Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

The degree of preparedness to grasp new opportunities varies markedly between research groups,
industries and countries. At the end of the day, it turned out that preparedness was crucial. The
research groups that survived and, after much turmoil, were able to ascertain their scientific standing,
were those who were prepared and able to use this resource to its maximum extent.

Exploring the Context of Implication

Nothing could perhaps better characterize the shift from Mode-1 to Mode-2 research than asking
what happened to the famous distinction introduced by Popper (Popper 19 6 9) between the 'context
of discovery' and the 'context of justification' which was used as a convenient epistemological
shorthand to summarize how Mode-1 research was perceived to function. In contrast, we have
emphasized the importance of a 'context of application', in which knowledge production in Mode 2
takes place. Yet, stimulated and reinforced through more frequent interaction with a Mode-2 society,
research activities now transcend the context of application. They begin to reach out, anticípate and
reflexively engage with what we call the 'context of implication' - those further entanglements -
consequences and impacts - that research activities continue to generate. The context of implication
thus always transcends the immediate context of application in which it occurs. It may reach out to
neighbouring research fields and to as yet obscurely recognized future uses. While nobody can know
precisely when and where a particular implication will arise or what will result from it, and while it
is virtually impossible to assess its importance, there can (and perhaps ought to) be a forward look,
a serious attempt to reflect and anticípate what the context of implication may hold - however much
uncertainty may enshroud the effort.

Taking the context of implication seriously opens the door to people - to their perspectives, on the
one hand, and to their constitutive role in research activity, on the other hand. In the first instance,
people may be encountered haphazardly as individuals, perhaps as colleagues or rivals. They may
come from other scientific disciplines or materialize more concretely than the otherwise hazy
category of 'users' suggests. But one may move from such random involvements and ask who ought
to be interested and/or implicated in a research activity - and start to act accordingly.

Whatever results from such an exploration of the context of implication and however uncertain the
insights that may be gained- far ultimately only history will tell and there will always be more than
one story to be told - such inquiries open the door to people, allowing them into the space in which
knowledge is produced. For ultimately, scientific knowledge will need to be tested not only against
nature, but against (and hopefully also with) people.

Tracking the Human Genome Project

Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

The United States Congress requires that the US Human Genome Project devote 3-5 per cent of its
annual budget to social impact studies which are meant to draw out social, legal and ethical
implications of ongoing work on the human genome. In 'Tracking the Human Genome Project', a
group of three anthropologists set out to map new genetic knowledge among three constituencies:
research scientists, clinical physicians and patients living with the diseases and disorders that have
become the objects of genomic investigation. By engaging the 'natives' - in this case the scientists -
at the centre of their belief systems and practical activities, by following them in their laboratories,
at collaborative meetings, on the Web and in corridor talk, but equally by watching and listening as
clinicians diagnose and treat rare conditions that run in families and by attending meetings of support
groups and voluntary organizations, they also learned how knowledge that patients acquired from
actually living with a genetic condition is put into social practice. The field of social practice turns
out to contain an enormous range of individual and social difference, even though it originates with
a small set of genetic alterations that can be grouped into a neat set of scientific problems.

Out of the vast research space which the genome constitutes, the project tracks only three connective
tissue disorders: chondrodysplasia, or dwarfing condition; Marfan's syndrome, or ocular and skeletal
abnormalities; and EB, epidermolysis bullosa, a family of blistering skin diseases. What constitutes
a 'genetic success story', however, varíes dramatically with the condition, the degree and kind of
medical consideration it receives, and the social circulation of information, aspiration and practical
knowledge about it. Eugenic fears, for instance, are most clearly expressed among those afflicted
with dwarfing syndrome, while patients with Marfan's syndrome tend to be extremely receptive to
genetic diagnosis, the circulation of genetic information and aggressive medical interventions.
Moreover, the stories of these different groups of patients have to be situated in a much larger
framework that includes attention to kinship, work and community relations. Trying to understand
the context of implication makes one acutely aware of how a particular disease transforms the way
people think of themselves and also about those who are participating in the genomic exercise, about
who is positioned truly to conduct research or give informed consent, about who benefits and who
is burdened by new genetic knowledge, and the extent to which much older forms of social
differentiation and stratification survive (Rapp, Heath and Taussig 1998). The picture of the
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

contextualization of knowledge that emerges here is one in which researchers are increasingly
becoming engaged – directly through their own awareness and indirectly through the numerous
mediating organizations and patients' groups that spring up - with the context of implication that is
shaped by their research, while simultaneously shaping the kind of research that will be undertaken
in the future.

