STS Terms and Concepts PDF

TERMS and CONCEPTS In Science, Technology, and Society because they can be metabolized (metabolism) Compiled and Edited by Teaching Staff, by organism. STS Cluster, UPLB...

TERMS and CONCEPTS In Science, Technology, and Society because they can be metabolized (metabolism) Compiled and Edited by Teaching Staff, by organism. STS Cluster, UPLB BIODIVERSITY: The collective richness and variety of all forms of life. APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY: The idea that CHAIN-LINKED MODEL OF INNOVATION: A the design and selection of technologies should model of the innovation process that stresses reflect the social, economic, cultural, and the existence of diverse starting points for and ecological conditions of the society into which multiple indirect pathways with feedback loops they are to be introduced. The phrase is most to technological innovation. often used to refer to low-energy, labor- intensive, easy-to-understand-and-use CHARACTER OF EVERYDAY LIFE: The technologies conductive to local, independent general texture or fabric of everyday existence use in energy-poor, labor-rich, less developed that confronts and affects individuals living in a countries. particular society and is substantially influenced by scientific and technological innovations and AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: The theory activities. that technology has a life of its own and develops independently of human control. COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY: Technology used to extend the transmission of BACTERIA: Single cell organisms and most information between individuals and groups over prevalent form of life on Earth. both distance and time. Examples include language, writing, printing, telegraph, telephone, BEHAVIOR SETTING: The natural matter and and the Internet. The development of such technics, and their configuration, that constitutes technology quickens and intensifies the pace of the material environment for human behavior socio-cultural change and sometimes influences it. CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICAL THEORIES: BIG SCIENCE: A phrase used to point up the Ones in which the rightness and wrongness of fact that since World War II, scientific research actions and policies hinge exclusively on their has increasingly involved money, personnel, estimated consequences. organization, and equipment on a large scale. Without such resources, much such activity CONTEXT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: would have been impossible. The social-cum-natural setting in which scientific and technological activities unfold and that BIG TECHNOLOGY: A phrase that points up affects and is affected by their processes and the fact that since about the mid-nineteenth products. century, technological activity has increasingly involved money, personnel, organization, and CULTURAL CONVERGENCE: A process in equipment on a large scale. Without such which two or more cultures exhibit increasing resources, much such activity would have been similarity of content or structure in some all impossible. dimensions of social life. BIODEGRADABLE: A property of molecules or CULTURAL SYSTEM: A society’s culture chemicals that refers to their usefulness as food viewed as a complex of interacting background factors or elements. These are often grouped into four sectors; the ideational, societal, determine and control the accurate copying of material, and personality-behavioral the nucleotide sequence during cell division or subsystems. protein biosynthesis. CULTURE: A group’s or society’s total inherited ECOSYSTEM: A specific characteristic and transmitted way of life, comprising its biological system in a location or area with a characteristics ideas, values, world views, unique mix of living organisms and physical institutions, roles, social structures, material consistency such as minerals, soil and air artifacts, ways of making things , personality traits, and behavior patterns and settings. ENGINEERING: That professionalized branch of Behavior unfolding in a social unit both technological activity devoted to organizing the influences and is influenced by its culture. design, production, and operation of technics and technical systems in order to meet practical CUMULATIVE SYNTHESIS THEORY OF human needs. INVENTION: The theory that invention is a cumulative, synthetic, social process involving a ENSKILLING EFFECT: A result of a new work genetic sequence of four stages of novelty: the situation in which a worker is called upon to perception of a problem, the setting of the stage develop and exercise new skills not required for the solving of the problem, the occurrence of under the previous work regime a critical act of insight, and critical revision. These stages apply not only to the processes ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT: A involved in realizing each that issues in a systematic estimation of the possible and likely particular notable invention, but also to the effects of a proposed technological initiative on processes involved in realizing each of the prior the natural and human-built environment. strategic inventions that set the stage for its realization. EQUILIBRIUM-DISEQUILIBRIUM MODEL: A model of the process of technically induced DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICAL THEORIES: cultural change that stressed the disruption by a Ones in which the rightness and wrongness of technical innovation of the prior equilibrium of actions and policies hinge on considerations society’s