to demonstrate so far is the particularities of the economistic cognitive framework, which makes the quest for responsibilization of innovation very challenging. Thus, in order to open space for ethics in the context of market-driven societies, part of RRI’s strategy and social critique stance needs to reveal the various discursive and cognitive closures that expel ethics or empty it of any meaning, or just instrumentalize it. It itself can become a product for sale, thus serving the profit-generating mechanisms of the market. It was already mentioned that public engagement

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in combination with ethics is becoming a key component of any research endeavor that seeks financing. The difficulties in coming up with the most adequate format in which the dialogue between science and society can take place (consultation, public deliberation, focus groups, users’ involvement in the actual research process, etc.), while creating the conditions for ethics reflexivity, have led to the emergence of a new niche of commercialization ‒ the provision of professional ethics consultancy or mediation. The latter can deliver ethics expertise or organize participatory/deliberation processes within publicly funded research projects or private RTD. This trend is not very surprising, keeping in mind that organizing different epistemic and normative perspectives into a single voice while averting conflicts is not an easy task. However, the figure of the mediator makes the whole process and the research content it produces vulnerable to intentional/unintentional distortions. Furthermore, genuine ethics reflexivity may not necessarily be initiated since for-profit ethics consultancy would be naturally interested in keeping the customer satisfied or the partners in a project happy (safeguarding the prospects of future partnership). Moreover, ethics-approved products and processes would be offered to the public, thus alleviating concerns as to their acceptability. In summary, commercialization of ethics may detach it from its significance by turning it into a shortcut instrument for gaining public and institutional support. But commercialization of research also generally raises a myriad of questions as to ethics. One of the crucial problems is how to sustain the tenets of good research ethics when the scientist is turning into an agent of the colonizing ambitions of capital. I do not refer only to the phenomenon of the scientist-entrepreneur. I particularly have in mind the scientist who has assumed the role of a mercenary as to corporate interests. An illustrative example is using research as an element of strategies for plundering indigenous cultures. Biopiracy is turning turns into a new conquista that misappropriates and rapines local knowledge, driven by the expansionist logic of capital, which aims to translate everything into an exchange value. Ethics could be lost again along the denied public good status of knowledge that is currently being turned into a subject of IPR wars. The fact that ethics scrutiny can hardly find its place in the midst of hectic reproduction of capital is not that surprising. In the realm of business, research ethics standards very often come into conflict with corporate

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loyalty. Projected to our cases, these are situations in which the claim for disinterestedness of science is put on trial. Research within the world of corporate interests can hardly sustain objectivity because market behavior is, by definition, strategic. Thus, within the realm of privately generated knowledge research is strategic as well as long as it is serving the profit-maximizing plans of the firm. However, if it is strategic, can it be reliable and reputable beyond some reasonable doubt? Then, the problem exacerbates from the fact that the business field is hardly upholding even the tenets of business ethics. Good old-fashioned business ethics is also challenged by a world of extremely competitive environment, which very often pushes executives and others to transgress (proudly!) the lines not only of what would be deemed moral (e.g. common business decency of serving the interests of the customers) but also to test the boundaries of the legal/illegal action12. This is because the principle of efficiency does not necessarily entail ethical behavior. Led to extremes, it can produce imperfect markets. Some see imperfect markets as an opportunity to open conceptual space to exploit their structural features for fostering proper business ethics and enhancing a firm’s ethics posture [SET 94]. However, making market imperfections an occasion for seeking the economic and non-economic benefits of ethical and socially desirable behavior can become just another profit-making strategy for exploiting that same ethics posture. These are some of the reasons why responsibilization of S&T in the context of market societies is in great trouble. The acceleration of social processes and the space–time compression does not create difficulties only as to the manageability of social change. It also refers to the diminishing space for ethics. It is caused not only by the pressure of some group rationality claiming to be universal (the economists, the engineers, the NGO activists, etc.) but also by the actual time to initiate such reflexivity. Ethics is unsettling because it challenges our own unquestioned stances and decisions. It requires thinking, speculation, a reflective distance and time for pondering. It does not go well with instantaneity as a dominating temporal regime of our societies and the imperative for speedy economic turnover. Responsibilization is also time-consuming for researchers ‒ it entails time to think about the moral framework in which they operate.

12 As many cases in the financial sector demonstrate, fraud (e.g. “cooking the books”) has become a great source of capital accumulation.

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The other problem that I will continue to emphasize time and again is the commitment to the claim for neutrality as ethics-averse concerning scientific-technological innovations. It responds well to the hailed indifference of the market to resultant social states. The mantra of neutrality of technology per se (not of its morally/politically tainted uses) shields important questions concerning what human purposes can certain technologies serve, what social effects can they produce (who wins and who loses as a result of those technological shifts), how do they reassemble political power structures and deliver new techniques of exerting control, etc.? The notion of neutrality can provide a normalization channel for problematic innovations because it does not entail the need for reflexive examination. Thus, ethics seems to be losing its place because in the joint functioning of the scientific realm and the market mechanism all debate on acceptability stops. Nevertheless, this is where the responsibilization ambition of RRI needs to begin. 6.2. On the traps behind the notion of “responsibilization” in a market-driven context We have already paid attention to some of the traps that accompany the imperative for responsibilization of the research and innovation process in the context of contemporary market societies. This section will add some nuances to the explored problems and illustrate different instances in which strategies to responsibilize may fall prey to the profit-oriented market mechanism. All these strategies differ in their conception of the possible locus of ethical intervention. As mentioned, one line in the RRI literature emphasizes the incorporation of values in the design of research and innovation products. The aim is not only to achieve sensitivity to particular normative orientations (e.g. privacysensitive technologies) but also to strive for actual moral betterment (e.g. privacy-enhancing technologies). Thus, responsibilization is construed as an attempt to tackle normative insufficiencies or conflicts by the means of technical makeup. The construction of the device, process or product is the locus of responsibilization. It demands a high degree of inventiveness and resourcefulness. As van den Hoven notes, the moral duty to innovate entails being creative with regard to designs (physical, conceptual, institutional) [VAN 13]. The aim is to introduce change through novel (unknown) designs that imply moral improvement, that try to solve moral problems through a

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new configuration of functionalities embodied in a product or that at least “expand the set of relevant feasible options regarding solving a set of moral problems” [VAN 13, p. 82]. Technology and innovation are viewed as a neutral reconciliatory mechanism between different value orientations. Unfortunately, value-sensitive designs cannot provide a final solution to certain normative problems, but are necessary steps in the overall process of responsibilization. In this respect, the greater normative fabric of contemporary market societies is inescapable. Thus, there are two main traps that I will mention here. First, it is the ambiguity in the interpretation and the public presentation of the value sensitiveness of certain products. Values have tremendous marketing potential. They can be instrumentalized by the industry to foster public acceptance while conceptually isolating the responsible product/technology from its irresponsible effects. A prominent example is the expansion of the green (environmentally sensitive) industry vis-à-vis its shady background of environmentally disastrous effects. The ethically relevant theme for sustainability can very easily be exploited for profit-making purposes rather than for enacting actual regimes of responsible governance and genuine care for the environment. The “green” appeal has tremendous market potential because it taps on certain value orientations of consumers. However, this is not enough to prove actual responsible practices. Just imagine how many “grey” and “brown” production processes (extraction industries [see ZIN 16, LIU 16]) are behind slogans such as eco-efficiency, green future and new green economy. Another difficulty is in the implicit hope that design can settle normative conflicts, that is, it can incorporate value orientations that very often are in a trade-off configuration (security vs. privacy; economic growth vs. sustainability, etc.). The moral duty to innovate as a response to a moral overload “when one is burdened by conflicting obligations or conflicting values, which cannot be realized at the same time” [VAN 13, p. 77], requires reconciling these conflicting stances. It is, however, a highly questionable endeavor. It is imagined as a second-order responsibility that requires initiating change that would solve the dilemmas between first-order responsibilities by virtue of design (advancing security and privacy; economic growth and sustainability, etc.). The trouble is that if design starts to be construed as a reconciliatory mechanism, then this could very easily relate to the assumption about the neutrality of technology. This attitude is

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also reflected in the institutional response as to the emerging conflicts between different perspectives concerning the governance of a particular policy problem, and the expectation that innovation (or technology) will elaborate a normative way out. Let us take as an example the problems of the EU border control policy and the hope that technology will elaborate a solution reconciling different normative orientations – efficiency, security and equality (fair treatment by border control machines). Such a hope in the “smartness” of technology is similar to the belief in the market to be such a reconciliatory regulator between different value preferences in the marketplace, which constitutes its neutrality. In the context of market societies, the appeal for value-sensitive design can turn into an ethics-averse technological determinism. Then, another strategy of responsibilization is promoting embedded (bottom-up) innovation. It is much in the spirit of the new governance turn, with its emphasis on horizontal and flexible forms of regulation that nurture collective normative dialogue, learning and experimentation. In this respect, responsibilization is construed as an immediate commitment of citizens to social change. In the broader political realm, it aims to find a practical means to give agency to civil society capacities, that is, to empower the citizenry in the decision-making process (sharing responsibility with political elites). In the realm of RTD, such empowerment is also considered much needed and expedient. The insistence on distributed innovation as opposed to centrally organized innovation comes from the realization that the knowledge-creation process is scattered – it involves socially dispersed knowledge-actors and knowledge-capacities. As Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously (2007) notes, this is part of a cultural shift in the overall nature of the innovation process [EUR 07c]. The appeal of embedded innovation that advances some forms of user-led open innovation becomes very strong because it entails an organization of the innovation process that aims to elicit and coordinate the distributed capacities, skills and resources of societal actors into a comprehensive solution. Understandably, the network comes as the adequate organizational form to allow the encounter of the complementary bits of knowledge held by heterogeneous social actors. There, they can interact, co-create, co-construct and ultimately redistribute agency, knowledge and power (which itself promotes a certain normative model of society). One questionable assumption in this narrative is that distributed sources of knowledge will actually succeed in complementing each other and overcome the dissonance of normative orientations held by