With the benefit of hindsight, in this case provided by social scientists, an ongoing middle-range
contextualization is observed, described and analysed. (The main di:fference from the kind of
interactions between medical researchers and patients' organizations, as described at the end of the
last chapter, líes in the emphasis which here is directed towards learning more about patients'
reactions, fears and hopes, and the explicit willingness to change research directions in arder to make
room for this kind of input. The context of implications thus can be said to shape also the content of
research in a more or less decisive and ongoing way.) Whenever it is possible to 'feed back' the
insights thus gained to those who were involved in the first place, the context of implication extends
backwards and leaves its traces in the research undertaken. By making the different groups (genetic
researchers, clinicians, patients and their families) aware of each other's different perceptions,
interests, outlooks, hopes and fears, otherwise single-minded views can combine into a truly
pluralistic perspective, which may allow people to be given a place in the production of
contextualized knowledge where originally no such space was foreseen for them.

The writing of history: A tension-ridden dialogue with the context of implication

History and historiography have never been straightforward affairs. Ever since Thucydides, it has
been remarked that it is usually, but not always, the defeated who feel an urge to narrate and to
account for what has happened to them. The questions that historians find interesting, as well as
what are considered to be legitimate tapies for historical research, have therefore always been closely
intertwined with the wider societal context. Since the lessons to be drawn from history are few (and
are more often than not highly ambiguous), it is not so much the context of application, but the
context of implication which matters most to historians.

Historians are engaged in a continuous, often tension-ridden dialogue with the surrounding society.
Their research agendas result from intricate and at times also highly controversial and emotional
exchanges, while historical research undoubtedly contributes to a country's or a social group's sense
of identity. N owhere is this more in evidence than in those instances where the research questions,
because they 'go under the skin', have deeply troubling implications for the rest of society.
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

The two examples, briefly presented here, illustrate how middlerange contextualization of
knowledge occurs in the social sciences. The first example comes from a new awareness that the
writing of African history may not need to follow the hitherto dominant model of European history.
Under its strong dominance, the past of other regions of the world, or even of a continent, that would
not fit European ideas, European techniques or European examples was disregarded or marginalized.

In the case of Africa, given its relative paucity of written sources its history seemed to have little to
o:ffer for the understanding of 'How have we come to be where we are?' A younger generation of
African historians has taken up the challenge, answering the question with an armoury of new
methods and techniques. In arder to circumvent the limitations of their archival material, they had
to break with the usual conventions of European and North American historiography. The new
African historiography had to draw upan a much wider range of materials, beginning with testimony
transmitted orally from one generation to another, carefully studying its narrative and poetic
conventions and, whenever possible, checking and comparing it with external written sources, or
other, archaeological or linguistic, evidence.

In a next step, Africanists went beyond comparing written and oral evidence. They brought together
techniques from archaeology, anthropology, botany, chemistry, ecology, economics, genetics,
linguistics and sociology in arder to widen the boundaries of historical understanding of Africa's
past. Dendrochronology and carbon-dating are by now commonplace techniques. Historical
linguistics in combination with modern genetics were used to tease out the broad history of African
migrations. Palaeo-botanists looked for patterns of change in climate and ecological conditions, so
important far shifts in agriculture, demography and the rise and fall of human settlements, and
allowing the reconstruction of other aspects of social, cultural and political life. Thus, a new
approach to history emerged, making much fuller use of other disciplines and research techniques.
But it carne in response to the relative neglect of research questions which were not considered to
fit the dominant model ofhow history should be written (Appiah 1998).

In this example, a latent context of implication existed, but it had to become mobilized. This was
achieved through a general shift in awareness and a successful attempt at breaking out of the
Europeandominated model of historiography. The challenge proved sufficiently strong to induce a
younger generation of Africanists to extend, rather than retreat, into new scientific territory, thereby
greatly expanding the scope of conventional methodologies and the basis of what is considered
relevant historical evidence.
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

The second example deals with recent changes in the kind of questions asked about the history of
the Holocaust in Germany (Herbert 1998). Following the German publication of Goldhagen's book
Hitler's Willing Executioners in 1996, the public debate in Germany about the country's past changed
dramatically. Although the book met with sustained criticism from professional historians,
Goldhagen has been praised for - at last - putting the mass murder itself, the motives of those who
killed and the suffering of the victims right at the centre of research.

Questions which had been asked by historians befare - whether the Holocaust was to be interpreted
as a phenomenon of modernity, whether it was a putative self-defence of the bourgeoisie against the
unconscious wish to kili the Bolsheviks or the issues in the highly abstract debate of the late 19 70s
about fascism and totalitarianism inevitably paled against the empirical facts of an unimaginable
brutality. Goldhagen's book, whatever its scholarly shortcomings, became a milestone by breaking
an unwritten societal taboo. It describes in hitherto unheard and unread detail the horror of the actual
murders committed. By contrast, traditional Holocaust research had focused on the genesis and
consequences of the mass murder, while playing down-for pietistic reasons orto avoid criticism of
searching for spectacular effects - what had actually happened in ali its concrete and painful detail.
Befare Goldhagen's book entered the public debate, academic research had been caught up in
increasingly theoretical debates about interpretations. They failed to deliver politically transferable
answers or any 'explanation' with which one could identify.