cultural system, the fall of the system other that their estimated consequences, e.g., into a state of dissonant disequilibrium, and its on their allegedly intrinsic properties, the eventual return to a new equilibrium state intentions or motives of their agents, or their because of changes enabling the (possibly being approved or disapproved by some altered) cultural system to accommodate the authority. (possibly revised) innovation. DESKILLING/ DESKILLING EFFECT: A result EVOLUTION, THEORY OF: The theory of of a new work situation in which a worker, partly evolution as initially formulated by Charles because of technological change, is no longer Darwin in 1859 is the central theory of biology. called upon to exercise previously utilized skills. All processes that enable life are the result of The term is sometimes used to claim that the process of evolution over a period estimated because of the introduction of new workplace to be more than 3 billion years. The mechanism technologies workers must, on balance, utilize of evolution are mutation and natural selection. fewer or “lower” skills under the previous These two processes result in changes at the regimes. genetic (mutation) and physiological level (selection of function). DEOXY-RIBONUCLEIC ACID: [DNA, (see also RNA.] Short for Deoxy-Ribonucleic Acid; makes FORMALIZED TECHNICAL PROCEDURES: up the genetic component of each cell. DNA is a Intellectual constructs, often in the form of linear polymer of four building blocks called computer programs, that indicate or direct in a nucleotides. Nucleotides are distinguished by definite and precise manner how some technic- their base structures known as adenine (A), related task is to be carried out. guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). The structure of DNA is the double helix and in all HEALTH AND SAFETY ISSUES: Refers to one organisms contains only two forms of base pair of the issues regarding science and technology combinations - AT (TA) and GC (CG) - which in which some work tend to be hazardous (such as exposure to chemicals and radiation) and eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth there are fewer fatal accidents but there are century. increases in disabling diseases INDUSTRIALIZATION: The continual expanding HEROIC THEORY OF INVENTION: The idea application of sophisticated technology designed that inventions are created by single individuals to efficiently draw energy and raw materials out who succeed by sheer genius, resolve, and hard of the environment and fashion them into work products for human use HIGH TECHNOLOGY: Late twentieth century INFLUENCE AGENT: A social actor, e.g., a technics and technologies heavily dependent on government agency, business firm, union, or or embodying advanced scientific or engineering public interest group, that exercises some type knowledge, e.g., many of those produced by and of influence on scientific or technological activity used in the microelectronics-based, or products or on some aspect of the total biotechnology, aerospace, and instrumentation societal enterprise of science or technology. industries. High technology is often indirectly characterized as the product of that industrial INFLUENCE EFFECT: A change in some sector whose companies employ substantially aspect of scientific or technological activity or higher than average ratios of research and products or of the total societal enterprise of development expenditures to sales. science or technology brought about through some types of influence exercise HYPOTHESIS: A testable scientific idea that can be proved right or wrong with experiments. INFLUENCE EXERCISE: Any of several A hypothesis is a formulation of a question that qualitatively different types of influence on lends itself to a prediction. This prediction can science or technology that can be exerted by an be verified or falsified. A question can only be influence agent in trying to bring some king of use as scientific hypothesis if there is an influence effect experimental approach or observational study that can be designed to check the outcome of a INNOVATION/INVENTION: A new intellectual, prediction. material, or social product or process ready for practical us, or the process involved in arriving IDUAR MODEL: A model of the technical- at one form, e.g., an invention change-ensuing-social-change (TCESC) relationship in which the social change outcome INNOVATION DIFFUSION: The process by of a technical change is a joint product of the which an innovation is disseminated in a social nature of the technical change realized and the group. interplay of the SCES (at the time the technical change is introduced) with five interacting INNOVATION SYSTEM [Western Context]: The intervening variables: particular innovation (I) complex of specific dispositions, values, and into which the technical change is turned, the political and economic institutions and rewards diffusion (D) it attains, the of use (U) of the that, taken together, enabled and fostered innovation that emerges, the adaptation (A) technological innovation in modern Western made by innovation users and nonusers, and society, the societal resistance (R) elicited by the innovation and its patterns of diffusion, use and INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF SCIENCE AND adaptation. Cf. technological determinism. TECHNOLOGY: The process by which the fledging endeavors of science and technology INDIGENOUS TECHNOLOGY: Technology take on established forms of organization and native to a particular place, people, or region. practice in a