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different societal actors. This is a difficulty that we have already explored and will refer to once again when outlining the pitfalls of the New Public Management (NPM) approach. The notion of embedded innovation originates in a vision of the innovation process as distributed (not centrally organized or guided). It is seen as a bottom-up innovation process that is community-based and user-induced, not just democratized by consultations with citizens. It advances a regime of collective experimentation, where labor and knowledge are distributed among societal actors. Such collective contribution and sharing of responsibility requires re-examining the status of the knowledge that is produced in the process. This might entail considering new approaches to IPR, as well as reinventing the common good status of knowledge. And here comes the first trap. The commodification logic of market societies advances the proprietary character of knowledge that is regarded as subject to legal monopoly by individuals or corporate entities. So, when innovation is embedded and knowledge is a collectively generated resource, this comes into conflict with the creeping demands of the market to tap in all publicly generated knowledge. Furthermore, market agents often use the appeal of community-based or user-led innovation in order to satiate their profit-maximizing strategies. It is true that notions such as open science, open innovation and transparency aim to set the conditions for institutional arrangements that would allow the efficient accumulation of knowledge, thus achieving efficiency in its production and avoiding redundancy in allocating resources by unlocking the channels of information sharing. However, these do not fit well the claim of exclusivity when it comes to knowledge that is serving the profit-making mechanisms of contemporary capitalist economies. There are cases when corporate culture stimulates “openness” of the research endeavor and seeks contribution from citizens. Engaging the end-user for accustomed product production is not only a good PR strategy; it also allows creative ideas to be tapped, to build up the legitimacy of the product or just avoid unnecessary costs for mitigating public rejection after the launch of the item on the market. In summary, one particular danger as to responsibilization through embedded innovation is that the latter can be harnessed to serve the interests of market agents without sharing the monetary benefits with the actual contributors in the innovation process. Another difficulty concerns the nature of distributed innovation. It is being promoted as part of the evolution of European knowledge societies [EUR 07c]. However, if it is not spontaneously

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organized but explicitly nurtured as a normative vision for the participatory research and innovation process, this could very easily lead to normative conflicts between the different societal actors and time lags that are habitual for the process of building consensus. In such a case, it comes into conflict with the logic of capitalism, the latter relying on accelerated turnover time, speedy innovation, rapid innovation cycles, etc. In this respect, the sustainability of this regime of innovation is questionable, unless it is situated or leading to another type of economic arrangement. Then, another responsibilization strategy is to initiate a process of reflexive governance. We already saw that reflexivity is one of the recurring themes in the RRI literature – a necessary component of the research and innovation process that could help in revealing hidden problems, unnoticed issues and alternative courses of action. It is benevolently destabilizing in the sense that it requires one to question their own assumptions and test the tenets of their own cognitive framework. At the same time, the process needs some stability in order to deliver on its initial promises to produce certain products, results or decisions. Voß and Kemp talk about reflexive governance as a mechanism of incorporating feedback in social problem-solving, which is different from rationalist problem-solving (based on the projections of effects and control over risk while minimizing uncertainty) [VOß 05, VOß 06]. This approach appeals for initiating secondorder reflexivity and for opening a variety of values, viewpoints and alternative paths for future development, by problematizing the working, conditions and effects of first-order reflexivity. The problem is that creating the conditions for reflexivity is very timeconsuming, and it takes effort to elicit, discuss and reconcile the myriad of perspectives on a particular matter. Furthermore, it presents us with the already mentioned efficacy paradox – complex problems in the environment of distributed control require comprehensive examination (through multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue, constructive TA, foresight, deliberative approaches), while complex conceptualizations require some “operational closure” to sustain the possibility for action. Otherwise, the collection and adjustment of different normative perspectives and bits of knowledge would take so much time and effort that it would not produce useful regulatory solutions. Then, in the context of market societies, reflexivity might be perceived as economically unsustainable as it would introduce disruptions in the accelerated temporal regime of capitalist

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economies, unless the inevitable operational closure is harnessed to advance well-known economistic considerations, and in so doing, to additionally diminish the space for ethics. The next responsibilization strategy that might fall in the trap of market mechanisms is the one relying on the notion of an innovation breakthrough as a solution to pressing grand societal challenges (i.e. it would hopefully responsibilize the existing system). Innovation, as any source of change, is not unambiguous. It could be regarded as life-saving, radical, changing the human condition, just useful in everyday activities, dangerous, unsafe and damaging, promising a different and almost sci-fi future, etc. But within what we call institutional rationality, whether it is the one behind Horizon 2020, the Lund Declaration [LUN 09] or the UN, it often is interpreted as the means for the speedy tackling of global problems by introducing a dramatic leap of change. The problem is that the structure of market societies that nurture innovation would probably reproduce the same problems once the innovation breakthrough is done. Then the drive for responsibilization by breakthrough innovation could lead to moving around the problems instead of solving them. For example, mitigating global hunger, which is an ethically relevant global challenge, does not necessarily require the invention of new foods, new agricultural revolution or popularizing the nutritional value of peculiar species [FAO 13, HAN 13]. Rather, it calls for reconsidering the current economic model – more socially oriented management of the global financial resource, more investments in social infrastructure and more just mechanisms of redistribution of added value instead. Shortcut reaching out for the next innovation fix could initiate or just exacerbate existing mechanisms of dependence. If we want to seriously dismantle the issue of responsibilization of innovation in contemporary market societies, we cannot omit the question of how profit-driven innovations enter the public turnover, and whether they have a societal contribution at all. We cannot dispute the benefits of medical breakthroughs, for example (whether it is medicine for malaria, hepatitis C, etc.). The problem is how responsible we are in structuring the access to those benefits. I do not argue against innovation but against the distortions in the mechanisms that produce it and the actual differentiated societal impact it often has. This also holds true for the technologization of healthcare. We can hardly refute the expectation that the benefits of this technologization

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would be enjoyed by some since the sector is highly commercialized and marketized. In this context, we need to dispute the claim that the results of innovative thinking can be unambiguous. Innovating with and for society, the nature, end-users, etc. does not automatically make innovation responsible. For example, if we innovate for the benefit of preserving some species by constructing alternative habitats where they can survive, how will this impact other organisms or the surrounding environment13? If we strive towards assuming responsibility, we shall destabilize current cognitive closures and reveal the whole picture as to eventual consequences and then clearly decide (this requires assuming responsibility for the decision) what will be sacrificed in the name of what. Part of the social critique stance of the responsibilization endeavor often requires an honest conversation about the costs and benefits and projecting the parameters of political responsibility for a particular set of costs and benefits. It is true that we fall into the consequentialist ethics of calculating pros and cons, which is sometimes deemed an insufficient and restricted approach by the RRI field, but at least it requires more clear engagement with those pros and cons, not only articulating them, as is often the case. We already mentioned some problems with green industries. Let us take again the example of renewable energy, the benefits of which are taken for granted and the dark side of which (the production cycle behind it) is neglected. Is this a responsible stance, and is it a fair and honest advancement of innovation that we assume to be responsible? Is it responsible for certain ecologically and socially detrimental effects, or for comforting the green consciousness of the insatiable global energy consumer? RRI accounts have to face assumptions and clichés as regards innovation if they are to deliver on the responsibilization promise. It entails initiating a reflexive deliberation on conceptual couplings14 within popular discourses in market societies, and avoiding the grip of one-sided market-led interpretations of the benefits of innovation. The next responsibilization strategy that we will pay attention to is organizing the research and innovation process along the lines of new governance approaches, including New Public Management (NPM). The so-called “governance turn” in EU politics came to compensate for certain 13 See, for example, [OLE 01]. 14 For example, notions such as energy efficiency and ecological sustainability reinforce each other. The former does not necessarily presuppose the latter, although it does so at the level of public perceptions.

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deficiencies of contemporary democracies by promoting a more inclusive manner of decision-making, which is hoped to bridge the trust gap between policy-makers and citizens. In the context of RTD, this turn was manifested in the orientation towards forms of dialogue that would reconcile science and society. We might outline two interpretations on this NPM reorientation in the governance process. One interpretation focuses on the participatory character of policy-making and emphasizes the importance of citizens’ input for the legitimacy of the democratic process. The other interpretation highlights the importance of efficiency as the output of the democratic process and implies more reliance on the market than on politics. A manifestation of this orientation in governance is the promotion of PPPs (Public–Private Partnerships), even in research. These two interpretations are simultaneously promoted by EU institutions which leads to the problematic expectation of their two different normative logics – that of managerial autonomy and that of democratic accountability would collaborate [MÖR 09]. A pertinent question then becomes: how realistic is the actual normative encounter between the two without allowing the one to absorb the other? In this respect, we need a closer look at NPM as a particular regulatory strategy under the auspices of new governance, which imports managerial principles from the private sector into the exercise of authority in the public sphere. It concentrates on producing output expressed in efficiency and performance, and neglects the importance of input from societal ideals as a guiding normative orientation (e.g. war on poverty, freedom from want, justice). The focus of the political decision-making process has shifted from aims to consequences (calculated as costs and benefits). NPM emphasizes the role of markets and corporate management techniques in achieving efficiency and consumer satisfaction in delivering public services. Over the last four decades, it has been advanced as a response to fiscal crises, as a means for reducing costs by marketization (part of it is privatization, contracting out, quasi-markets and consumer choice, management contracts) and by corporate-inspired management (introduction of performance incentives, value for money, closeness to the customer, etc.). However, the collaboration between public and private might turn into a fusion between public and private, and outright concession of public authorities’ functions to private players. We already observe this not only in the process of privatization of education and healthcare public services, but

