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Modern science has until recentlyflourished partly because of a stable,underlying agreement between its

practitioners and the rest of society. In otherwords, there has been a social contractbetween science and society, an arrangementbuilt on trust which sets out the expectationsof the one held by the other, and which — inprinciple — includes appropriate sanctionsif these expectations are not met.

This social contract has been made up ofseveral individual elements, reflectingbroader contracts between government andsociety, between industry and society, andbetween higher education and society. Thecontract between university science andsociety, for example, has been based traditionally on the understanding that universities will provide research and teaching in return for public funding and arelatively high degree of institutional auton-omy; under this contract, the universities,often supported through research-fundingagencies, have been expected to generatefundamental knowledge for society, and totrain the highly qualified manpowerrequired by an advanced industrial society.

By contrast, the contract with industrialresearch and development (R&D) has beenbased on an understanding that industrywould provide for the appliance of sciencethrough the work of its laboratories, andthus carry the discoveries of basic scienceinto product and process innovations. Inturn, government science was meant to useresearch establishments to fill the gapbetween university science and industrialR&D. The understanding has been that thestate has been directly responsible for carry-ing out research related to national need; forexample, in defence, energy, public healthand standards.

For most of the twentieth century, univer-sities, government research establishmentsand industrial laboratories have thereforeoperated relatively independently, develop-ing their own research practices and modesof behaviour. Recently, however, this relativeinstitutional impermeability has graduallybecome more porous. Privatization policies,

for example, have moved many governmentresearch establishments into the marketplace. With the relaxation of the Cold War,governments have shifted their prioritiesfrom security and military objectives tomaintaining international competitivenessand enhancing the quality of life. And manylong-established industries have been denationalized, while in many countriescompanies previously dependent upon government for R&D support through military technology projects have had to findthese resources elsewhere, or in partnershipwith others, to compete in internationalmarkets.

Meanwhile the expansion of higher education has been accompanied by a culture of accountability that has impactedon both teaching and research. In research,many academics have had to accept objective-driven research programmes,whereas research funding agencies have beenincreasingly transformed from primarilyresponsive institutions, responsible formaintaining basic science in the universities,into instruments for attaining national technological, economic and social prioritiesthrough the funding of research projects and programmes.

These trends can be observed interna-tionally, even if their precise form and timinghas varied between countries. Cumulatively,they signal the end of the institutionalarrangements through which science flour-ished during and after the Second WorldWar, and thus mark the expiry of the socialcontract between science and society that has dominated this period. A new social contract is now required. This cannot beachieved merely by patching up the existingframework. A fresh approach — virtually acomplete ‘rethinking’ of science’s relation-ship with the rest of society — is needed.

Reflecting complexity and diversityOne aspect of this new contract is that itneeds to reflect the increasing complexity ofmodern society. For example, there are nolonger clear demarcation lines between university science and industrial science,between basic research, applied research andproduct development, or even betweencareers in the academic world and in indus-try. There is now greater movement acrossinstitutional boundaries, a blurring of professional identities and a greater diversityof career patterns.

But the price of this increased complexityis a pervasive uncertainty. One way of looking at this is in terms of an erosion ofsociety’s stable categorizations, namely thestate, market, culture and science. Alterna-tively, it can be seen as the cumulative effectof parallel evolutionary processes. For therehas been a co-evolution in both society andscience in terms of the range of organizationswith which researchers are prepared to work, the colleagues with whom they collab-orate, and topics considered interesting.Whatever viewpoint one takes, science isnow produced in more open systems ofknowledge production.

One consequence is that the norms andpractices of research in university and indus-trial laboratories have converged. There arestill differences between universities andindustry, but these do not impact on what isconsidered sound scientific practice1.Indeed, science and society more generally

Science’s new social contractwith societyMichael Gibbons

Under the prevailing contract between science and society, science hasbeen expected to produce ‘reliable’ knowledge, provided merely that itcommunicates its discoveries to society. A new contract must now ensurethat scientific knowledge is ‘socially robust’, and that its production is seenby society to be both transparent and participative.

Traditional boundaries between university andindustrial science, and between basic andapplied research, are disappearing. As a result,science and society are invading each other’sdomain, requiring a rethinking of previousresponsibilities.

