Normative Regimes of the Nanoworld in the Web of Science Database: From Self-Assembly to Science Policy
Abstrakt
Nanotechnology development stretches between worlds at the nanoscale and (future) society at large. It is governed by different normative regimes that take into account accompanying rules, standards, also social regulation laws, ethics and so on.
In response to current analytic turn to studying multiple legal systems, laws of various forms and in various contexts, the presented study investigates normative regimes of the 'nanoworld' (keyword) in the Web of Science (WoS) database, approx. 250 articles, between the years 1990 and 2016. The initial content analysis conducted in the corpus supports model variability of the normative regimes, ranging from technical to social aspects.
While perspective on separating these into technical and social regimes is suitable for the scientometric measures, these alone cannot explain flexibility and stability of certain figures, such as nanotechnology roadmaps, here included Moore's law and its break down. The corpus-based metaphor analysis then allows to uncover these as metaphors and narrative structures as they shift and get translated to different contexts.
This is argued as a dynamic feature by which nanoworld is maintained as a coherent imaginary - connecting nanoscale and society within the root metaphor of 'creative evolution' (a cultural-genetic code). The metaphor represents strategic options for the technology development, promoting adjustment that is associated with high financial and societal costs, but also more open science policy.