Keeping Steady as She Goes: A Negotiated Order Perspective on Technological Evolution

A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design. In this essay, we overturn the ontological assumption that social order is inherently stable, drawing on Anselm Strauss's concept of negotiated order to analyze the persistence of a dominant design as a social accomplishment: an outcome of ongoing processes that reinforce or challenge a socially negotiated order. Thus, we shift focus from battles over standards to periods of normal innovation. We extend the technology cycles model to explain social dynamics in periods of incremental change, and to make predictions specifying how contextual conditions in standards-setting organizations affect social interaction, leading to reinforcement or challenge to a socio-technical order

Home care Competitive goods and services for care in the community

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:q97/05783 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Scenarios for biotechnology in Europe A research agenda

ECU 8.75Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:GP/EC-2716 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

The emergence of genetically-engineered animal models in carcinogenicity testing of pharmaceuticals: a case-study of process innovation

In this article, we explain the emergence of new short-term tests for carcinogenicity involving genetically engineered animals for the purposes of pharmaceutical regulation. Drawing on some long-standing theories of technological innovation, we argue that the alteration of carcinogenic risk assessment of pharmaceuticals, which occurred from 1998, did not result solely, or perhaps even mainly, from internal logical and technical developments in the experimental sciences of toxicology or genetics. Rather, this process innovation in regulatory science resulted from a complex interaction between scientist activism around molecularization of toxicology in powerful US government institutions, on the one hand, and a powerful research-based trans-national pharmaceutical industry committed to deregulatory mobilization, on the other, seeking to reduce carcinogenicity testing of its products and capable of marshalling significant support from governments and regulators, especially in Europe and Japan, to achieve that goal. The new techno-scientific basis for regulatory decisions about whether pharmaceuticals are carcinogenic risks to the public was, in effect, an accommodation in “bio-political“ trading between two power-blocks of expert scientists. Those from industry and their regulatory allies in Europe and Japan, who sought reductions in “the burden“ of drug testing, on the one hand, and FDA scientists, who did not accept the simple “reduction“ agenda, but were interested in shifting the paradigm of carcinogenicity testing toward geneticization, on the othe