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also in giving away functions that are key for the Weberian modern state and constitutive for its sovereignty such as waging of wars, maintaining order internally, the prison system, etc. This is not just a transfer of principles from the market sector but also actually sharing the exercise of authority with market players. The problem is how we can ensure that the private partners in this endeavor are democratically accountable if they do not share the same normative orientation as that held by public authorities. This demonstrates the tension between the imperative for responsibility and market regulation. The problem also persists in the realm of RTD. Coming up with research and innovation solutions to grand societal challenges, public–private alliances provide market players with ample opportunities to harness the appeal for responsibilization in order to expand their market share. It suffices to recall once again the way the security industry was given a promising avenue for development under the auspices of privacy-enhancing innovation [EUR 12c]. Furthermore, new governance approaches bestow a greater role on markets and networks as coordination mechanisms. The new governance perspective is not about pushing away governments in order to solve the governability crisis, but about assigning new roles of the state in developing new tools and techniques to steer policy-making without recourse to commands or the use of their authority [WAL 99, p. 185]. The aim is to enact autonomous self-governing networks of actors to achieve specific societal objectives. In this respect, the outputs of government and governance are not considered different. The difference is sought in the processes that produce them [STO 98, p. 17]. The problem is that in the complex interactions between a multitude of actors within markets and networks, the usual mechanisms of democratic accountability may be disrupted. They both can be construed as mechanisms for advancing collective responsibility, and as such might denounce the appropriateness of assigning individual blame. This makes them a very good terrain for finger pointing and scapegoating in times of trouble. The market or the network, respectively, can obscure responsibility and reproduce the problem of organized irresponsibility. The next variation of the responsibilization effort that presents us with certain pitfalls as to the status of ethics is the one advancing the human rights paradigm. We already mentioned that part of the overall orientation of EU institutions as to the research and innovation policy is to align the scientific process and its products with fundamental ethical principles in the

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way they are implied in the variety of guaranteed rights by CFREU and ECHR. It is also advanced in the main RRI texts as a way to address the problem of coming up with a shared definition of “societally desirable” and “ethically acceptable” against the backdrop of normative fragmentation in market societies. As von Schomberg noted, we might find such a normative consensus behind the EU political consensus on the notion of fundamental rights [VON 13]. It is believed to reflect the value profile of the EU. The notion of fundamental rights is also considered to be a way of ensuring that RRI’s notion of responsibility will not be absorbed by neoliberal interpretations on responsibility. In this respect, it would be unfair to argue that the RRI field has not addressed the normative incompatibilities between the imperative for responsibilization and market regulation. Such analysis of the prospects of RRI in view of the current politico-economic context has been initiated by Arnaldi and Gorgoni. Their attempt is directed towards “some preliminary considerations on the connections that can be established between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as ‘neoliberalism’” [ARN 16]. The suspicion that RRI could eventually serve the neoliberal agenda is not absent in the conceptual debates devoted to it [VAN 14b, MAC 14]. Arnaldi and Gorgoni contend that RRI’s anchoring to the notion of fundamental rights can discern it from yet another mold of neoliberal understanding on responsibility. However, this also has its difficulties. Although the notion of fundamental rights is considered to be a possible way out of a market-oriented approach to responsibility, we might also consider it supportive in terms of the underlying assumptions that somehow fit the market interpretation on agency. There are two main considerations. First, the notion of rights implies that the latter are understood as individual ascriptions and advance a negative conception of freedom (“freedom from” abuses of all forms and sources), which reproduces neoclassical understanding on agency and responsibility. Second, an implicit tension exists between the human rights regime, which is centered on the individual as political agency, and the RRI’s claim to pursue societally desirable ends. The latter presupposes the existence of a collective agency. I do not contend that reliance on the fundamental rights paradigm is futile. Quite contrarily, it

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is a conceptual vantage point. One possible way for the RRI field to bridge the gap between human rights and collective responsibility is exploring and renegotiating the meaning of “collective rights” as to the overall direction of the S&T process. Yet another responsibilization strategy is the attempt to extend the principles of RRI to the world of privately funded research and innovation. We already mentioned that one of the great challenges before the RRI community is to convey its conceptual achievements to the business sector by trying to “sell” to the industry an idea that emerged in the context of the new governance orientation of publicly funded knowledge. This is deemed necessary, following from the realization that a great deal of the RTD sector is private and if the imperative for responsibilization is to be advanced seriously, it also needs to be integrated in the private knowledge-production process. The overall aim is to mitigate the potential adverse effects on the social fabric caused by the indifference of the market towards resultant social states. This in itself represents a trap for the RRI community since the success of that endeavor is conditioned by delivering a discourse on responsibility and innovation that is commensurate with the “ethos” of the market realm. On the one hand, it offers some economized accounts of responsibilization for convincing the business world that ethicizing its products is cost-efficient and monetarily beneficial in the long term (the account of irresponsible innovation, e.g. [VON 13]). As a result, ethics is presented as compatible with the profit-generating mechanism. This may be true to some extent; nevertheless, it opens a vast space for instrumentalizing it, thereby reproducing implicit problems rather than solving them. On the other hand, RRI does not demonstrate sufficient conceptual flexibility and resorts to promoting well-known tools for democratizing and responsibilizing the knowledge-creation process (e.g. focus groups, brainstorming, Delphi exercises, scenario workshops, citizens’ juries). They are already used by the corporate sector for assessing and anticipating ethics risks and societal impacts15. Finally, it even advances the notion of corporate social responsibility as its own precursor.

15 This is quite obvious in a document of one of the EU-funded projects on integrating the RRI framework in the industrial context (see [RES 17]).

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We already pointed out that RRI is yet another attempt in a series of conceptual novelties to open up room for ethical or at least non-market considerations as to the governance of S&T. One of the often-mentioned notions, especially with reference to the responsibilization of the market realm, is corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is a particular strategy employed by market players, which aims to regain the trust of customers and employees by demonstrating concerns other than those serving the profit-generation process. CSR is a gesture of embracing social and environmental responsibilities along with economic responsibilities (see [BAR 09, IDO 11]). It may take the form of patrimonial care for the workforce, engagement with social causes or charities (repairing public social infrastructure – healthcare, environment, social welfare) or proposing value-sensitive products along with the needs and demands of concerned consumers (e.g. eggs from happy hens, environmentally safe products, etc.). We may regard this as a peculiar claim to integrate ethics and morality back in the market through consumption as long as the latter is expected to reflect the moral choices of the users/consumers/customers. Given this perspective, there is a risk of boiling down morality and ethics to properties of consumption, the information of which can be conveyed as market signals by advancing CSR as a value-sensitive, money-making mechanism. Again, ethics could be instrumentalized and integrated in the market mechanism as a PR technique conveying allusion to acceptability for market expansion. In summary, the different avenues within which the possibility for responsibilization of the research and innovation realm has been explored, present us with ample challenges, the most serious of which is the always lurking danger of instrumentalization and co-optation. This is, of course, not a groundbreaking conceptual realization as to the specifics of the world we live in. RRI, however, has the difficult task of opening conceptual and practical spaces for ethics against the backdrop of the easy match between the S&T realm and the market under the spell of new governance approaches and neutrality. 6.3. Going beyond New Public Management? New Public Management techniques were embraced in RTD policies as part of the overall new governance orientation of the EU. Conceptually, NPM is an amalgam of generic managerialism, which advances a postFordist emphasis on organizational flexibility and customized products, and

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new institutional economics as a guide for reshaping the public sector. NPM was promoted in a series of reforms in the 1980s as a response to the governability problem and the crisis of the Weberian model of public administration (see [LYN 06, LAN 00, POL 11]. Its managerial core aims to deliver more adequate solutions in the provision of public services in view of uncertainty, complexity and citizens’ higher demands. It shares the belief of new institutional economics in the appropriateness of market solutions to public problems and public choice theory’s assumption about the politico-philosophical universality of the figure of Homo economicus. Within this perspective government failure is explained with inefficient allocation of public goods (distortions due to election strategies), inefficiently implementing beneficial policies (bureaucratic failure), rentseeking (generation of social waste rather than social surplus) and failing in delivering judicially optimal outcomes [WAL 99, p. 37]. NPM was the basis for the promotion of a policy paradigm shift for addressing what was deemed government failure by advancing a comprehensive reform program (CPR) in the public sector, which embraces the principles of liberalization, stabilization, privatization and commercialization (LSPC). These changes had led to fading of the distinctions between the private and the public realm. It is not that the private conquers or substitutes the public. It is more a form of sharing (but not a wholesale transfer) of responsibilities among the networks of public and non-state actors. This governance model of blending the two realms in the provision of public services is the so-called New Public Contracting [VIN 07]. A manifestation of the same trend but in the field of EU-funded RTD is the promotion of PPPs in research and innovation. It is not only in accord with the new governance orientation but also in line with the principles of Mode-2 science. Here, in this research-market line of development, responsibilization and democratization are not mutually reinforcing. As Vincent-Jones demonstrates very well in his article [VIN 07], NPC measures may suffer from serious responsiveness deficits, expressed in regulatory ineffectiveness and illegitimacy (diminishing room for citizen participation). Then, the overall NPM orientation can turn into a governance problem rather than a means for citizen empowerment. As was already hinted, extrapolating management principles from the private sphere to public sectors and spilling over responsibility into non-state agencies raises the vexed question of democratic accountability.

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The reason is that the market-oriented interpretation of accountability differs in its normative content from the political interpretation of accountability. This has led to what some might call the “second wave” of public sector reforms [BEV 07], which aimed to address the consequences of NPM. These include coordinating and managing the various networks of agencies by advancing joined-up policies16; tackling issues of accountability in the context of NPM (e.g. corruption in the private sector); increasing citizens’ involvement; engaging stakeholders in policy formulation and implementation in order to establish trust; and so on. In this context and in view of the problems accompanying globalization (terrorism, the environment, asylum seekers, aging populations and the digital divide), the role of the state has been renegotiated, and the focus has changed from efficiency to equity. All this has its projections in the realm of research and innovation. In a report of the European Science Foundation (2013), most of the aforementioned problems have been considered. It advances the need to replace the managerial culture of choice and control with the logic of care for the future, in order to attempt to reconcile excellence and relevance in research instead of opposing them, to open up ways to actually integrate diversity of perspectives on progress and the future, recognizing the need for time and space for reflexive work in research, to consider relevance beyond economic expediency and excellence beyond traditional research indicators, not to delegate reflexivity only to the social sciences and humanities, etc. [ESF 13]. As can be seen, it offers suggestions that aim to overcome the consequences of the “market turn” in new governance, embodied in NPM, and direct governance efforts towards finding the adequate form of organizing the research and innovation process so that responsibilization and democratization may not go astray. Going beyond NPM may require very creative conceptual and practical efforts to attempt to emancipate S&T from the normative grasp of market societies. In the following I have outlined some directions that could not exhaust such an endeavor, but could serve as a beginning for clearing the way for the RRI promise. The first such direction was hinted at in the previous chapters. It concerns the role of the political realm in the overall organization of the 16 A manifestation of such joined-up policies are the one-stop shops at which the unemployed can access benefits, training and job information all in one place.

