One of the most routine observations about modern life concerns the rapid pace of technical change and the consequences of this for every aspect of society. Of course, this is not just a phenomenon of the 1990s. The social impact of ceaselessly changing science and technology has been a classical theme of writers, social scientists and scientists since the Industrial Revolution. Generally, the tone has been deterministic, suggesting that science and technology have their own objective logic to which society must adapt as best it can.

However, the relationship between scientific expertise and the ‘general public’ is currently a matter of renewed attention and social concern. Although the dominant form of this renewed interest is shaped by anxieties about the ‘social assimilation’ of science and technology (i.e. by a concern that the public are insufficiently receptive to science and technology), we will argue that this conceals a more fundamental issue regarding the public identity and organisation of science within contemporary society.

This edited collection focuses on one important aspect of this wider theme; the contemporary issue of what has become known as the ‘public understanding of science’. As the following chapters demonstrate, this has become something of a fulcrum for debates over the social negotiation of power and social order in relation to science and technology. In this Introduction, we will first set the scene for the detailed analyses which follow and then explain the particular approach to this debate which has been adopted here. As this book demonstrates, concern with ‘public understanding’ takes us into many areas of case-study and socio-technical inquiry – it is thus all the more important to establish from the outset the major interlinkages and connections.

Visual imagery is often presented as capturing ‘literal reality’, especially in a climate of increasing surveillance. The quest to better ‘the view’ has spurred the development of technologies that enhance visibility and provide useful images. Telescopes, microscopes, X–rays, and then ultrasound and other scanning devices have opened up wholly new areas of observation. They have also fostered new alliances, evaluation criteria and agendas – new routes to authority and of entry into the politics of representational practices. Surveillance, for instance, particularly since Foucault (1979), has become a way of asserting the political character of visualisation. However, this analysis may deflect attention away from imaging practices premised on a ‘mutuality of knowing’, and on ‘care’ as well as ‘control’ (Lyon 1993). Moreover, central issues of power and accountability also arise when there is a shift of domain, as the image is transferred beyond the legitimate realm of the ‘expert’.

Images invite action: the use of technologies of visual depiction are now central to medical interventions. In general, diagnostic images are intended, above all, for expert scrutiny: elaborate conventions exist to shield such images from public display. Captured on plate, film, or tape, these images are scanned for signs of pathology and become substitutes, surrogates for the subject under clinical observation: as authorised depictions, they are also readily available for evaluation, in group discussion in the clinic, or in a court of law in a malpractice suit. Patients can be elsewhere: their physical presence is no longer required. The images become constituted as technical data, and such technical data can come to be seen as determining the diagnosis.

This chapter takes as its focus one very specific example of public interaction with science – the case of the hill sheep-farmers of the Lake District of northern England. They experienced radioactive fall-out from the 1986 Chernobyl accident which contaminated their sheep flocks and upland pastures. In an area dominated by a traditional and demanding hill-farming economy, they were restricted from selling their sheep freely (almost 100 farms are still under restriction). They also received intensive expert advice about the environmental hazards from the radiocaesium deposits, and the relationship of these to other such deposits from the nearby Windscale-Sellafield nuclear facilities and 1950s weapons testing fall-out. Fieldwork comprising mainly in-depth interviews with affected farmers and others provided data for analysis of the factors influencing the reception of scientific expertise by this sub-population.

In analysing the farmers' understanding of the science, it was immediately apparent that it would have been meaningless and utterly misleading to treat their response to its cognitive content – for example, the claim that radiocaesium from Chernobyl was clearly distinguishable from Sellafield emissions of the same radio–isotopes – as if separate from its social and institutional form. Examining how the scientific institutions framed the issue and the knowledge they articulated as science, identified certain commitments which were institutionalised and taken for granted, thus not deliberately introduced. They constituted the very culture of science as institutionalised and practised as public knowledge. These assumptions shaped the scientific knowledge, they were not extra to it; and they were built in as social prescriptions in the way the science was institutionalised and deployed.

Introduction

As discussed in previous chapters, one important dimension of the contemporary public understanding of science is the heterogeneity of scientific knowledges and understandings. Whilst conventional perspectives portray science as a unitary and coherent body of knowledge and expertise, the accounts in this book have typically stressed the diverse character of science as it is encountered by various publics. In looking to the future development of science–public relations it is important also that we consider the changes which are currently affecting modern science – not least because these will help form the new context for these relations. In a book devoted to the linkages between science and the public we therefore need to examine the various and shifting understandings of science within the scientific community.

