Suchergebnisse

This book compares resistance to technology across time, nations, and technologies. Three post-war examples - nuclear power, information technology, and biotechnology - are used in the analysis. The focus is on post-1945 Europe, with comparisons made with the USA, Japan, and Australia. Instead of assuming that resistance contributes to the failure of a technology, the main thesis of the book is that resistance is a constructive force in technological development, giving technology its particular shape in a particular context. Whilst many people still believe in the positive contribution made by science and technology, many have become sceptical. By exploring the idea that modernity creates effects that undermine its own foundations, forms and effects of resistance are explored in various contexts. The book presents a unique interdisciplinary study, including contributions from historians, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists

Public Understanding of Science (PUS) is a field of activity and an area of social research. The evolution of this field comprises both the changing discourse and the substantive evidence of a changing public understanding.1 In the first part, I will present a short account on how the discourse of PUS moved from Literacy, via PUS, to Science-in-Society. This is less a story of progress, but one of false polemics and the multiplication of concerns. In the second part, I will show some empirical evidence on how PUS has changed by drawing on mass media data and large scale comparative survey evidence. I conclude by stressing that the Science-Society relationship is variable both in distance between science and the wider society and in the quality of this relationship.

This volume brings together the full range of modalities of social influence - from crowding, leadership, and norm formation to resistance and mass mediation - to set out a challenge-and-response 'cyclone' model. The authors use real-world examples to ground this model and review each modality of social influence in depth. A 'periodic table of social influence' is constructed that characterises and compares exercises of influence in practical terms. The wider implications of social influence are considered, such as how each exercise of a single modality stimulates responses from other modalities and how any everyday process is likely to arise from a mix of influences. The book demonstrates that different modalities of social influence are tactics that defend, question, and develop 'common sense' over time and offers advice to those studying in political and social movements, social change, and management.