Projects

Distributional Impacts of Science and Technology Policies

Recently, a good deal of attention has been devoted to the “digital divide" - the influence of socioeconomic status on access to computers and information technology. Given the impact that information technology has on access to learning and many occupations, this focus is most welcome, but it is insufficient. An array of equally apparent income-based disparities in access to and impacts of S&T have not received equal attention. There is certainly a digital divide, but there is also an MRI divide, a consumer electronics divide, a reproductive technology divide and an injection molded polymer divide, to name a few.

The purpose of this research project is to develop knowledge about the factors affecting the distributional impacts of S&T. The focus is on factors internal to science and technology knowledge production processes rather than the social factors that mitigate distributional impacts (e.g., income inequities; lack of universal health care). Amazingly, little or no research of this nature has been done. Using a combination of survey research, historiography and intensive case studies, the research seeks to isolate those attributes of S&T associated with access and benefit distribution. The results of the study will support public policy designs that can promote more equitable outcomes from S&T. This would represent a different set of priorities for science policy, a field that has been dominated by a focus on enhancing research budgets and economic growth, with insufficient attention paid to distributional concerns.

Publications and Conference Presentations

Bozeman, Barry. 2002. Public-Value Failure: When Efficient Markets May Not Do. Public Administration Review 62, 2: 145-161.  

The familiar market-failure model remains quite useful for issues of price efficiency and traditional utilitarianism, but it has many shortcomings as a standard for public-value aspects of public policy and management. In a public-value-failure model, I present criteria for diagnosing values problems that are not easily addressed by market-failure models. Public value-failure occurs when: (1) mechanisms for values articulation and aggregation have broken down; (2) “imperfect monopolies” occur; (3) benefit hoarding occurs; (4) there is a scarcity of providers of public values; (5) a short time horizon threatens public value; (6) a focus on substitutability of assets threatens conservation of public resources; and (7) market transaction threaten fundamental human subsistence. After providing examples for diagnosis of public-values failure, including an extended example concerning the market for human organs, I introduce a “public-failure grid” to facilitate values choices in policy and public management.

Bozeman, Barry, 2003. Science, Technology and Culpability: Some Hypotheses about Why the Disadvantaged Benefit Less from Discovery and Innovation. Presentation prepared for the Annual Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, Washington, D.C., November, 2003.

Bozeman, Barry and Daniel Sarewitz, 2005. Public Values and Public Failure in US Science Policy. Science and Public Policy, 32(2), 119-136.

Domestic science policy in the United States is linked inextricably to economic thinking. We seek to develop a practical analytical framework that confronts the manifest problems of economic valuing for science and technology activities. We argue that pervasive use of market valuation, market-failure assumptions and economic metaphors shapes the structure of science policy in undesirable ways. In particular, reliance on economic reasoning tends to shift the discourse about science policy away from political questions of “why?” and “to what end?” to economic questions of “how much?” Borrowing from the “public values failure framework”, we examine public values criteria for science policy, illustrated with case vignettes on such topics as genetically modified crops and the market for human organs.

Bozeman, Barry and Paul Hirsch, 2003. Science, Technology and the Distribution of Impacts: Alternative Theories of the ‘Handicapper General’. Presentation to Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Atlanta, Georgia, October 15, 2003.

Barry Bozeman and Paul Hirsch. 2004. Science and Institutionalized Ethics: Prospects for Protecting Human Subjects. Paper prepared for presentation at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, August 25-28, Paris, France.

Scientists whose work has potential relevance for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations are in a sort of catch-22:  if they ignore the needs of minorities, the poor, or the disabled, scientists are accused of being a part of an inequitable capitalist structure where the rich get the benefits of the best science, and the rest get the leftovers.  But if they focus their scientific lens directly on the needs of the most vulnerable, even the most well-intentioned scientists are at risk of being accused of treating people as human guinea pigs. Sometimes such accusations are accurate, sometimes they’re questionable.  Either way, every accusation serves as a wedge between scientists and members of at-risk populations.  The purpose of our paper is to use a case study approach to shed light on some of the limitations of “institutionalized science ethics” for protecting human subjects and for avoiding the kind of negativity generated by many of these cases, and to argue for a supplementary approach that might, in cases where ethical edge is the sharpest, offer a method of adjudicating proposed research that would better protect both subjects and researchers.

