Technoscience: changing relationships between science, technology and society

The purpose of this chapter is to better understand how technoscience prompted the emergence of technology assessment (TA) in the 1970s and conversely how TA helped reconfigure, the practices of research and development (R&D) and the relations between science, technology and the public, over the past fifty years. The chapter briefly defines and characterizes the technoscientific regime in section 1. Then section 2 will examine the shifting priorities that prompted the emergence of TA in the 1970s and the 1980s and how they changed the role and the ethos of academic researchers as well as R&D practices in general. Section 3 will specifically focus on the promotion and diffusion of new and emerging technologies (NEST) - such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology - in the USA and in the European Community. It will describe how NEST initiated new rules and ideals of TA and at the same time posed serious challenges to its practices and orientations.