Suchergebnisse

Abstract: Technology is now a subject of politics, but we have little expertise in handling science and technology as issues in politics. Most of the solutions put forward to solve the technology and politics problem have their shortcomings, whether they be the "new calculus" of computer‐based decisions taking into account all possible values; participation and decentralization; competing sources of advice or the implication contained in the Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration that government be "elevated" to partnership with the bureaucracy. The technology‐based issue of energy illustrates this move towards politics, first through debates about whether certain values should be excluded from the calculus; secondly by the move to increase the degree of coordination not only within the energy complex but also in its relationship with other social objectives; and finally by posing the need for "brokerage" skills beyond those of profession or expertise. In fact the vision of the future as a knowledgeable society is now a description of the past. Our technological missions, once left to the protected world of the autonomous statutory corporations with their "little" politics, are being pushed into the area of "big" politics with its policy competition. The politicization of technology throws up the need for much more dynamic models of the relationship between politics and administration as neither the dichotomy nor continuum model is adequate. As a start, it may be useful to analyse the ways in which an administrative continuum and a political continuum twist and spiral around each other.