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responsibilization endeavor. It was already mentioned that in line with the new governance principles, politicians and public officials are regarded as enabling and mediating the dialogue between the scientific community and the public. That is, they have receded in contribution to the normative content of the science–society exchange, and taken the role of good listeners to all arguments and to all the input from the variety of societal actors. The political realm umpires the normative conflicts between the concerned parties and their respective demands. This produces certain distancing from the actual dialogue and taking the role of an external arbiter instead of contributing to genuine normative and politico-philosophical content, which leaves political responsibility only with procedural significance. This is understandable given the new governance approaches and the overall caution taken not to be accused of imposing normative substance but to activate the conditions in which it can emerge in the collective learning process between societal stakeholders. Therefore, we need to find ways to revitalize the notion of political responsibility in the context of research and innovation. In the current governance paradigm, politicians are primarily regarded as mediators and power/interest brokers, listening to the voices of experts (proud of taking a technocratic stance) and the public (through participatory initiatives)17. This may be the result of a long-lasting tradition which Schmitt mentions, which reflects a particular feature of Western European thinking. It is the continuous chasing of a neutral sphere in which all arguing stops (from theology to metaphysics, to moral philosophy, to economics, to technics). The history of ideas may be regarded as a continuous process of neutralization, de-neutralization and a search for new areas of neutralization [SCH 07]. In the realm of decision-making and even knowledge creation, this drive is reflected in the recent accentuation on the importance of evidence-based policy and scientific expertise – as though evidence is not context-based, politically influenced and methodologically restricted. What is actually needed is fully fledged participation of the political realm as a contributor of authentic normative content in the dialogue about the acceptable future trajectories of S&T development. In this sense, the role of the political level in initiating, inciting and contributing to a political

17 Participatory exercises often take the shape of media-covered enquiries on attitudes of different societal actors that serve as leverage for shaping attitudes on a larger public scale.

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struggle as a politico-philosophical struggle shall be emphasised. Thus, in order to reinvigorate the appeal of RRI, we need to think how to re-enchant the world in view of science and technology (as opposed to the Weberian disenchantment by science and rationalization) and re-inspire the politics–S&T relationship. Our second suggestion concerns the conceptual underpinnings of RRI, and more specifically the relation/distinction between morality and ethics. Sometimes in accounts exploring the normative questions as to the future of new and emerging technologies, ethics is defined in contrast to morality (e.g. [RAI 12]). It is usually assumed that morality is similar to restrictive, unquestionable, obligatory normative guidance on what is right and wrong, whereas ethics is construed as the province of discussion. It entails more conceptual freedom as well as the hardship of the reflexive examination on the categories and the specific content of right and wrong. Morality carries an allusion to the individual responsibility against the backdrop of some collective expectation, while ethics alludes to the possibility for assuming collective responsibility within the process of participatory reflexive deliberation. On the one hand, I can recognize that in the context of market societies, the meaning and significance of ethics as to the research and innovation process needs to be firmly asserted. And it is usually done by underlining the insufficiency of morality. On the other hand, advancing ethics as a subject of procedural installments and operationalizations may have, and has, started, I believe, to construe ethics as a neutral arbiter on what is right and wrong within the RTD process. It is perceived as expert knowledge that can provide a kind of techno-administrative fix on matters where there is no legal regulatory clarity yet, a source of ready-made answers, a procedural requirement with which researchers have to deal in order to obtain financing, etc. Conceptually, the RRI field aims to restore its open and reflexive character, while its institutional integration into RTD makes it functioning as a fundamental rights-oriented compliance approach. NPM is also not of help since it could allow the economization of ethics by conceptually coupling it with the coordination and normative characteristics of the market mechanism. It seems to me that in the context of market societies, we need to restore the power of moral reasoning and the notion of moral status in order to make meaningful any discussion that claims to engage with substantive (not procedural) perspectives on the issue of “the good life” in view of the developments in the S&T realm. This is important for RRI as long as it aims

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to steer innovation towards “the right impacts” as a collective endeavor. Hence, the field needs to reopen the debate on morality and ethics, and renegotiate the significance of this dyad. In view of the imperative for responsibilization as imperative, morality seems to convey a stronger appeal to responsibility and one’s individual and social consciousness in contrast to ethics, which seems to have gained more procedural flavor that puts emphasis on the engagement with the mere possibility for discussion and not particularly with substantive normative content. Hence, morality will not be expelled as irrelevant to the responsibilization ambition of RRI. It could be used to revitalize the normative weight of ethics in the research and innovation process. It has already been mentioned that one of the greatest problems before RRI accounts in sustaining a shared vision on what would constitute as societally desirable and ethically acceptable is the normative fragmentation in contemporary market societies. This corresponds to the liberal concern as to how to reconcile the multitude of value orientations within a shared normative framework that should be neutral between their respective notions of the good life. The NPM strand of new governance would advance the relevance of the market mechanism as a neutral and indifferent coordination tool as to the richness of ethics and morality perspectives. This could economize the notion of the good life or decrease its normative significance. In order to overcome this hindrance, the RRI conceptual field, taking the example of Sadurski, could advance as a first step towards a very necessary distinction between “the right” and “the good” [SAD 90]. He made this distinction in an attempt to find the moral grounds for some normative consensus in the context of value pluralism. The difference between the two allows for the law to be neutral between various conceptions of the good while enforcing the right. One of the errors in consequentialist ethics is that it infers the right from the maximization of the good. Thus, the normative weight of this approach is decreased and reduced to calculation on costs and benefits, which is paradigmatic for any economistic analysis. Nevertheless, the notion of right needs a certain normative content that would not be disputed by any value orientation18.

18 He finds this indivisible and infrangible moral ground for enforcing the right to be the harm principle [SAD 90, pp. 89–131].

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Concerning RRI, such a distinction could be very useful in an attempt to advance responsible governance of emerging technologies. It is so because it is important to avoid misconstruing sectorial conceptions of the good (particularistic interests) with the right. Very often, in the examination of the societal aspects of a novel technology, its rightness is assessed on the basis of its benefits in terms of economic figures – creation of potential jobs, contribution to economic growth, tax revenues, etc. In view of such an analysis, the technology in question may seem good. However, this does not answer unequivocally to the question whether it is right. Let us illustrate this with the case of harnessing research and innovation for the development of the gambling industry. The sector has experienced tremendous growth after the economic crisis of 2008. It has employed various technological novelties to turn the wheel of its profit-generating mechanism. Since then, the industry has been on the path of “ethical clearance” as the potential benefits in economic terms are very convincing in any political debate on the matter [MAR 15]. So, one of the problems in RRI and all responsibilization efforts as to S&T is how to emancipate the notion of “the right” from “the good” and reinstate the relevance of non-economic considerations while not advancing them as quasi-economic interpretations. This brings us to the next consideration. It refers to the broader cultural context of market societies. Unfortunately, today in its neutralization drive, economic thinking advances the analytical importance of the notion of preferences, not that of intents. And this is understandable since it is in line with the value neutrality hypothesis about the market. It does so because when we focus on intent, we enter the realm of social action and cannot escape the conversation about ethics and morality. Insisting on the notion of preferences provides conceptual isolation of the economic field from ethics, and maintains its claim to represent evidence-based and reliable scientific knowledge. In other words, economic thinking must re-engage with its own tradition – its implicit connection with moral and political philosophy. Economics is a moral science, since it deals with “[i]ntrospection and values… with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties” (John Maynard Keynes, cited in [SKI 11]). This corresponds to the pathos against the colonization ambitions of the market as a normative beacon. Sandel maintains that when deciding whether a good should be allocated by the market or non-market principles,

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economics is a poor guide [SAN 13, p. 122]. The reason is that, along with the claim for value neutrality of the discipline when interpreting human behavior and social choice, and its purported independence from moral and political philosophy, it becomes insufficient and irrelevant in providing adequate normative orientation. What Sandel challenges, following Hirsch, is the economistic assumption that the process of commercialization does not affect or alter the good in question: “Standard economic theory construes all motivations, whatever their character or source, as preferences, and assumes they are additive. But this misses the corrosive effect of money” [SAN 13, p. 135]. His intellectual strategy is slightly different from Polanyi’s – he claims that as long as market reasoning is pervading social and civic life, it becomes inevitable that it engages with moral reasoning. This practically means to relinquish its aspirations to be a value-neutral science and re-engage with its own tradition. We shall not forget that classical economy was conceived as political economy. Of course, there have been conceptual projects that aim to overcome the distance between economics and ethics. The conceptual strategy of one such attempt is to bridge the gap between economics and normative ethics by exploring the need for both fields to critically examine their own presuppositions and respective approaches: economics – as to assessing the market solely on grounds of efficiency and neglecting ethical issues; normative ethics – as to its disdain of the primacy of efficiency and its narrow focus on the moral assessment of markets (mainly in its failures to produce justice) [BUC 85]. This approach, in the spirit of new governance, advances a reflexive process of questioning the foundations of each discipline, and by doing so, coming up with a shared normative vision. Another account [ULR 08] proposes an integrative approach that critiques conceptualizations that assume a two-world vision of economic rationality and ethical reason. It advances an integrative idea of socio-economic rationality in which a rational–ethical point of view is already embedded. It opposes that economic rationality should be reduced to the coercive logic of economism, which has expunged any ethical dimension (which is a politico-philosophical consideration) and departed from the good tradition of political economy to claim the supremacy of “pure” and “value free” economics. Peter Ulrich argues that economic (not economistic) rationality has already embedded a normative component ‒ operating in the