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have each invaded the other’s domain, andthe lines demarcating the one from the otherhave virtually disappeared.

As a result, not only can science speak tosociety, as it has done so successfully over thepast two centuries, but society can now‘speak back’ to science. The current contractbetween science and society was not onlypremised on a degree of separation betweenthe two, but also assumed that the mostimportant communication was from scienceto society. Science was seen as the fountain-head of all new knowledge and, as part of thecontract, was expected to communicate itsdiscoveries to society. Society in turn didwhat it could to absorb the message andthrough other institutions — primarilyindustry — to transform the results of science into new products and processes.

Science was highly successful working inthis mode, and for as long as it delivered thegoods, its autonomy was seldom contested.Yet this success has ironically itself beeninstrumental in changing its relationshipwith society, drawing science into a largerand a more diverse range of problem areas,many lying outside traditional disciplinaryboundaries. It is this increasingly intenseinvolvement of science in society over thepast half a century that has created the conditions that underpin the growing com-plexity and the pervasive uncertainty inwhich we live, and encouraged the social andbehavioural experiments described above.

But if it is widely recognized that scienceis transforming modern society, it is lessoften appreciated that society, in speakingback, is transforming science. I will use theterm ‘contextualization’ to describe thisprocess, and ‘contextualized knowledge’ asthe outcome of this reverse communication.Contextualization affects modern science in

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its organization, division of labour and day-to-day practices, and also in its episte-mological core.

In relation to the former, for example,research carried out in both industrial andgovernment laboratories, as well as the fund-ing policies of research-funding agencies,have opened up to a wide range of socioeco-nomic demands, admitting more and morecross-institutional links, and thus alteringthe balance between the different sources offunding of academic research. Thus in‘speaking back’ to science, society isdemanding various innovations, for example the pursuit of national objectives,the contribution to new regulatory regimesand acknowledgement of the multiplicationof user–producer interfaces.

In relation to the latter, the epistemologi-cal dimension, the increasing importance of‘context’ is also reflected in a relatively rapidshift within science from the search for‘truth’ to the more pragmatic aim of provid-ing a provisional understanding of theempirical world that ‘works’2. John Ziman,former physicist and long-time contributorto social studies of science, has described science as a form of ‘reliable knowledge’ thatbecomes established not in terms of anabstract notion of objectivity but, concretely,in terms of the replicability of research statements and the formation of a consensuswithin the relevant peer group3. Reliableknowledge is therefore defined as suchbecause it ‘works’.

But what ‘works’ has now acquired a further dimension that can best be describedas a shift from ‘reliable knowledge’ to whatNowotny et al. call ‘socially robust’ knowl-edge4. The latter characterization is intendedto embrace the process of contextualization.For ‘socially robust’ knowledge has three

aspects. First, it is valid not only inside butalso outside the laboratory. Second, thisvalidity is achieved through involving anextended group of experts, including lay‘experts’. And third, because ‘society’ hasparticipated in its genesis, such knowledge isless likely to be contested than that which ismerely ‘reliable’.

Socially robust knowledgeMy argument is that we are currently witnessing a significant shift from ‘reliable’to ‘socially robust’ knowledge. Three obser-vations can immediately be made. The first is that the basic conditions and processes that have underpinned the production of‘reliable knowledge’ are not necessarily compromised by the shift to ‘socially robustknowledge’. Indeed, if these conditions andprocesses have been undermined, it mayhave been as much by the narrow outlook ofmuch scientific practice as by any attempt towiden the range of stakeholders, or more systematically to take into account the context in which science is produced.

The second observation is that reliableknowledge has always only been reliablewithin boundaries. Science was recognizedas inherently incomplete because it is, primarily, a method rather than a finalanswer. But to achieve a reasonable degree ofreliability, the problem terrain had also to becircumscribed, and judgements on what isincluded there restricted to those of a peergroup, rather than opened to the scientificcommunity as a whole.

Both aspects of reliable knowledge arecarried forward into socially robust knowl-edge. But although knowledge remainsincomplete, this is no longer only in the conventional sense that it will eventually besuperseded by superior science; rather it means that it may be sharply contested,and no longer remains within the controlledenvironment of scientific peers. This shiftinvolves renegotiating and reinterpretingboundaries that have been dramaticallyextended, so that science can no longer not be validated as reliable by conventionaldiscipline-bound norms; while remainingrobust, science must now be sensitive to amuch wider range of social implications.

An example is the current debate surrounding genetically modified organ-isms (GMOs). Here, specialist peer groupshave been challenged not only by pressuregroups but also by ordinary consumers, for whom the research process is far from transparent, and who are demandingthat it be more so. Here, knowledge of thehealth implications of GMOs may be ‘reliable’ in the conventional scientific sense;but it is not socially robust, and will not become so until the peer group is broad-ened to take into account the perspectivesand concerns of a much wider section of thecommunity.

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Both pressure groups and ordinary consumers are demanding that the debate surrounding the healthimplications of GMOs be broadened to include the perspectives of the non-expert community.

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There was also a degree of contestation inthe United States about the value of theSuperconducting Super Collider (SSC),plans for which were dropped in 1992. In thiscase, however, unlike the case with GMOs,there was no spontaneous backlash fromsociety generally about the value of theknowledge. Rather, it has been argued thatthe collapse of funding for the project was aresult of the unwillingness (or inability) of anarrow disciplinary group to extend itsboundaries sufficiently to persuade otherscientists and politicians that the researchwould be of wide benefit5. Again we see a failure to achieve sufficient social robustnessin the research process, however reliable itmay be in its own terms.

The third observation is that the episte-mological core of science has, over time,become crowded with norms and practicesthat cannot be reduced easily to a singlegeneric methodology, or, more broadly, toprivileged cultures of scientific inquiry.There is no one set of practices that describe,much less lead to, good science. The case for science can still be made in essentiallyfunctionalist terms; but many more factorsnow need to be taken into account before asolution that ‘works’ can be adopted.

One outcome of all these changes is thatthe sites at which problems are formulatedand negotiated have moved from their previ-ous institutional locations in government,

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industry and universities into the ‘agora’ – thepublic space in which both ‘science meets thepublic’, and the public ‘speaks back’ to science. This is a space in which the media isincreasingly active, and in which the newcommunication technologies play a promi-nent role. It is also the domain in which contextualization occurs. Neither state normarket, neither exclusively private nor exclu-sively public, the agora is where today’s soci-etal and scientific problems are framed anddefined, and their ‘solutions’ are negotiated.

Narratives of expertiseThe factor that has come to the fore in theagora is the role of scientific and technicalexpertise that is so crucial to decision makingin highly industrialized societies. This role ischanging as expertise spreads throughoutsociety, resulting in the fragmentation ofestablished links between expertise andinstitutional structures, whether of govern-ment, industry or the professions. Further-more, the questions asked of experts are neither the same, nor simple extensions of,the ones that arise in their specialist fields ofstudy. Experts must now extend their knowl-edge to widely disparate areas, and try tointegrate what they ‘know’ now with whatothers want to ‘do’ in the future.

Collective narratives of expertise need tobe constructed to deal with the complexityand the uncertainty generated by this

fragmentation. Such narratives are challeng-ing to their participants. Experts mustrespond to issues and questions that are nevermerely scientific and technical, and mustaddress audiences that never consist only ofother experts. The limits of competence ofthe individual expert call for the involvementof a wide base of expertise that has to be care-fully orchestrated if it is to speak in unison.

Since expertise now has to bring togetherknowledge that is itself distributed, contex-tualized and heterogeneous, it cannot ariseat one specific site, or out of the views of onescientific discipline or group of highlyrespected researchers. Rather it must emergefrom bringing together the many different‘knowledge dimensions’ involved. Itsauthority depends on the way in which sucha collective group is linked, often in a self-organized way. Breakdowns in socialauthority arise when links are inadequatelyestablished, as has occurred in Europeandebates over GMOs.