Bozeman, Barry, and Paul Hirsch. 2006. Science ethics as a bureaucratic problem: IRBs, rules, and failures of control. Policy Science.

“Institutionalized science ethics” refers to the statutory, professional and institution-based ethical standards that guide and constrain scientists’ research work. The primary institution responsible for implementing institutionalized science ethics is the Institutional Review Board. We examine the limitations of IRBs and institutionalized science ethics, using bureaucratic theory and, especially, theory related to the development and enactment of rules. We suggest that due to the very character of rules-based systems, improvements in IRB outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through either more or better rules or even by bureaucratic reform. Instead, we suggest that improvements in human subject protection can best be advanced through increased participation. Ours is not a call for more participation by the general public but participation, via “Participant Review Boards” of persons who are eligible, by the protocols of the research in question, to serve as subjects. This provides a level of legitimacy and face validity that cannot be obtained by IRB affiliates, even by “external representatives.” In making these points, we review a recent science ethics controversy, the KKI/Johns Hopkins lead paint study. In spite of being approved by IRBs, the study resulted in a civil lawsuit that reached the Maryland Court of Appeals. The case illustrates the limits of institutionalized science ethics and the bureaucracies created for their enactment. The case also underscores the complex and equivocal nature of the ethical guidelines established under the National Research Act.

Implications of the 2004-2005 Flu Vaccine Case. Public Integrity.

Public interest concerns within policy analysis have been marginalized by the popularity of economic individualism and the growing reliance on market failure models to analyze public policy issues. The public interest should be the center of policy analytical frameworks. This case study applies a public values framework to the 2004-2005 influenza vaccine shortage to illustrate the potential for infusing public values in analysis of public policy controversies. The public values framework leads to a quite different, and we think a preferable, focus on policy analysis and forecasting compared to predominant economic thinking, especially market failure criteria. The case of flu vaccine shortage is especially apt inasmuch relatively few of the determinants pertained to economic forces or to market criteria. Public health is a classic instance of public goods, perhaps even more so than defense and national security, because the level of one’s threat is in large measure a function of the threat to others. 

   Hirsch, Paul, 2003. Shattering the Glass: Scientific Research, Societal Inequality, and Formalized Review. 2003 Research Value Mapping Conference. Atlanta, GA.

Scientific progress and technological development are often viewed as primary forces in the growth and development of the American economy (Kleinman 1995, Brooks 1996, Guston 2000).  Technology boosts productivity and creates new markets; science cures diseases and expands the range of human possibilities. The jury is still out, however, on the distributional implications of scientific and technological progress: whether the benefits generated by science and technology will serve to increase or decrease the gap between the haves and the have-nots.  Given a pre-existing state of inequality, the interaction between vulnerable populations and scientific researchers can take one of several forms: researchers can ignore vulnerable populations; they can exploit them; or they can attempt to ameliorate some of the disadvantages accrued to vulnerable populations.  These three possibilities provide the structure for this paper. After drawing on previous research and historical examples to explain each of the possible interactions between research and inequality, we use them as the organizational principle for subsequent analysis.  We argue that researchers’ ideas regarding the underlying causes of inequality – whether stated or unstated, reasoned or unreasoned – play a major role in determining whether scientific research ends up ignoring, exploiting, or ameliorating pre-existing inequalities, regardless of the researchers’ original intent.

   Hirsch, Paul. 2004. Science and Institutionalized Ethics: The Johns Hopkins Lead Paint Study and its Implications for Protecting Human Subjects. Georgia Tech Faculty Seminar, Atlanta, GA.

   Sosinska, Olga, and Mary K. Feeney. 2006. Working Paper. Public Value Mapping: The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Yellowstone National Park and Diversa Inc.

Science, Policy & Social Inequity Workshop sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes.

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