ABSTRACT

The most common higher discourse around science has been a philosophical and moral one. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has measured itself against this, and more generally against what it takes as public and elite misunderstanding of science, including particular sorts of claims for the economic centrality of science. While its evaluative and normative framework has been very different from those it criticises, there is a shared understanding of what counts. STS, for all its critical positioning, can and does amplify, rather than displace, all sort of claims for the centrality of this or that form of knowledge, or this or that account of the various industrial and scientific revolutions; it can and does incorporate many unhelpful assumptions about science, and about the economy. For example, much of STS, while dismissive of a strange construct called the ‘linear model of innovation’ in fact relies on what appear to be key assumptions of this supposedly discredited concept (Edgerton 2004). As Thomas (2015) has rightly insisted, STS and history of science need to abandon the entrenched notion of the backwardness of scientists' and lay understandings of science and society, which has become so central to its identity, and adopt a less triumphalist view of its own understanding of these complex matters. It is in this light that a political economic approach based on empirical understanding of actually existing science, I believe, has the potential to remap radically what we understand as scientific knowledge, research and innovation, offering a profound challenge not merely to the conventional discourses but to STS itself (Edgerton 2004, 2010, 2012).