Rethinking scienceThese four inter-related processes — co-evolution, contextualization, the produc-tion of socially robust knowledge and theconstruction of narratives of expertise —form a framework both for rethinking science and for understanding any newsocial contract between society and science.Co-evolution denotes an open interactionbetween science and society which generatesvariety through experimentation, whetherin scientific problems, colleagues or institu-tional designs, with the selective retention ofcertain choices, modes or solutions. This isso even while these experimental approach-es, in responding to uncertainty and complexity, not only promote permeabilitybut also generate more complexity anduncertainty, thus encouraging furtherexperimentation.

Greater permeability provides the basisfor increased contextualization by increasingthe routes through which society can ‘speakback’ to science. Denser communicationitself brings an imperative to produce social-ly robust knowledge that is seen as valid notonly inside but also outside the walls of thelaboratory, in terms of being accepted aslegitimate.

As the walls of laboratories have openedup, more and more scientists have taken theirplaces as actors in the agora, broadening therange of experts whose view might be soughton a particular problem or issue. To copewith this, a further development in the use ofscientific and technical experts is needed. Forreliable knowledge can only become sociallyrobust if society sees the process of knowl-edge production as transparent and partici-pative. The old image of science workingautonomously will no longer suffice. Rather,a reciprocity is required in which not onlydoes the public understand how science

A failure to persuade the broad public of thevalue of the USSuperconducting SuperCollider researchprogramme may havecontributed to thecollapse of funding forthe project.

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works but, equally, science understands howits publics work.

The process of rethinking science, nowthat the line that used to separate science andsociety has virtually disappeared, has scarce-ly begun5. But several changes in perspectivemust be initiated before a new social contractcan emerge. First, the need for contextualiza-tion means that the (unknowable) implica-tions as well as the (planned or predictable)applications of scientific research have to beembraced.

Research activities now transcend theimmediate context of application, and beginto reach out, anticipate and engage reflexive-ly with those further entanglements, conse-quences and impacts that it generates. This‘context of implication’ always transcendsthe immediate ‘context of application’ inwhich it occurs. It may embrace neighbour-ing research fields, and as yet obscurely recognized future uses. Taking the ‘context ofimplication’ seriously opens the door tothose previously excluded from decisionsabout research. The individuals nowinvolved may be encountered haphazardly asindividuals, perhaps colleagues or rivals.They may come from other scientific disciplines, or from the ‘user’ community.Whatever their origins, scientific knowledgewill increasingly need to be tested not onlyagainst nature, but against (and hopefullyalso with) other people.

Furthermore, while it is important todefine problems, and then assemble theintellectual, human and financial resourcesneeded to solve them, this is not, in itself, sufficient to guarantee the reflexivity charac-teristic of socially distributed knowledgeproduction. In contrast, a process of contex-tualization that attempts to embrace unpredictable and unintended implicationsdemands reflexivity, as it is intended toincorporate future potential implicationsinto the research process from the very beginning. It thus goes far beyond aconventional ‘forward look’ or ‘technologyforesight’ exercise.

This has several consequences. One is theneed for strategies to ‘fix’ more accurately theimplications of knowledge production. Thismight be done by identifying areas in whichsignificant implications of particularresearch projects are likely to arise withoutbeing pinpointed exactly, making it necessaryto ‘prospect’ for these (presently unknow-able) implications. Such a process might, forexample, involve consulting other knowledgeproducers and users, as well as wider socialconstituencies, in order to carry out a form of‘triangulation’ survey. Perhaps every researchproposal and project should include a deliberate strategy for identifying its ‘contextof implication’. This might best be achievedby including those likely to be implicated —perhaps unknowingly — as well as the conscious carriers of social knowledge.

internalize accountability. Indeed there is ananalogy between the relationships betweenautonomy and self-organization on the onehand, and between reliable and sociallyrobust knowledge on the other. In the agora,the conditions that promote greater self-organization also promote the generation ofsocially robust knowledge.

ConclusionTo summarize, I have argued in this paperthat the prevailing contract between scienceand society was set up to sustain the produc-tion of ‘reliable knowledge’; a new one mustensure the production of ‘socially robustknowledge’. The prevailing contract is gov-erned by the rules of bureaucratic rationality,with society linked to ‘people’ primarilythrough representative institutions. A newcontract will require more open, socially distributed, self-organizing systems ofknowledge production that generate theirown accountability and audit systems.Under the prevailing contract, science wasleft to make discoveries and then make themavailable to society. A new contract will be based upon the joint production ofknowledge by society and science.