society, eventually to the point of becoming recognized as abiding constituent INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: The elements of the society’s culture. transformation of a technology based on human and animal labor to a technology based on the INTENSIFICATION: The application of ever use of inanimate energy sources. The term is expanding technology and labor techniques to generally used to refer to the transformation that increase productivity occurred in England in the second half of the INTERMEDIATE TECHNOLOGY: A technology single atoms is ten fold smaller. The molecular resulting from taking a traditional technology processes of life, particularly the activity of through series of incremental modern proteins (enzymes) and the self-organizing innovations that make it much more productive behavior of many biological molecules has yet leave it still able to meet the criteria for greatly inspired nanotechnology and molecular appropriate technology motors (i.e. protein complexes) could be considered the result of natures INVENTION: A substantially original operational nanotechnology. device or process--- or the process of conceptualization and experimental testing by NATURAL SELECTION: The process described which one is realized---that achieves a desired by Darwin's theory of evolution that favors result, often in an ingenious manner. certain genotypes and disfavors others. This process is entirely guided by the interaction of IMMEDIATE SOCIAL SYSTEM: The system of an organism with its environment. foreground factors consisting of the reigning political, economic, and social forces and NEWLY INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES: interests of the day in the society in question. Newly Industrialized Countries; often used to refer to countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, KINETICS: The science of measuring changes, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. of assessing rates of movements and flow. ORGANISM: The individual member of a LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: Less species; can be a single cell or a multicellular Developed Countries, often referred to organism. Organisms are the biological unit of collectively as the so-called Third World. reproduction and while cells of single cell organism are autonomous (bacteria, archaea), LEGISLATIVE LIMITATION OF SCIENCE AND individual cells of multicellular organisms (fungi, TECHNOLOGY: Activities undertaken by plants, animals) are not legislatures to restrict scientific and technological developments, ostensibly to serve OUTPUTS CHARACTERISTIC OF SCIENTIFIC what is held to be in the public interest AND TECHNOLOGICAL ACTIVITY: Well- founded knowledge of the natural world LINEAR MODEL OF THE INNOVATION (science); technics and technic-related PROCESS: A model of the innovation process intellectual constructs (technology) that represents technological innovation as due, at the bottom to basic scientific research, PARADIGM: The set of intellectual followed in order by development, production, commitments common to most practitioners of a and marketing phases given discipline of field of intellectual or practical activity. Such commitments may include beliefs MORE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: Countries, about how work in the field is properly often understood as referring to those of conducted, about what phenomena deserve Western Europe, North America, and Japan attention by practitioners, about what counts as high achievement in the field, and, in the same MODERN BUSINESS FIRM: An organizational case of natural science, about what exists and is innovation, consisting of the large-scale, fundamental multiunit, hierarchically organized, professionally managed firm that arose in the second half of POLYMORPHISM OF CONTEMPORARY the nineteenth century as a response to SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: The idea that technologies that made business on a national scientific activity and technological activity each and international scale technically feasible. take many coexisting forms in the contemporary era. NANOTECHNOLOGY: A technology that creates small materials at the scale of molecules POPULATION: The totality of a closely related by manipulating single atoms. The name nano number of individual organisms that belong to comes from the size of molecules which is the same species and live in the same measured in nanometers - or one billionth of a geographical area and interact with each other meter (0.000000001 meter). The dimension of through sexual (or asexual for bacteria) or promoting what is held to be the public reproduction. interest. POSITIVISM: A philosophical position according RESOURCES FOR SCIENTIFIC AND to which there are close ties between the social TECHNOLOGICAL ACTIVITY: Supplies of and natural sciences, which share a common available means with which such activities are logical framework carried out. Transformative resources (knowledge, technics, labor power, and PRODUCT LIABILITY LITIGATION: Legal methods) are brought to bear on input resources proceedings aimed at resolving a claim that a (money. Materials and natural phenomena) to product’s manufacturer or distributor is legally produce the respective characteristics outputs of responsible for the harm incurred by a product scientific and technological activities. user because of some defect in the product or deficiency in the way it was represented. RESPONSIBILITY-FEASIBILITY DILEMMA OF MODERN INNOVATION: The dilemma often PROTEIN: Proteins are macromolecules