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service of life. Economic reasonableness presupposes an ethical dimension of rational economic action: “[t]he actual development is in the opposite direction, towards an increasingly radical independence of a ‘free’ market, which has meanwhile unleashed its forces worldwide. Questioning the acceptability of this development by no means implies a rejection of the market economy but only of its exaggeration towards a total market society. Not markets but citizens finally deserve to be free in modern society. The market economy must, therefore, be civilized in a literal sense” [ULR 08, p. 2]. Economic ethics is more than applied ethics (business ethics) or normative ethics. The integrative perspective treats economic ethics as part of political ethics that embeds a “civilized” market economy in a well-ordered society of free citizens [ULR 08, p. 7]. It entails the primacy of the principle of service to life over the logic of the market and the profit principle (which, according to the author, is not a principle at all). The undeniable link between ethics and economics advances a substantial notion of economy. This very much reminds Polanyi’s vision on the meaning of the economic. One of the problematic assumptions regarding contemporary market societies is what he calls “economistic prejudice” – it denotes confusion that the term economy can be exhausted with the notion of self-regulating economy. Then, civilizing the market economy, as Ulrich suggests, also requires challenging the power of market mentality and its assumptions. Although all this looks like a problem outside the scope of RRI, it is directly related because it concerns the context in which the responsibilization endeavor needs to take place. If it is to fulfill its promise as a social critique stance, subjecting the context to reflexive examination, including economistic prejudices and the overarching market-oriented mentality is a must. On the one hand, it is necessary to emancipate publicly funded RTD from the impact of NPM interpretations of new governance. On the other hand, if its responsibilization ambitions are indeed also directed towards the business world, it needs to find a conceptual and practical means to bridge economy and ethics, that is, economic reason with moral reasoning. We already saw that within the RRI efforts, there are steps in

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this direction. The notion of problematic/irresponsible innovation is used as a strategy to appeal to the reasonableness of market agents to realize that ignoring the ethical/morality charge of an innovation could eventually be costly. However, the RRI field needs to make further steps in order to advance genuine responsibilization processes and not to fall in the trap of economistic interpretations of its own postulates. I suggest that a possible way to do so is to renegotiate the meaning of reasonableness, as the one encompassing the notions of sensibility, acceptability, rationality and fairness. Then, economic rationality, in connection to RRI, could be justified and reinterpreted in the light of broader societal and ethical considerations. But RRI cannot stop there. Once it has done that, it also needs to proceed in the same vein with other keys for the notions of the economic realm. It could attempt to renegotiate the expediency of innovation, for example. A critical analysis can easily show how innovation can be used to reveal or mask the problems of capital accumulation and realization. An example of the former is the role of innovative financial instruments in producing problematic mechanisms for reallocation and redistribution of capital through financial markets. An instance for the latter is using innovation for advancing transparency in initiatives such as WikiLeaks. Concerning the economic expediency of innovation, it does not need much elaboration. First, innovation might produce acceleration as to the performance of the “invisible hand”. Just imagine the economic temporality and particularly turnover time without the innovations in the ICT and transportation sectors. Second, innovation is a capital-generating mechanism by virtue of advancing new products, production processes and market niches. Third, it can be a means for capital realization by creating new consumer preferences, attitudes, social habits and cultural orientations. Fourth, innovation is certainly part of the strategies of accelerated economic temporality for the world of crime. Designer drugs, technologies for falsification and fraud (money, documents, contraband, trafficking) and even social innovation (e.g. practices involving “cooking the books” in the financial sector) are all examples of harnessing innovation for unjust/illegal purposes. Innovation’s undeniable economic expediency is obscuring a very important question ‒ whether it serves the problematic domination of exchange value over use value. This pertains to the question of the possible conceptualizations of responsibility and ethics within the realm of economics. So, one possible way to reconceptualize the expedience of

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innovation in the context of RRI is to bring forward the importance of use value over exchange value. Then, responsibilization through end-user involvement can obtain more substance and meaning. Otherwise, it will stand only as an empty slogan legitimizing profit-oriented strategies. Then, innovation is one of the points of contradiction in contemporary market societies. According to David Harvey, a contradiction not only reveals the conflicts in the generation and accumulation of capital but also represents opportunities for constructing positive images of the future and intervention in a more desired direction. In line with this stance, we might regard innovation as both a problem and an opportunity [HAR 14]. Thus, RRI’s responsibilization of innovation in the context of market regulation would entail reconsidering the role of innovation not in patching the chasm of capitalism but in revealing and opposing exploitation mechanisms, and in redirecting the current economy of “accumulation by dispossession” (to employ a phrase of Harvey’s) in more socially productive paths. This emphasizes a very important point – economically productive does not necessarily mean socially productive, although the concerted narrative surrounding economic growth implicitly equivalates the latter with societal well-being. RRI needs to dismantle this assumption time and again in order to advance its agenda in contemporary market societies. Last but not least, in order to mitigate the impact of NPM market-oriented interpretation on ethics and the expediency of research and innovation, the RRI field could attempt to elaborate a new ethos of science – an ethos that escapes the traps of the new research culture that we mentioned earlier, because the latter welcomes dangerous alliances with the world of private interests. And when I refer to a new ethos of science, I mean something different from a new ethics in science. As it was already shown, in the institutional context, on the one hand the term ethics evokes connotations of a peculiar “technocratic knowledge on morality”, an expertise that is supposed to provide ready-made answers as to what is acceptable in the realm of research and innovation, and a recipe on what the scientist should do and not do. On the other hand, ethos entails engagement with a certain outlook not only on how to be in the world but also on the meaning of this being in the world. The RRI field could use the notion of ethos as a conceptual basis to reconstruct the meaning and significance of research and innovation and renegotiate the tenets of scientific professionalism in the light of the imperative for responsibilization.

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In summary, there are different paths of addressing the tension between responsibilization and market regulation, and the impact of NPM-inspired perspectives on governance in the research and innovation realm. Regardless of the specific intellectual strategy or practical solution, it seems inevitable to challenge the economistic interpretations of the role and significance of the S&T realm – as to the primacy of neutrality, the expediency of innovation, the status of ethics, the roles (and responsibilities) of the actors engaged in the process, among other aspects. Simply put, the forming RRI field must reinstate the politico-philosophical significance of the contemporary knowledge-creation process.

Conclusion

The underlying conflict between “the imperative for responsible innovation” and the normative profile of contemporary market societies is a major consideration for reflecting on the feasibility of the quest for responsibilization of the science and technology realm. This book has voiced a warm-hearted concern about the enormous obstacles to fulfilling the promise of RRI. It proposed some critical reflections on its actual prospects in view of the current politico-economic context. It explored the merits of the recently promoted notion of RRI and its potential as social critique when it comes to the role of ethics, responsibility and innovation in shaping the future; it nonetheless focused on the inevitable impediments to the meaningful implementation of the idea vis-à-vis the normative structure of contemporary market societies. What are the properties of the latter that have made S&T a grave concern instead of a hope for the future? The first problem is the normative fragmentation of contemporary societies and turning the political realm into a terrain of bargaining between the legitimate interests of different sectors: defence, healthcare, employment, economic stimulus, education, and so on. How can this plurality of perspectives provide normative orientation to the research and innovation realm without a grand societal project to which it can be referred? The problem is not in value pluralism itself but in the assumption that it is exhaustive of the normative structure of contemporary societies. Given the undergoing marketization of public life, this may open avenues for flattening the plurality of values with the normative orientation of the market.

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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This politico-philosophical issue might seem conceptually distant from the theme of the current book, but it is actually at the heart of the matter because it concerns the conditions for responsibilization and the possibility of giving deeper societal meaning to the S&T evolution. The lack of grand societal visions makes it difficult for the research and innovation realm to construe such meaning beyond the market imperatives for efficiency, performance and economic expediency. Even though we agree that the purpose of science is to advance science itself, including by producing plurality of scientific truths, this does not answer the questions “why?” or “what vision for humanity does this advance?” It is so because we have no grand narrative about what our vision for humanity is. Contemporary societies became victims to their own reflexive mechanisms embodied in post-structuralism and questioning the very idea for grand narratives. In the current intellectual climate, the argument for such large-scale societal projects seems offensive for the free, autonomous, liberal subject, who has been left with the market as the main source of normative orientation1. The fear of grand narratives that can tuck the subject into oppressive social structures has become oppressive itself. In such a situation, the S&T realm ends up relying on the market as a societal compass, which navigates through a mechanism that is assumed to be non-cognitive of values (neutral). Second, we witness a diminishing trust in the power of legal regulation. It is a common assumption that when it comes to the speed in introducing social change, business is always ahead of other sectors. Futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler once famously noted that public life is like a multispeed freeway in which private economic activities are in the fast lane, while the slowest reaction to change belongs to the realm of law [TOF 06]. And there is no surprise or drama about this. In fact, legal regulation very often performs as a normative stabilizer of social change and not as the sole promoter of the latter. However, the image used by the Tofflers is very telling for an existing assumption about private enterprise as the engine of progress, and the political and legislative realms as a hindrance or censors of its impetus to introduce novelty. This is one of the problems that poses risks for ethics: any attempt to subject the economic field to ethics-oriented revision could be perceived as an attack against change, progress and innovation altogether. In the cultural climate of market societies, raising the question about the purposes, the meaning and effects of market-driven 1 Despite the current intellectual climate, O’Neill, for example, makes a conceptual attempt to demonstrate the compatibility between perfectionist accounts and value pluralism [ONE 98].

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innovation could very easily be regarded as hostile, retrograde and anti-scientific. This reveals a very pressing issue – the decreasing normative power of law in the context of turning innovation into the driving force of contemporary societies. Innovation introduces novel practices, launches new phenomena in public life, and produces unknown risks and uncertainties about the future. How does the legislative effort handle the enormous challenge of ensuring social control when it comes to the unknown? How should regulation be provided when it comes to uncertainty? Furthermore, how should it be relied upon when we witness what some call a “crisis of compliance”2? Strategic “adjustment” of scientific results, concealment of relevant data due to “trade secrets” and ignoring the potential for inflicting harm all illustrate the fact that sometimes the mere existence of legal regulation is not a sufficient motivation for abiding by it in a highly competitive market environment3. Today, it seems hard to uphold the legal normative horizon. What should be said about the ethical, then? Bearing in mind all these problems, we might construe the RRI endeavor as part of an intellectual effort, although not explicitly expressed, to somehow restore a long-forgotten meaning of progress by reconciling the notions of human progress and S&T advancement. Or at least, to make room for the argument that the former is not exhausted with the latter. This entails conceptual emphasis on the instrumental role of research and innovation. But then again, the responsibilization effort cannot omit the following politico-philosophical questions: instrumental in the service of what common good, what societal vision, what notion of the good life and what kind of future? I believe that RRI can fill in this conceptual gap. In view of its uncertain future, this could be the matter on which to claim its own original contribution. Meanwhile, the RRI field is still in search of its radically novel imprint. It is in a precarious position in the realm of ideas. If it does not go deeper into the problems of research and innovation amidst the pushes and pulls of market societies, it could be yet another attempt in an array of responsibilization endeavors that failed in providing a

2 This refers to the fading normative force of law. The term appeared in relation to humanitarian concerns as to armed conflict [BAS 08], but its relevance could also be explored in view of profit-oriented innovation. 3 Very often, “big pharma”, “big oil” or “big tobacco” have been in the limelight due to similar concerns.

