Minerva 47 (2):119-146 (2009)
Abstract |
STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement.
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Keywords | Sociotechnical imaginary Nuclear power Science and technology policy Comparative policy US South Korea |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
DOI | 10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 |
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References found in this work BETA
States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order.Sheila Jasanoff (ed.) - 2004 - Routledge.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.Laurie J. Sears & Benedict Anderson - 1994 - Journal of the American Oriental Society 114 (1):129.
The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in Sociology and History of Technology (25th Anniversary Edition with New Preface).Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes & Trevor Pinch (eds.) - 1987 - MIT Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Visions and Ethics in Current Discourse on Human Enhancement.Arianna Ferrari, Christopher Coenen & Armin Grunwald - 2012 - NanoEthics 6 (3):215-229.
Emerging sociotechnical imaginaries for gene edited crops for foods in the United States: implications for governance.Carmen Bain, Sonja Lindberg & Theresa Selfa - 2020 - Agriculture and Human Values 37 (2):265-279.
Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation.Jack Stilgoe - 2016 - Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (3):851-869.
Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research in Practice: Between Imaginaries of Collective Experimentation and Entrenched Academic Value Orders.Thomas Völker, Andrea Schikowitz, Judith Igelsböck & Ulrike Felt - 2016 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 41 (4):732-761.
Responsible Innovation in Industry: The Role of a Firm’s Multi-Stakeholder Network.J. Ceicyte, M. Petraite, Vincent Blok & E. Yaghmaei - 2021 - In Bio#futures, Foreseeing and Exploring the Bioeconomy. Dordrecht, Nederland: pp. 581-603.
View all 49 citations / Add more citations
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