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This volume provides a broad-ranging acount of the relationship between politics and technology in the modern world. It shows how political processes and values shape the developmentof technology and, in turn , how new technologies influence the conduct of politics. The core concern of the book is how democratic control can be exercised in all aspects of technological decision- making and how technology can be used to extend demmocracy. Street shows that much publicized 'natural' disasters from the explosions at Chernobyl and Bhopal to the erosion of the ozone layer have politicalas well as technologicalcauses and examines the way in which telecomunications, biotechnology and other technologies are used both to serve and subvert politcal aspirations.
Why are some countries better than others at science and technology (S&T)? Written in an approachable style, The Politics of Innovation provides readers from all backgrounds and levels of expertise a comprehensive introduction to the debates over national S&T competitiveness. It synthesizes over fifty years of theory and research on national innovation rates, bringing together the current political and economic wisdom, and latest findings, about how nations become S&T leaders. Many experts mistakenly believe that domestic institutions and policies determine national innovation rates. However, after decades of research, there is still no agreement on precisely how this happens, exactly which institutions matter, and little aggregate evidence has been produced to support any particular explanation. Yet, despite these problems, a core faith in a relationship between domestic institutions and national innovation rates remains widely held and little challenged. The Politics of Innovation confronts head-on this contradiction between theory, evidence, and the popularity of the institutions-innovation hypothesis. It presents extensive evidence to show that domestic institutions and policies do not determine innovation rates. Instead, it argues that social networks are as important as institutions in determining national innovation rates. The Politics of Innovation also introduces a new theory of "creative insecurity" which explains how institutions, policies, and networks are all subservient to politics. It argues that, ultimately, each country's balance of domestic rivalries vs. external threats, and the ensuing political fights, are what drive S&T competitiveness. In making its case, The Politics of Innovation draws upon statistical analysis and comparative case studies of the United States, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Turkey, Israel, Russia and a dozen countries across Western Europe.
Professor Guston provides an analysis of the changing relationship between politics and science in America.
Does the public trust science? Scientists? Scientific organizations? What roles do trust and the lack of trust play in public debates about how science can be used to address such societal concerns as childhood vaccination, cancer screening, and a warming planet? What could happen if social trust in science or scientists faded? These types of questions led the Roundtable on Public Interfaces of the Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a 2-day workshop on May 5-6, 2015 on public trust in science. This report explores empirical evidence on public opinion and attitudes toward life sciences as they relate to societal issues, whether and how contentious debate about select life science topics mediates trust, and the roles that scientists, business, media, community groups, and other stakeholders play in creating and maintaining public confidence in life sciences. Does the Public Trust Science? Trust and Confidence at the Interfaces of the Life Sciences and Society highlights research on the elements of trust and how to build, mend, or maintain trust; and examine best practices in the context of scientist engagement with lay audiences around social issues.
An increasing number of scholars have begun to see science and technology as relevant issues in International Relations (IR), acknowledging the impact of material elements, technical instruments, and scientific practices on international security, statehood, and global governance. This two-volume collection brings the debate about science and technology to the center of International Relations. It shows how integrating science and technology translates into novel analytical frameworks, conceptual approaches and empirical puzzles, and thereby offers a state-of-the-art review of various methodological and theoretical ways in which sciences and technologies matter for the study of international affairs and world politics. The authors not only offer a set of practical examples of research frameworks for experts and students alike, but also propose a conceptual space for interdisciplinary learning in order to improve our understanding of the global politics of science and technology. This first volume summarizes various time-tested approaches for studying the global politics of science and technology from an IR perspective. It also provides empirical, theoretical, and conceptual interventions from geography, history, innovation studies, and science and technology studies that indicate ways to enhance and rearticulate IR approaches. In addition, several interviews advance possibilities of multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Returning to the fundamentals of political science, namely power and governance, this book studies the relationship between information technologies and global politics. Key issue-areas are carefully examined: security (including information warfare and terrorism); global consumption and production; international telecommunications; culture and identity formation; human rights; humanitarian assistance; the environment; and biotechnology. Each demonstrates the validity of the view now prevalent within international relations research—the shifting of power and the locus of authority away from the state. Three major conclusions are offered. First, the nation-state must now confront, support, or coexist with other international actors: non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations; multinational corporations; transnational social movements; and individuals. Second, our understanding of instrumental and structural powers must be reconfigured to account for digital information technologies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, information technologies are now reconstituting actor identities and issues.
Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into even closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism. This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries. The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power—the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them—and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.
This edited volume provides a convenient entry point to the cutting-edge field of the international politics of technology, in an interesting and informative manner. Technology and World Politics introduces its readers to different approaches to technology in global politics through a survey of emerging fusions of Science and Technology Studies and International Relations. The theoretical approaches to the subject include the Social Construction of Technology, Actor-Network Theory, the Critical Theory of Technology, and New Materialist and Posthumanist approaches. Considering how such theoretical approaches can be used to analyse concrete political issues such as the politics of nuclear weapons, Internet governance, shipping containers, the revolution in military affairs, space technologies, and the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, the volume stresses the socially constructed and inherently political nature of technological objects. Providing the theoretical background to approach the politics of technology in a sophisticated manner alongside a glossary and guide to further reading for newcomers, this volume is a vital resource for both students and scholars focusing on politics and international relations.
Using a historical sociology approach, this book illustrates the formation of the technological state in Indonesia during the New Order period (1966-1998). It explores the nexus between power, high technology, development, and authoritarianism situated in the Southeast Asian context. The book discusses how the New Order regime shifted from the developmental state to the technological state, which was characterized by desire for technological supremacy. The process resulted in the establishment of a host of technological institutions and the undertaking of large-scale high-tech programs. Shedding light on the political dimension of socio-technological transformation, this book looks at the relationship between authoritarian politics and high technology development, and examines how effectively technology serves to sustain legitimacy of an authoritarian power. It explores into multiple features of the Indonesian technological state, covering the ideology of development, the politics of technocracy, the institutional structure, and the material and symbolic embodiments of high technology, and goes on to discuss the impact of globalization on the technological state. The book is an important contribution to studies on Southeast Asian Politics, Development, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS).