Prediction as an Impediment to Preparedness: Lessons from the US Hurricane and Earthquake Research Enterprises

No matter one’s wealth or social position, all are subject to the threats of natural hazards. Be it fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or drought, the reality of hazard risk is universal. In response, governments, non-profits, and the private sector all support research to study hazards. Each has a common end in mind: to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities. While this end goal is shared across hazards, the conception of how to get there can diverge considerably. The earthquake and hurricane research endeavors in the US provide an illustrative contrast. The earthquake community sets out to increase resilience through a research process that simultaneously promotes both high quality and usable – preparedness-focused - science. In order to do so, the logic suggests that research must be collaborative, responsive, and transparent. Hurricane research, by contrast, largely promotes high quality science – predictions - alone, and presumes that usability should flow from there. This process is not collaborative, responsive, or transparent. Experience suggests, however, that the latter model – hurricane research - does not prepare communities or decision makers to use the high quality science it has produced when a storm does hit. The predictions are good, but they are not used effectively. Earthquake research, on the other hand, is developed through a collaborative process that equips decision makers to know and use hazards research knowledge as soon as an earthquake hits. The contrast between the two fields suggests that earthquake research is more likely to meet the end goal of resilience than is hurricane research, and thus that communities might be more resilient to hurricanes were the model by which research is funded and conducted to change. The earthquake research experience can provide lessons for this shift. This paper employs the Public Value Mapping (PVM) framework to explore these two divergent public value logics, their end results, and opportunities for improvement.     

How Technological Platforms Reconfigure Science-Industry Relations: The Case of Micro- and Nanotechnology

With reference to the recent science studies debate on the nature of science-industry relationship, this article focuses on a novel organizational form: the technological platform. Considering the field of micro- and nanotechnology in Switzerland, it investigates how technological platforms participate in framing science-industry activities. On the basis of a comparative analysis of three technological platforms, it shows that the platforms relate distinctly to academic and to industrial users. It distinguishes three pairs of user models, one model in each pair pertaining to how platforms act toward and conceive of academic users, the other model regarding users from industry. The article then discusses how technological platforms reconfigure the science-economy divide. While the observed platforms provide new institutional contact and interaction between academia and industry, new research collaboration does not necessarily materialize in practice. In this respect, science-industry mediation by way of technological platforms does not make science-industry boundaries more porous. Instead, the declared openness of public research with respect to industry, in the case of technological platforms, may contribute to maintain public science’s autonomy.     

Virology Experts in the Boundary Zone Between Science,Policy and the Public: A Biographical Analysis

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements.     

Normal Accidents of Expertise

Charles Perrow used the term “normal accidents” to characterize a type of catastrophic failure that resulted when complex, tightly coupled production systems encountered a certain kind of anomalous event. These were events in which systems failures interacted with one another in a way that could not be anticipated, and could not be easily understood and corrected. Systems of the production of expert knowledge are increasingly becoming tightly coupled. Unlike classical science, which operated with a long time horizon, many current forms of expert knowledge are directed at immediate solutions to complex problems. These are prone to breakdowns like the kind discussed by Perrow. The example of the Homestake mine experiment shows that even in modern physics complex systems can produce knowledge failures that last for decades. The concept of knowledge risk is introduced, and used to characterize the risk of failure in such systems of knowledge production.     

University and Business Relations: Connecting the Knowledge Economy

It is commonplace to say that the modern economy is knowledge based but a moment’s reflection points to the vacuity of this notion. For all economies are knowledge based and could not be otherwise. The question is rather how is one kind of knowledge based economy to be distinguished from another? This essay proposes that the answer may lie in three directions: (1) in terms of the variety of knowledge that is engaged; (2) in terms of the processes by which the production of knowledge is organised, and its corollary the resources devoted to knowledge production and dissemination; and, (3) in terms of the purposes to which knowledge is put. In respect of each of these dimensions, the rise of the modern university as a custodian of knowledge in Western economy and society has been of central importance; but universities are not alone in this role, a wide range of other agencies, private firms, public research laboratories for instance play an important role in defining a knowledge economy and have done so increasingly since the turn of the nineteenth century—a first indication of the systemic dimensions of a modern knowledge economy.     

Why culture attracts and resists economic analysis

The realm of arts and culture can be seen as ephemeral and ill-suited to the ‘intrusion’ of quantitative analysis. Yet, demand amongst end-users for economic research into cultural and creative industries is stronger today than ever it has been in the past. Oddly, culture seems to both attract and resist economic analysis. Drawing on an analysis of recent research findings related to multi-platform strategies in the television industry, this article examines what is distinctive about economics of culture, and it assesses the appeals but also the challenges associated with conducting scholarly research work in this particular area.