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comprehensive solution to the problem of what would be an acceptable direction of the unstoppable S&T advancement. In view of this, RRI is facing a particular challenge – how to legitimize itself as a genuinely novel direction in the governance of innovation, and as such how to reach the innovation infrastructure, most of which is based on privatized knowledge-generation processes. Concerning the first difficulty, a great deal of conceptual efforts have been made to distinguish the specific appeal of RRI’s take on responsibility from all its “predecessors”. However, when it comes to demonstrating good practices in this respect, it very often relies on cases elicited from the latter. Thus, one of the dangers is that if the field does not develop its own original contribution to methods and tools, it can very easily become a case of conceptual colonialism by rendering ideas and practices that do not emerge from the field to be its own. In addition to this, the structural pressure and the normative (dis)orientation in contemporary market societies restricts the possibility for responsibilization and the integration of anticipation, deliberation, participation, reflexivity and transparency in the research and innovation process. The first component of the challenge comes into conflict with the second one. How should the privatized research and innovation process be reached? The latter would entail questioning the normative autonomy and the primacy of profit maximization in the business sector. In many public RRI events, when raising the issue of extending RRI principles to businesses (the big gap in RRI popularization), it becomes clear that they already have guidelines, declarations and tools aimed at responsible practices. Furthermore, they have been the sole promoter of such changes, guided by the shifting normative landscape that influences consumer behavior. This, of course, does not deny the many problems that accompany the private knowledge-generation process, some of which we have paid attention to in this book. But the question of persuading the industry into something to which it is already leading its own battles is rather complicated. Similar to the case with society, we cannot assume that business represents a consistent agency. It can be considered as such only in terms of its general normative orientation towards profit. However, the issues concerning what are the acceptable margins of profit and which are the acceptable means for securing it are not a source of consensus among market players. The commitment to competition and a variety of sector-specific interests does not mean that the notion of responsibility, the societal significance of economic activities, the range of obligations to the customers, and the role of

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entrepreneurship and innovation are not an arena of battles and discord between different private entities. How RRI should contribute to these debates or how they will assist in elaborating its original take on responsibilization in a market-driven context is an open question that needs to be addressed by all means. Then, RRI accounts could fulfill their emancipatory potential as social critique. We already noted that part of this effort is advancing a novel responsibility paradigm. The academic strand of RRI argues to promote a future-oriented notion of responsibility, which is concerned with taking the initiative to open new trajectories for development along societal needs and values. Indeed, this seems to be a plausible way of steering innovation away from the normative rigidity of purely economic considerations. However, there are two possible traps along this understanding – preemptive stance towards the future4, and the difficulty in sustaining an argument on the consistency of a collective agency such as society in a normatively fragmented environment. Then again, how should we ensure space for proactive action when it is “narrowed” into certain institutional arrangements and the imperative of market regulation? After all, proactivity presupposes an expanded mindset to generate or accommodate the possibility for emancipation in the sense of exercising critique. RRI purports to claim such conceptual space; nevertheless, this does not solve the implementation problem concerning the actual possibilities for a reflexive manoeuvring that would enrich existing legal approaches in assuming responsibility. Second, RRI calls for responsibility as a collective and participatory process; it should be shared among different societal actors. This is an admirable claim, but how can it reach its promise without pushing against the “law-market-science” interlock on the individual as the only relevant agency when it comes to morality and ethics? The RRI field will have to elaborate a better approach in conceptualizing responsibility and collective action in view of steering S&T. Its ambition is to establish complementarity between different sectorial dimensions of responsibility and ensure collaboration between perspectives (political, economic, legal and ethical). This is a promise for normative reconciliation; however, it is burdened with its own problems concerning the 4 This danger is manifested in the promotion of new surveillance technologies, which bring out a myriad of ethics-related issues concerning privacy, the autonomy of the subject, and the legal interpretation of terms such as crime, suspect, and guilt, among others.

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“compatibility of logics” for which RRI does not propose a clear implementation solution. One particular worry is how the format of collective learning can avoid turning into a bargaining process between competing sectorial interests – a distinctive feature of contemporary democracy as polyarchy. Yet another problem when it comes to the future of RRI is what original normative content it can propose. Currently, this difficulty is overcome by resorting to the “ethics principles” in EU policies, embodied in the notion of fundamental rights. This in itself poses two important questions. First, will it develop an independent and original normative content vis-à-vis the specifics of contemporary market societies, and if so, in what direction? Second, if it did not propose some novel normative contribution, why would we need RRI if we already have ethics institutionalized through the anchoring of fundamental rights in the formulation and implementation of research and innovation policies? We need to keep in mind that the fundamental rights paradigm is employed due to a missing grand narrative that could provide the ideological underpinning of the European Union project. It itself is not a very stable point of normative anchoring since it cannot overcome the problems of value pluralism5. So, RRI needs to clarify its extent of reliance on the fundamental rights dimension. Of course, we cannot deny its place, at least because part and parcel of the responsibilization endeavor is to reinvent the ethos of science, which in turn steps on the human rights tradition. How this tradition can be reinterpreted in terms of the prospective notion of responsibility and the conditions for collective action is another open matter. Additional difficulty comes, as it was already pointed out, from the unclear conceptual relationship between ethics and morality. Sometimes the field advances a language that reconciles morality orientation with an institutionalist approach – it is about steering, managing, governing innovation towards “the right impacts”. Other times, it detaches morality from ethics, arguing the insufficiency of morality as restrictive guidance on what is acceptable, and advances the merits of ethics as reflexive examination with no predetermined solution. By doing so and by underlining the processual character of conceiving ethics, it opens the door for 5 For example, in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the right of security is coupled with the right of liberty (Article 6 – Right to liberty and security – “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person”). Thus, the promoters of ethics reflexivity in security research are confronting a disagreeable situation in which two contesting notions, especially in view of security technologies for surveillance purposes, are normatively reconciled in a line that conceals their controversy.

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interpretations of new public management under the auspices of the EU governance turn. In summary, in the context of market societies, the RRI realm is facing many challenges in bringing the imperative for responsibilization up to another level. A key condition in accomplishing this, I believe, is fulfilling its social critique potential. This involves the conceptual audacity of its proponents to question the evidential social reality, to reveal problematic moments in conceiving an ethical response to the need for responsible governance of innovation, to focus on the issues concerning both the mischiefs of the market and the democratic deficit and to explore the fading trust between science, society and the realm of politics. Such critical stance entails both unmasking (i.e. revealing, making visible the mechanisms of domination) and liberation (i.e. emancipation from the grip of those external 6 7 powers) . Or, as Boltanski depicted it ‒ to render reality unacceptable and engage in action [BOL 11, p. xi]. If there is no reconsideration of the conflict between the demands of responsibilization and the normative grip of market regulation, the prospects for RRI to introduce meaningful social change are rather poor. It may not escape capitalism’s ability to assimilate critique and risks to become something like a recording mechanism compiling data and collecting information on all sorts of techniques and methods that fall under the broad umbrella of participation and ethics. In view of all this, I make several suggestions as to themes that the RRI field would need to further pay attention to and develop if it aims to fulfill its potential as conceptual novelty and emancipatory effort, and face the main challenge – the tension between its responsibilization ambitions and market regulation. Governance. In order to emphasize the particularity of the new approaches of management of innovation in responsible ways, the RRI field often relies on the notion of governance. It is considered to be the participatory, democratic and adequate reaction to the governability crisis. It implies going beyond the purely technocratic or purely ideological policy response to a particular social problem by aligning the possible solutions

6 See Boltanski on Bourdieu [BOL 07, p. x]. 7 From this perspective, he is probably right when noting that “moral activity is a predominantly critical activity” [Ibid., pp. 3–4].

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with realities on the ground8. It entails initiating and promoting public action within networks of social actors. This is hoped to ensure legitimacy of the solutions; however, as it “rests on multiple authorities” [MÖR 09], it leads to obscuring the distinction between public and private. RRI theoretical accounts need to explore in depth the assumptions about the merits of governance as to the management or “steering” of research and innovation. Why? On the one hand, the usual association of governance with the market realm might confuse the potential of the latter to advance responsibilization and democratization strategies in the field of science and technologies. Given the effects of market regulation and the claim for its normative neutrality, it is somewhat questionable whether governance is about the multiplication of authorities or about a profound crisis of authority. Neutrality as a principle of social regulation, advanced by the market, can lead to anti-regulatory stance that challenges the mere conditions of authority. Then, how could the legitimacy of the responsibilization effort be conceived? On the other hand, the conception of governance as resting on multiple authorities can produce yet another confusion. Does the exercise of authority at different levels – local, regional, national, international, supranational – introduce more complexity (because of their simultaneous regulatory claims), or could it deliver on legitimacy and mitigate the governability crisis? Such an understanding about a multi-level exercise of authority can legitimize the market, not as just one level among many, but as a leveling (horizontal, neutral, morally indifferent) locus of authority through instruments such as public–private partnerships. The forming RRI field needs to further explore the notion of governance, especially in view of public–private collaborations and the justification of private interests as manifestation of the common good under the auspices of new public management approaches. Hard law/soft law. The emphasis on the notion of governance as distinctive from other modes of managing research and innovation has another related effect – diverting the analytical attention away from the so-called “hard law” towards more loose, or “soft”, forms of social regulation that rely on voluntary commitment to normative principles 8 An example of such an approach is involving patients’ organizations in setting healthcare policies.