Accordingly, this chapter seeks to identify how science is contextualised by academic scientists, administrators, industrialists, and members of some environmental organisations, and distinguishes between the various, and largely disparate, ‘understandings’ of strategic science held and enacted in the civil sector of British science. It is based on an investigation conducted in the context of policy changes at the political level which have borne most directly in recent years on the development of science and technology policy in Britain. There are several policy changes which deserve special consideration with regard to British civil science in the 1990s. First, the move towards the prioritisation of key areas of scientific research using special programmes for the focusing of government funding. Second, the fact that these have evolved within an increasingly stringent economic framework. Third, the narrowing of the institutional base for this work through a process of rewarding ‘excellence’ and the concentration of resources in key institutions.

Expertise in context

The public understanding of science is situated in a changing theoretical landscape. Debates about modernity, post modernity, and globalism are throwing into question significant conceptual categories that social science has previously taken for granted. In this flux, the relationship between science, technology, and publics has become a central concern of social theory. Western society is depicted as increasingly dependent on specialised roles and institutions that are associated with specialised knowledges and competences. Accordingly, theoretical frameworks are being developed that allocate key roles to concepts relating to perceptions of risk, dependence on expert systems, and trust. Within these debates the ‘local’ has assumed a new significance in constituting identity-based responses. However, empirical studies of the relationship between the local and wider society are sparse. This chapter is based on ethnographic research, focusing on local interpretations of expertise relating to ionising radiation in the Isle of Man. It examines the social and cultural interpretations of science that emerge from the mundane transactions of people in ‘micro-social’ situations. This approach is in tune with what Knorr-Cetina calls methodological situationalism, which ‘demands that descriptively adequate accounts of large-scale social phenomena be grounded in statements about actual social behaviour in concrete situations’ (1988: 22).

In the following pages I describe how authoritative knowledges associated with science are assumed, attributed, and evaluated in practice, within both lay contexts and institutional settings on the Isle of Man. It is proposed that there are many similarities in the ways expertise is constituted in ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ settings, and that drawing boundaries between the two is far from straightforward.

This chapter addresses the issue of public understandings of science through a study of the ways patients with a genetic metabolic disorder make sense of the medical sciences they encounter. This disorder is ‘peculiarly scientific’ in that although it is strongly associated with premature death from cardiac arrest, it does not in itself produce obvious, subjectively discerned symptoms. Indeed, as far as the patient, and most probably his or her general practitioner, are concerned, even those external indicators of the disorder that may be present are unlikely to be seen as significant. Thus prior to the onset of coronary heart disease and/or a heart attack, the disorder may have no embodied presence in the daily life of the individual; instead it is called into existence through laboratory indicators, that is by the presence in a blood sample of raised levels of lipids (blood fats).

As a science concerned with human health, medicine has played a crucial role in representing science and technology in general to the public and in establishing their authority and status in contemporary society. While medical sociology has debated the sociological value of studying those whose disorder is medically defined, few studies have directly explored patients' interpretations of medical science itself. For social scientists interested in the public understanding of science, patients with such an abstract ‘disembodied’ disorder offer a rich point of inquiry.

Introduction

The starting-point of this chapter is the observation that people do not simply possess knowledge about scientific ‘facts’ and scientific procedures and processes, they can also reflect upon the epistemological status of that knowledge. In addition, I argue that this active reflection can directly affect their responses to science and scientific experts. In feeling uncertainty about their understanding of science, or in identifying a ‘lack’ in their knowledge, people are making tacit judgements in relation to the authoritative source or sources of that knowledge. Thus people can review the standing of their scientific and technological knowledge in relation to some more or less expert source such as scientists, the media, friends and relatives, and so on. As such, identity cannot but be implicated. Conversely, the ways in which people regard themselves and the value they place upon their scientific knowledge, affects the ways in which they understand science. We have, therefore, a sort of discursive jigsaw in which identity, the status of lay scientific knowledge, and scientific expertise are delimited.

This chapter will, first of all, briefly examine three approaches to the public understanding of science which are essentially interested in describing the scientific knowledge that people ‘possess’. The fact that these approaches ignore issues concerning the reflexivity and identity of lay people, suggests their underpinning model of the individual is fundamentally mechanistic. The implication is that a particular representation or narrative of the lay person is promoted; in some cases, this is further disseminated through the media. These ‘knowledge description’ approaches will then be contrasted with a social constructionist/discourse analysis of the public understanding of science. Further, I will focus on one particular facet of the public understanding of science.