Goldhagen's account answered the unmet need of the victims and their children by pointing to the
clearly defined motives of a large and clearly defined group of perpetrators, while offering to the
younger generation of Germans the possibility of siding with the victims. The challenge which was
raised and which persists concerns the role played by the 'ordinary' Germans in those murders.

What this case study shows is the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, interaction of a research field,
and its immensely charged political and emotional significance, with the wider society. This cannot
be reduced to a simple generational dichotomy (although this remains a persistent theme). Nor can
it be compressed into an account of groups in society that differ in their willingness to engage in
such a debate or their differences in ideological and political positions, although this also had an
impact. What emerges is the unpredictable process of developing a research agenda which results
from an intense and painful engagement with different sections of society - with the judiciary, with
successive hospital administrations, with the keepers of bank archives or- reaching deeply into
personal loyalties - with former academics or even currently respected professors whose role in
trying to shape the 'demographic policies' of the regime has come to the fore only recently. The
actual development and shape that the historical research agenda took in this case can only be
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

understood by following the path of questions raised and answers provided in highly selective ways
( which, in retrospect, always contain 'blind spots' and 'deficits' that are filled only later).

The responsiveness of these different sectors of society - both in a positive (affi.rming and open)
and negative (denying and avoiding) sense - to streams of attitudes, political issues, media reports
and judiciary proceedings shaped the public debates at each period. There is one step further to go.
Holocaust research cannot be conceived without these continuous layers and series of painful
interrogations and intense, emotional interactions with different groups in society, both within one
country and abroad. The 'context of implication' in shaping the knowledge and historical findings
thus produced is central - but it cannot be planned, or foreseen. It is as much an unintended, long-
term process as history itself, which in retrospect can be seen to have a direction. Although it is
unplanned it is none the less co-produced by successive generations of historians in the new
questions they raise and the discourse they must enter and maintain with society at large.

Can something similar be imagined to occur in a research field in the natural sciences? What is the
nature of the influences, for example, which impinge on the development of genomic or post-
genomic research While historical research and much scholarship in the social sciences and
humanities might be expected to be open to 'outside influences' that lead to a necessarily clase
involvement with the context of implication, can this also happen in the natural sciences? Does the
absence of people as scientific objects of investigation, at least as a rule, tend to 'protect' the natural
sciences from too clase an entanglement with how research questions are to be posed or how society
may 'influence' what happens on a deep, epistemological level? In the postgenomics era, sorne
scientists are explicitly seeking to address historical, technical, epistemic and cultural aspects of
genome projects and are developing arguments to show why closer attention should be paid to the
epistemological aspects - and not only to ethical, social and legal issues - of the new genomic mode
of practising biology (Collins et al. 1998). These altered practices include an assessment of the new
ways of processing and delivering data, new forms of cooperative projects, new relations between
knowledge production and application, and of the lessons gleaned from developmental biology, of
epigenetics, of the reintroduction of morphology, and of whole-animal representation in conjunction
with genomics. The focus here is on the inclusion of the complete dynamics of the organism in post-
genomic research rather than on mapping only the genome – a move which would re-configure what
it means to do biology in the coming decades.

While we do not intend to compare what it means to do biology with doing historical research in a
politically and emotionally highly charged field, the question nevertheless poses itself of how to
analyse processes of contextualization that occur in various scientific practices and through shifts in
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons - Exploring the Context of Implication

research questions on a deeper level. The manifest presence of a wide range of scientific practices
leads one away from a fixed epistemological core operative throughout all of science to a multiplicity
of shifting scientific practices. Why practices shift, in which directions and driven by what, remains
to be explored in each case. But we should not be surprised to find a multitude of constraining and
driving factors which forcefully demonstrate that something is to be gained by conscientiously
attempting to understand the web of wider interactions and their consequences on the actual
practices, the questions asked and new directions to be explored. If, in the conference on post-
genomics mentioned above, the prospect was raised that the epistemological core of biological
experimentation is about to change - from being hypothesis-driven, based on the results of single
experiments, to being based on systematic, largescale data production, followed by modelling - this
might also be interpreted to show that the contours of an altered context of implication are becoming
visible. Such a possibility should then provide an appropriate theme for comparative and historical
case studies that evaluate these changes against the broader contours of (not only the life) sciences
and their expanded horizon of middle-range contextualization.