made faced by public decision makers who must from twenty different types of amino acids. decide whether to approve a technical Proteins constitute the active component of cells innovation either at a point when it is late. Proteins function as enzyme in metabolism, enough for a socially responsible decision to be transporters and receptors in cell membranes, made but too late for it be feasible to reject or hormones, antibodies, and help read, translate, substantially modify the innovation, or at a point and replicate the genetic information. when it is early enough to be feasible to reject or substantially modify the innovation but, since all PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN SCIENCE AND relevant information about possible long-term TECHNOLOGY: Involvement by the public at effects is not yet available, too early for the large or its representatives in advisory or legally decision to be socially responsible. binding decision making intended to affect scientific or technological affairs SOCIO-CULTURAL ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM: The general context in which scientific PURPOSES OR FUNCTIONS and technological developments should be CHARACTERISTIC OF SCIENTIFIC AND situated if thinking about their causes and TECHNOLOGICAL ACTIVITY: To attain an consequences is to be systematic and enhanced understanding of the natural world, comprehensive. including human and social phenomena (science); to expand the realm of practical SCIENCE: A term that can mean any of the human possibility (technology) following: the organized; well-founded body of knowledge of natural phenomena; a field of QUANTUM MECHANICS: The physical theory systematic inquiry in which such knowledge is of the composition and behavior of atoms and sought; a distinctive form of human cultural subatomic particles; explains the duality of light activity whose practitioners include professional as wave and particle, the existence of chemical scientists; and the total societal enterprise bonds, and radioactivity. devoted to the study and understanding of the natural world. RATIONALIZATION: A process whereby practice in a sphere of human activity proceeds SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT: A phrase that decreasingly on the basis of tradition, sentiment, refers to techniques devised for the systematic and rule-of-thumb and increasingly on the basis analysis and specification of work tasks and for of explicit, abstract, and intellectually calculable the evaluation of worker performance, and to knowledge rules, and procedures. policies adopted for the selection, training, motivation, and compensation of workers, all REGULATION OF SCIENCE AND with the goal of increasing productive efficiency. TECHNOLOGY: A social control mechanism Also called “Taylorism,” after the American whereby a government body elaborates and engineer, Fredrick Winslow Taylor, usually enforces the terms and conditions, under which credited with inaugurating this managerial scientific and technological activities may be tradition. Taylor’s “set of ideas” involve carried out, ostensibly in the name of protecting simplifying, rationalizing, standardizing, and coordinating the actions of workers to produce SYSTEM, CONCEPT OF: The idea of a maximum efficiency. complex of elements viewed with respect to possible interactions between or among them SCIENTIFIC METHOD: Steps taken in the and their possible interactions with the system’s research process to assure the validity, environment. reliability, and generalization of the results. These steps include observation, gathering the SYSTEM-EMBEDDEDNESS OF TECHNICS: data, hypothesis testing, and analysis of data. The phenomenon of the dependence of technics on complex sociotechnical support systems for SCIENTISM: An ideology claiming that science their design, production, use, operation and and the scientific method alone can provide true maintenance knowledge and understanding of the world. Scientism rejects any alleged truths that cannot SYSTEM ANALYSIS: The usually quantitative be explained by that method. analysis of systems to determine how they behave or would behave under certain SOCIAL CONTROL OF SCIENCE AND conditions or assumptions. TECHNOLOGY: A society’s influence on Science and Technology through public opinion, TASK ORIENTATION TOWARD WORK: A coercion, social suggestion, religion or any other traditional cultural orientation toward work, in method. This means that a group is better able accordance with which it is dine when and to the to exercise influence on S&T than a single extent required to complete a particular task at individual. This group may be the family, the hand. Work thus conceived is intermittent and church, the state or the trade union, etc. often related to irregular natural and human processes and rhythms. Cf. time orientation SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM: The theory that apparently naturalistic or objective phenomena, TCESC RELATIONSHIP: The relationship e.g., aspects or products of scientific and between a Technical Change and Ensuing technological activity such as scientific facts and Social Change it initiates. See Equilibrium- technological inventions, are actually, in whole Disequilibrium and IDUAR model or in part, the outcome of often complex, extended, and conflictive social processes. TECHNICITY: An aspect of the character of everyday life in a society that refers to the extent SOCIOTECHNICAL SYSTEM: A system of to which technics pervade everyday existence interacting social and technical elements. TECHNIC-RELATED