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embodied in declarations, codes of conduct, guidelines, communications, action plans, etc. Soft law, by virtue of its proactive and voluntary character, is regarded as a democratic and participatory mechanism of conceiving normativity, which in itself is considered a source of its legitimacy. Nevertheless, it is not strictly binding and does not imply legal sanction. It entails rather different accountability mechanisms, mostly relying on internal sectorial pressure on the transgressing party. Then, assuming responsibility becomes a matter of goodwill compliance with agreed norms by the respective field or the political realm. The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity is a good example of a soft law instrument in the sphere of research and innovation. Future theoretical debates devoted to RRI could also add significant conceptual contribution by exploring the traps behind this dichotomy. A pertinent question in this respect is how the overreliance on soft law instruments of regulation could obscure instances of irresponsible research practices that beg for hard law sanctions. Is soft law going to become an exonerating mechanism in the context of market-driven regulation, especially in the realms that are supposed to advance public–private collaboration on significant innovation projects? Academic RRI accounts often conceptualize responsibility in contrast to strictly legalistic interpretations on accountability. But what could be the traps for the responsibilization effort in view of this approach? Can the quest for more responsibility in the governance of research and innovation turn into less responsibilization due to questioning the regulatory adequacy of hard law (legal compliance) and using the appeal for soft law as a way out? The idea for multiplying the responsible actors in RTD policies (through participatory structures), together with the reality of normatively indifferent but democratic market (regulation without authority), could lead to the disappearance of the responsible agency altogether. It seems that in the framework of RRI and future EU governance of innovation, it is important to sustain the hard law aspect of regulation and further improve it by promoting a more dynamic (timely) and adequate (as to moral interpretation) legal rules. Although legal compliance is sometimes resented as restrictive and insufficient by academic RRI proponents (e.g. [RAI 12]), we should probably not dismiss the opportunities to integrate ethics through it. It is worth considering the possibilities of using legal normative regulation as a meeting ground for technical and philosophical resources, as well as the issue of how the current legal framework can evolve in a timely manner in

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order to accommodate considerations as to the malevolent or unintended effects of the wide-range deployment of new technologies. Responsibility/risk/fault. If we talk about the imperative for responsibility and acknowledge that the notion of imperative has a strong normative appeal, we also need to elaborate on the different dimensions of exercising that responsibility. It is true that the RRI field has already treated the question. One particular account has exhaustively put the matter in order by differentiating between paradigms ‒ fault, risk, safety, RRI ‒ and their respective criteria of ascription (liability, damage, uncertainty, responsiveness); means of realization (sanction, compensation, precaution, participation); target (negative outcomes or negative and positive outcomes in the case of RRI); dimension (individual, systemic, collective, collaborative); orientation in time (retrospective, prospective/retrospective, prospective/anticipative, prospective/proactive); responsibility dimensions (liability-responsibility, causality-responsibility, capacity-responsibility, virtue-responsibility); and regulating mechanism (hard law, soft law, hard law/soft law, self-regulation/soft law/hard law) (all summarized in [ARN 16, p. 10]). As can be seen, RRI is argued to have the status of a new paradigm which completes the existing ones. It does not denounce them but claims to provide an innovative take on the matter of participation, collaboration, prospection, proactivity, self-regulation and virtue. It is supposed to overcome the shortcomings of legalism (based on the notion of fault and liability) and consequentialism (based on the calculation of risk and possible compensation), and go beyond purely protectionist notions (such as safety and precaution). Arnaldi and Gorgoni’s account is a significant step towards outlining the conceptual substance of RRI. However, their exploration needs to be further carried out, especially in view of the interaction between aspects of the different paradigms and rediscovering the merits of the latter. For example, how valuable can the notion of fault still be? It has a particular ethical charge in contrast to the notion of risk, which fits very well the claims for neutrality of both the scientific realm and the market. Fault still keeps the element of personal normative engagement with one’s deeds and their consequences. It is morally binding and presupposes some notion of justice. Risk, on the other hand, being construed on the basis of allegedly neutral calculation as to possible effects in line with the logic of market

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societies and its commodification drive, can obscure actual fault9. It is a gesture of objectifying and measuring uncertainty. It is not morally binding but legally binding. It does not serve some substantive notion of justice (which does not have a genuine normative appeal), but makes a consequentialist assessment of a process. Morality becomes a matter of calculation. It depersonalizes fault by presenting it as a misfortune that entails legally set compensation due to the contractual character of social relationships under the procedural neutrality of the law. This also reproduces the logic of the market. Without the notion of fault, can we question forms of social and economic organization such as sweatshops? Left only to the risk paradigm, the acceptability and moral abhorrence of such practices cannot be highlighted, because they are presented as economic phenomena whose admissibility is a matter of cost– benefit analysis. What about the safety paradigm, then? Can it save the day? It advances legal instruments to ensure precaution against possible negative consequences for the public. It is still the only official way to keep profit-eager market agents accountable in the context of free market supply. It sets limits, which are politically negotiated, but it still has the potential to convey morality arguments which can be codified as bans, licenses, etc. The problem with it is how reliable it can be against the backdrop of market pressures, lobbying mechanisms, interested and advocacy knowledge production, information wars, etc. It is based on the normative claim for protecting the public interest, but in view of the increasing globalization of knowledge production and the lack of universal regulatory mechanisms, its enforcement might become difficult. Thus, RRI needs to explore the merits and drawbacks of the available responsibility paradigms, and if necessary, to restore the conceptual and practical relevance of some of their aspects, given the tension between responsibilization and market regulation. Temporality. Another conceptual challenge before RRI is to elaborate more on its own take on temporality, especially in view of uncertainty. One of the difficulties in sustaining a reliable ethics of the future is the grip of economized consequentialist thinking expressed as cost–benefit analysis. RRI mostly treats uncertainty as epistemic insufficiency. It focuses on 9 Japan’s 2011 nuclear catastrophe is a telling example. Initially, it was discursively referred to as one caused by natural disasters (earthquakes and tsunamis). The fault of industry and government in the management of safety was obscured under the auspices of calculable risk. Later, it became clear that the incident was more man-made than triggered by nature [MCC 12].

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anticipation by exploring positive and negative impacts, steering towards the “right impacts” and opening the visibility on unintended effects and unforeseen consequences. The overall aim is to shrink the range of ignorance (epistemic uncertainty) in order to propose more acceptable forms of innovation governance. This exploratory attitude towards the future is part and parcel of the responsibilization agenda. At the same time, RRI needs to escape the trap of economized consequentialist logic and keep a clear distinction between epistemic uncertainty and ontological indeterminacy. If 10 it needs to advance a Hans Jonas-like ethics for the future , it must be vigilant about what Dupuy considers to be an aporia as to the imperative for responsibility [DUP 05, p. 3]. Consequentialism as an ethical response entails foreknowledge as to the complex dynamics of the systems and their future effects. However, this is impossible; it is accompanied by a great deal of inevitable ignorance. Dupuy wants to overcome this conceptual dead end and open a way for Jonas’s ethics to work. His enlightened catastrophism advances a peculiar metaphysics of temporality ‒ considering the future as real and fixed and uncertainty as ontological indeterminacy. The aim is to obtain “[a]n image of the future sufficiently catastrophic to be repulsive and sufficiently credible to trigger the actions that would block its realization, barring an accident” [DUP 05, p. 13]. In other words, it requires the doom to be addressed retrospectively by embracing the reality of the catastrophe (not calculating the probability of the latter). This is just an illustration of the importance of the concrete scheme of temporality within the overall conceptual framework of RRI. We might trace some features of such an understanding about the manner in which it conceives the accessibility of the future, especially in the notion for prospective responsibility. It does, however, need further elaboration vis-à-vis the normative profile of market societies, and the fact that economic theory seems to have blurred the distinction between non-calculable uncertainty and risk (calculation of probabilities). This is rather important because the way the epistemological and ontological features of unpredictability (manifested in uncertainty and indeterminacy) are treated can set the limits of our possible relationship with the future. The latter is even more relevant for RRI given its promotion within EU institutional setting, where, as we have already shown, the dangers of economization of ethics are lurking from everywhere. 10 It requires decision-making in view of the vulnerability of nature and all creation in the face of human technological capacity.

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Neutrality. Not once did this book emphasize that one of the major problems, if not the major problem, for RRI’s responsibilization endeavor in the context of contemporary market societies is the normative interlock between science and the market around the notion of neutrality. We will use this conclusion to add another aspect on the matter. Neutrality is the main politico-philosophical response when we face the challenge of normative fragmentation in contemporary societies. The pluralism of cherished notions of the good life and values held dear is at the heart of two particular responses that evoke the notion of neutrality ‒ one used in political theory and the other in economics. Once again, I will resort to O’Neill’s distinction between dialogical and non-dialogical responses to the pluralism of contemporary societies in view of the sites for neutrality [ONE 98, pp. 16–34]. The dialogical solution to the problem of the normative fragmentation that we mentioned many times entails a procedurally neutral public space for conversation and rational deliberation between different conceptions and competing beliefs of the good life; the non-dialogical rejects the possibility for a rational conversation between different conceptions of the good life and requires a neutral (arational, amoral) coordination mechanism as to the activities of individuals. In the first case, the forum is the site of neutrality and a model for political and civil society. In the second case, it is the market. The dialogical response advances indifference towards justification of the variety of viewpoints within the procedurally neutral deliberation mechanism; the non-dialogical advances indifference towards the products/effects of the workings of the coordination mechanism of the market. They both assume the possibility for cooperation on common problems. The forum puts the responsibility for cooperation onto the deliberating parties under the auspices of the procedurally neutral public space. The market abdicates responsibility onto the agentless, non-conversational coordination power of exchange. In contemporary market societies, there is an inclination to argue the supremacy of the non-dialogical over the dialogical model. It is based on the assumed impossibility to rationally resolve disputes over values. This impossibility could lead to a situation in which they are either imposed by the force of institutional authority (the extreme case being totalitarianism) or lead to a state of constant social discord (political violence, political impasse or governability crisis). These two models imply very different conceptions of the possibility for