A new social contract will thereforeinvolve a dynamic process in which theauthority of science will need to be legitimat-ed again and again. To maintain this, sciencemust enter the agora and participate fully inthe production of socially robust knowledge.According to some observers, we can alreadysee this approach emerging in the manage-ment of large technology projects. Thomas P.Hughes, the eminent American historian oftechnology, has identified a new ethosamong engineers who now recognize thatthe deeper involvement of communities indecision making actually produced betterengineering solutions in a number of projects6. If the boundaries between science,technology and society are becoming morepermeable, why should not a similarapproach in science likewise produce moresocially robust solutions?Michael Gibbons, a former director of the SciencePolicy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, isnow secretary-general of the Association ofCommonwealth Universities, 36 Gordon Square,London WC1H 0PF, UK.1. van Duinen, R. J. European research councils and the Triple

Helix. Sci. Public Policy 25, 381–386 (1998).

2. Daston, L. & Galison, P. The image of objectivity. Representations

40, 81–128 (1992).

3. Ziman, J. Reliable Knowledge Canto Edn (Cambridge Univ. Press,

Cambridge, 1991).

4. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. Re-thinking Science:

Knowledge Production in an Age of Uncertainty (in the press).

5. Gieryn, T. F. in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (eds

Jasanoff, S. et al.) 393–443 (Sage Publishers, London, 1995).

6. Hughes, T. P. Rescuing Prometheus 301–303 (Pantheon Books,

New York, 1998).

Acknowledgements. The research described in this essay is taken

from a report entitled ‘Re-thinking science: knowledge production in

a Mode 2 Society’, prepared by H. Nowotny, P. Scott and M.

Gibbons for, and funded by, the Tercentenary Fund of the Royal

Swedish Bank and the Swedish Council for Higher Education.

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A second need is for the process of contextualization to be internalized. The‘context of application’ can be managedthrough ‘external’ mechanisms such as ‘forward look’ and ‘technology foresight’exercises, and through science and technolo-gy parks and technology transfer or industrialliaison offices within universities. In contrast,the ‘context of implication’ needs to be inter-nalized by researchers if it is to be effective. It isexpressed through routes, often informal,that cannot easily be incorporated intoadministrative procedures. These new lines ofcommunication need to be encouraged andrecognized institutionally. This cannot bedone by communications experts — contex-tualization is not a public relations exercise —or by asking journalists to develop popularaccounts of the significance of research.

A further important point is that themore open and comprehensive the scientificcommunity, the more socially robust will bethe knowledge it produces. This is contraryto the traditional assumption that there is astrong relationship between the social andintellectual coherence (and, therefore, theboundedness) of a scientific community,and the reliability of the knowledge it produces. Reliable knowledge may have beenbest produced by such cohesive (and there-fore restricted) scientific communities. Butsocially robust knowledge can only be pro-duced by much more sprawling socio/scien-tific constituencies with open frontiers.

At the same time, socially robust knowl-edge is superior to reliable knowledge bothbecause it has been subject to more intensivetesting and retesting in many more contexts— which is why it is ‘robust’ — and alsobecause of its malleability and connectivecapability. Its context is not predeterminedor fixed, but open to ceaseless renegotiation.Instead of achieving a precarious invarianceby establishing strict limits within which itstruthfulness can be tested, as reliable knowl-edge does, socially robust knowledge is theproduct of an intensive (and continuous)interaction between data and other results,between people and environments, betweenapplications and implications.

It is also clear that science must leave theivory tower and enter the agora. To increasethe effectiveness with which the agora operates, the self-organizing capacity of allparticipants needs to be enhanced. Here,there is tension between the desire for individual or institutional autonomy and the increasing demands for accountabilityon both individuals and institutions.

Increasing the capacity for self-organiz-ing means that participants need to act morereflexively. But one cannot enhance respon-siveness by simply increasing the demand for public accountability, as this could make participants more, rather than less,defensive. On the contrary, what is needed isto encourage participants voluntarily to