INTELLECTUAL SPECIES: A group of organisms (individuals) CONSTRUCTS: Any mental conception devised that can interbreed and reproduce with each to assist in the design, production, operation, other. Used to distinguish sexually reproducing use, or maintenance of technics and technics organisms into groups. and technical systems STAKEHOLDERS: Refers to Individuals and/or TECHNICAL SPECIALIST: An individual who groups that have an interest on the issues in specializes in a highly technical field. hand. TECHNICS: Material products of human STS: An expression meaning “science, fabrication. technology, and society.” TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM: The STEM CELL: Specialized cells of animals and general theory that society is determined in plants that have the ability to grow and divide by some sense by its technology. In hard mitosis. Cell division results in self-regeneration technological determinism (HTD), society’s as well as differentiation. This means that stem technical base fixes the form or configuration of cells can maintain their characteristic as stem all patterns of social existence. In soft cells (self-regeneration), but also change into a technological determinism (STD), changes in different cell type (differentiation) technology are the single most important source of social change. TECHNOLOGY LITERACY: The ability to use, THEORY: A theory is a generalization about a manage, understand, and assess technology phenomenon, an explanation of how or why something occurs. Indeed, any statement that TECHNOLOGICAL MAXIMALITY: The quality, explain what is measured or described--any often exemplified in technological endeavors, of general statements about cause or effect--are doing or striving to do something technology- theory based, at least implicitly. [Frey, Botan, related to the greatest degree possible, e.g., Friedman, & Kreps (1991)] producing the largest or most powerful technic Theory is a model or framework for observation possible, producing or selling as many units of a and understanding, which shapes both what we given sort of technic as possible, diffusing or see and how we see it. Theory allows the deploying a technic as rapidly and widely as researcher to make links between the abstract possible, diffusing or deploying a technic as and the concrete; the theoretical and the rapidly and widely as possible, or using technic empirical; thought statements and observational as quickly, intensively, or extensively as statements etc. possible. Theory is a generalized statement that asserts a connection between two or more types of TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT: The phenomena – any generalized explanatory idea that technological change, especially principle. automotive technology, causes unemployment. Theory is a system of interconnected abstractions or ideas that condenses and TECHNOLOGICAL TOOL: A device used by organizes knowledge about the world. humans to complete a task. These tools may Theory explains and predicts the relationship include rulers, protractors, computer software, between variables. CAD programs, etc In The Role of Theory in Research, [Compiled by Dr. Christopher Sunday, University of TECHNOLOGY: A term that can mean any of Western Cape] the following: the complex comprising the A scientific theory is an established and knowledge, materials, and methods used in experimentally verified fact or collection of facts making a particular kind of technic (a about the world. Unlike the everyday use of the technology); a distinctive form of human cultural word theory, it is not an unproved idea, or just activity whose practitioners include engineers, some theoretical speculation. The latter meaning machinists, and many craftspeople; and the total of a 'theory' in science is called a hypothesis societal enterprise devoted to the research, development, production, operation, and TIME ORIENTATION TOWARD WORK: A maintenance of technics and sociotechnical modern cultural view of work as fungible labor systems carried out for the duration of the set workday- viewed as compromising regular, equal, abstract TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT: Systematic units of time- whether or not the assigned task is estimation of the possible and likely social, completed. Cf. task orientation. economic, health, and environmental consequences of the introduction of new VIRUS: Smallest of all organisms and often not technologies or the implementation of new considered alive because they strictly depend on technology policies a cellular host organism (bacteria, plant, animal) to reproduce. Viruses have no metabolism of TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: The conveyance their own and depend on passive carriers to of technics and technical systems and the transport them around. Viruses are infectious transmission of various kinds of technology- particle. related knowledge from one organization society to another WHISTLE BLOWING: Public charges, often by a scientist or an engineer, of hitherto hidden THEMATA: Nonscientific, culturally generated misconduct in the accuser’s organization that he and transmitted supposition about nature that or she contends has harmed, jeopardized, or can inform or otherwise influence a scientist’s unjustifiably risked damaging public interest. theoretical or empirical work. Sources: GLOSSARY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES [Frank W. Elwell] SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY [Robert E. Mcginn] WHAT IS LIFE [in http://www.whatislife.com/ glossary.htm]