The fieldwork presented in this volume provides mainly qualitative insights into the ways in which public groups attempt to fashion locally useful knowledges from ‘external’ and ‘indigenous’ sources. Most of the chapters analyse the interactions between identifiable social groups and scientific, technical or medical experts. These groups are defined by different parameters; geopolitical-cultural location (The Isle of Man); shared livelihood, culture, and physical place, but with more cultural permeability (Cumbrian sheep-farmers); physical location but a less-distinct culture (residents around major industrial hazard sites); shared experience of medical treatment – either chronic or episodic (hypercholesterolaemia and antenatal patients). Two further chapters analyse responses of more diffuse collectivities to scientific knowledges as experienced in museum exhibitions (Chapter Seven), and in relation to radiation hazards in the home (Chapter Five). Finally, and consistent with the orientation of the fieldwork chapters, two chapters examine new contexts of the contemporary negotiation of scientific practice (i.e. the norms and ethos of what is meant by ‘science’) – namely in environmental debate and policy-making, and in the commercialisation of scientific research.

In these conclusions, we offer some thoughts on the overall implications of this work by giving further reflection and clarification to some of the key themes of our book. Since two of the key assumptions about science which frame the ‘public understanding’ issue are its intrinsic usefulness and its universality, it is especially important to give attention to two issues at this stage: the connections between ‘useful knowledge’ and hidden models of social agency; and the relationships between the ‘local’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ in the ‘micro social’ research presented here. Following this, we will consider some of the practical lessons which can be drawn from our collective research.

In this chapter, the focus is on environmental threats – one of the most topical and pressing areas of public debate and controversy involving science. Rather than considering environmental issues as they relate to global or national concerns, we will focus on immediate questions of pollution and hazard as they affect specific local communities. Whilst Steven Yearley tackles some of these questions in Chapter Eight with regard to environmental organisations, our attention will be concentrated on community residents who have a more ‘everyday’ approach to living in a hazardous environment. Given the present concern over environmental issues, what sources of information exist and how useful do they appear? In what ways do people relate to and ‘make sense’ of those sources of expertise? Going further, we will also consider the relationship between the provision of technical information and the social context within which that information is developed, disseminated, and received.

The central theme of this chapter is, therefore, that of ‘citizens’ and ‘sources’ set against matters of environmental concern. In this we are approaching a topic which recurs throughout this book – albeit, as we will see, from a distinctly ‘local’ and community-oriented perspective. We are also selecting a theme which was identified by the Royal Society as a gap in current knowledge: ‘We therefore also recommend that the sources from which individuals obtain their understanding of science be actively investigated.’

Science communicators are widely acknowledged to have an important role to play in the public understanding of science. Despite this acknowledgement, the role is often seen as one of simply transporting information, like so many potatoes on a conveyor belt, from the world of science to the public (the transportation model) or else as a relatively straightforward matter of simplification and translation (the translation model). The aim of this chapter is to show that there is more to the communication of science than this supposedly value-free simplification and packaging; and that science communication involves selection and definition, not just of which ‘facts’ are presented to the public, but of what is to count as science and of what kind of entity or enterprise science is to be. That is, science communicators act as authors of science for the public. They may also, however, by dint of their own institutional status, give implicit stamps of approval or disapproval to particular visions or versions of science. That is, they may act as authors with special authority on science – as authorisers of science.

Museums are one type of institution involved in the communication, authoring, and authorisation of science, and as such they share many of the same problems, and can exemplify many of the same issues, as other science media. Although museums and science centres reach a smaller public than do some other science communicators – such as schools and television – this public is nevertheless substantial. Over the last decade in particular, many museums, and their relatives the science centres, have been involved in developing new science communication strategies, strategies which have increasingly gone under the label of ‘the public understanding of science’.

Environmentalism and the public's understanding of science

Since the late 1980s Britain has experienced a rapid rise in popular and media interest in environmental matters. The level of public concern with green issues seemed poised to reach truly unrivalled heights in 1989 when, in elections for the European Parliament, the UK Green Party received nearly 15% of the poll. The tendency to choose Green soon deserted the British voting public, but not before it had made a strong impact on the other mainstream parties who quickly began to emphasise their own environmental credentials.

Greening has been apparent elsewhere in society too. Advertisers have plundered he environment's comic resources, with puns about ‘greenness’ achieving wide currency and with jokes around environmental themes being employed to sell all manner of goods, from ‘lid free’ cars (convertibles) to ‘nose-zone friendly’ deodorants. Sports commentators have shown equal flexibility in weaving accounts of climate change into their remarks about unseasonably warm football matches as well as rain-affected cricket fixtures. Environmental thrillers have once again begun to populate television schedules and, for the late 1990s, Hollywood looks set to offer numerous environmental spectaculars, particularly on rainforest themes. Given all these trends, one can only assume that the public is increasingly familiar with certain aspects of environmentalism, and that such topics as acid rain, the ozone layer, and the greenhouse effect have attained daily currency. The penetration of these terms into everyday culture is, I suggest, indicated by a 1992 poster campaign in the UK for Regal cigarettes featuring a character (Reg) supposedly giving his views about topical issues, the joke (at least in many cases) being that he misconstrues his theme.