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collaboration on common problems, as well as of the social and political institutions to realize that collaboration. Why is this so important for our own account on responsibilization and the prospects of RRI altogether? RRI (in both the theoretical and institutional interpretations) proposes a dialogical answer to the normative plurality in contemporary societies and, in particular, to the R&D realm. It advances the idea that societal actors must come together to deliberate about ethical acceptability and societal desirability of the research and innovation process and its products. At the same time, the knowledge-creation process takes place in the context of a progressively incursive non-dialogical model of market regulation, irrespective of societal end-states. It is true that RRI is primarily implemented as to publicly funded knowledge, and that both economic growth and efficiency are still legitimate societal ends. Nevertheless, we have to recognize a long-running trend of bridging European S&T with the market against the backdrop of global competition pressures and the increasing integration of market players in the knowledge-creation process, who very often try to impose private interests under the umbrella of neutrality. RRI promises responsibilization through democratic inspection of societal ends and values in RTD governance. It aims to establish participatory structures in which the dialogical model of neutrality can take place, to bolster collaboration within the research and innovation realm and spur a debate on the acceptable (foster ethical reflexivity) limits of science and technology. Again, this happens in a context of promoted closeness to the market mechanism that is perceived as amoral, indifferent and incognizant of values and ends, and does not sustain institutions that aim to reach a reasonable consensus on normative disputes. Thus, in order to fulfill its social critique potential and explore in depth the traps before its implementation, the RRI field needs to pay more analytical attention to the controversies implied in the many uses of the notion of neutrality. On a final note, I would like to touch upon a question that might seem slightly distant from the immediate problems of the RRI field, but it concerns a very important matter in construing the meaning of research and innovation. At the beginning of this book we mentioned that the advancement of the S&T realm is accompanied by a certain uneasiness to which RRI needs to adequately respond. There is something uncanny in the power of research and innovation to alter the human condition, something

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that provides immediate occasion for ethics reflexivity. This could be the fact that it not only tries to decipher, harness and ultimately control natural phenomena, including the human being, but also to create nature, initiate its own natural processes and create novum in the realm of nature. Furthermore, the uneasiness in question might also be generated by a quiet anxiety that the advancement of S&T projects a future that heralds our own (human) irrelevance. One of RRI’s great tasks is to challenge the notion of our ultimate irrelevance, which is advanced persistently by the neutralization claims of science and technology in alliance with market regulation, and look for sources of social meaning that can tackle the issue of normativity in the current ethics vacuum. For that end, it will have to reinvent a sphere of reverence and inviolability without relying on the notion of the sacred. This could actually give normative significance to its imperative for responsibility and address the crisis of authority in contemporary market societies, that is, the crisis of the spirit behind the mere possibility for collective life and action.

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available

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[VOß 06] VOß J.-P., KEMP R., “Sustainability and reflexive governance: introduction”, in VOß J.-P, BAUKNECHT D., KEMP R. (eds), Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 3–30, 2006. [WAL 70] WALLIS G., “Chronopolitics: the impact of time perspectives on the dynamics of change”, Social Forces, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 102–108, 1970. [WAL 99] WALLIS J., DOLLERY B., Market Failure, Government Failure, Leadership and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999. [WHI 13] WHITE C., The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers, Melville House, Brooklyn and London, 2013. [WIL 15] WILLIAMS R., ROBINSON D. (eds), Scientism: The New Orthodoxy, Bloomsbury, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney, 2015. [WIL 91] WILBER C., “Incentives and the organization of work”, in COLEMAN J. (ed.), One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, pp. 212–223, 1991. [ZIM 00] ZIMAN J., Real Science: What it is and What it Means, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. [ZIM 96] ZIMAN J., ““Post-academic Science”: constructing knowledge with networks and norms”, Science Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 67–80, 1996. [ZIN 16] ZINK T., GEYER R., There is no such thing as a green product, online article, Stanford Social Innovation Review, available at: https://ssir.org/articles /entry/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_green_product, 2016.

Index

A, C, D acceptability, 6–8, 14, 15, 19, 30, 35, 36, 46, 63, 67, 72, 79, 84, 86–88, 95, 96, 99, 104–106, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123, 128, 129, 134, 149, 150, 155, 157, 166, 168, 171, 173, 176–178, 184, 186, 191, 192, 194 anomie, 23, 38, 148 anticipation, 4, 7, 9, 10, 25, 27, 28, 33–39, 42, 48, 67, 69, 75, 87, 142, 167, 184, 192 chronopolitics, 37, 43 citizen science, 107, 108, 137–139 collective experimentation, 26–28, 30, 117, 160 collective responsibility, 7, 10, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 36, 46, 99, 128, 130, 165, 167, 172 commercialization of research, 73, 155 commodification, 16–19, 36, 71, 79, 80, 143, 148, 160, 191 consequentialism, 6, 10, 14, 33, 34, 38, 85, 89, 151, 163, 173, 190, 191 coordination problem, 24, 79, 140 CSR, 1, 2, 14, 31, 167, 168

democratization of the knowledgecreation process, 12, 24, 107, 109, 110, 114, 138 discontinuity, 22, 34, 38, 95, 129, 148 E, F, G economic expediency, 28, 51, 68, 85, 90, 100, 101, 134, 147, 170, 177, 182 economistic prejudice, 11, 176 efficacy paradox, 61, 109, 161 EGE, 116–118, 121 ELSI, 66, 69 emancipation, 11, 19, 30, 32, 74, 85, 98, 136–139, 143, 150, 170, 174, 176, 185, 187 epistemological deficiencies, 37, 87 ethics Appraisal procedure, 116, 118 expertise, 116, 118, 120, 121, 134, 141, 155 -free zones/ethical dumping, 53, 55, 124 reflexivity, 28, 118, 119, 122, 134, 136, 139, 142, 143, 146, 149–151, 155, 156, 162, 186, 195

The RRI Challenge: Responsibilization in a State of Tension with Market Regulation, First Edition. Blagovesta Nikolova. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Forward Studies Unit, 23, 40, 62, 98 fundamental rights, 27, 54, 87, 91, 95, 115, 116, 123, 134, 166, 172, 186 gender, 5, 57, 85, 86, 96, 103–105, 129, 135 governability crisis, 24, 38, 57, 58, 73, 78, 97, 129, 151, 152, 165, 187, 188, 193 governance good, 57, 58, 63–65, 83, 88, 98 network, 61, 62, 67 new, 9, 39, 55, 58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95–97, 99, 102, 105, 111, 116–119, 121, 130, 134, 135, 159, 163–165, 167–171, 173, 175, 176, 187, 188 reflexive, 7, 65, 109, 161 H, I, L Hayek, Friedrich, 18, 30, 77, 78, 140, 151, 152 Horizon 2020, 5, 68, 70, 85, 103, 118, 126, 127, 130, 162 human experimentation, 123–125, 132 human rights paradigm, 123, 125, 128, 165 ignorance, 25, 74, 140, 152, 192 imperative for responsible innovation, 11, 18, 47, 181 innovation-driven capitalism, 38, 39, 145 interdisciplinarity, 49, 70, 83, 86, 92, 93, 116, 119, 121 irresponsible innovation, 2, 13, 167, 177 law hard, 64, 105, 188–190 soft, 7, 64, 65, 83, 90, 91, 122, 129, 188–190

legal compliance, 45, 115, 120, 136, 149–151, 189 legal regulation, 90, 124, 150, 172, 182, 183 M, N, O manageability of the future, 36–39, 41–44 market fundamentalism, 3, 12, 55 market regulation, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28, 31, 32, 46, 54, 59, 63, 65, 67, 73, 80, 81, 108, 133, 151, 165, 166, 178, 179, 185, 187, 188, 191, 194, 195 market society, 11, 13, 16, 17, 28, 30, 35, 36, 39, 44, 48–50, 52–55, 68, 78–81, 85, 89, 90, 93, 94, 122, 130, 133, 134, 140, 145, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156–162, 164, 166, 170, 172–174, 176, 178, 181–184, 186, 187, 191–193, 195 neutrality, 3, 16, 17, 19, 29, 32, 47, 53, 55, 59, 75, 81, 89, 90, 92, 103, 105, 107, 120, 130, 139, 142, 149–151, 157, 158, 168, 174, 175, 179, 188, 190, 193, 194 normative conflict, 2, 80, 94, 101, 158, 161, 171 normative fragmentation, 11, 22, 29, 58, 79, 91, 113, 114, 131, 166, 173, 181, 193 NPM, 160, 163, 164, 168–170, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 187 Nuremberg Code, 123, 124, 127–129, 131, 132 open innovation, 5, 57, 65, 100–102, 134, 159, 160 openness, 9, 30, 41, 53, 63, 65, 80, 100, 102, 141, 160

Index

P, R, S participatory approaches, 69, 97, 108, 110 Polanyi, Karl, 11, 17–19, 68, 73, 143, 175, 176 post-normal science, 3, 48, 94, 107 postacademic science, 68, 129 precaution, 2, 5–7, 13, 37, 42, 101, 118, 148, 150, 190, 191 premeditation, 33, 35, 37 profit motive, 13 prospective responsibility, 55, 192 public engagement, 21, 73, 96–99, 113, 154 research integrity, 10, 49, 52, 55, 73, 101, 105, 115, 118, 129, 136, 137, 189 responsibilization strategy, 35, 161–163, 167 responsiveness, 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 25, 27, 28, 47, 63, 64, 89, 96, 102, 169, 190 RRI as social critique, 28 RRI keys, 104, 135 Sandel, Michael, 16, 17, 19, 73 science education, 5, 57, 85, 86, 96, 104, 106

221

scientific ethos, 49, 52, 74, 139 scientism, 47, 54, 55, 75–80 socially robust knowledge, 50, 52 societal uptake of innovation, 86 SSH, 69, 70, 76, 77, 85, 93 T, U, V technocratization, 122, 134 technological determinism, 3, 11, 53, 55, 75, 76, 159 technology assessment, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 25, 28, 33, 35, 37, 47, 161 transdisciplinarity, 49, 92, 111, 116, 119, 161 transparency, 6, 9, 35, 52, 63, 64, 80, 87–89, 98, 103, 160, 177, 184 truth-telling, 134, 136–143 uncertainty, 10, 22, 24, 25, 33–39, 41, 44–46, 51, 63, 65, 90, 126, 129, 133, 139, 140, 149–151, 154, 161, 169, 183, 190–192 value-sensitive design, 2, 7, 14, 15, 89, 158, 159 vulnerability, 5, 21, 27, 54, 91, 118, 123, 126, 133, 138, 155, 192

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