Paper short abstract:

Presenting a study across five nanosafety laboratories on how responsibility was integrated into research practices, this paper describes a significant tension between ideas of responsible research and understandings of good science, with several cultural and institutional barriers to enactment.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of 'responsible innovation' or 'responsible research and innovation' (RRI) is rapidly gaining currency in both European policy discourse and STS scholarship on the governance of new and emerging technologies. This rising emphasis on having technoscientific innovation develop ' responsibly' is arguably the latest manifestation of a longer historical trend to reimagine and enact the relationship between science and society towards more ethically sound, socially robust, and broadly participatory forms. An emphasis on the need for 'responsible' development has been particularly prominent in nanoscale sciences and technologies. In this paper we present results of a study that combined laboratory ethnographies with research group dialogue sessions

across five different Scandinavian nanosafety laboratories to investigate how responsibility both could be and was being integrated into research practices. One of the key findings of the work is that although researchers could recognise the value and importance of RRI as currently being defined by STS scholars and policy-makers, they saw several elements of it as being in tension with what they identified as the characteristics of good science. Discussions on this tension highlighted a range of significant conceptual, cultural and institutional barriers to the integration of RRI into the daily practice of nanosafety scientists. Having described these findings, the paper will conclude by arguing that much of the current focus within RRI on the role of individual scientists needs to be supplemented by enhanced attention to the cultural and institutional changes required if RRI is to be successfully enacted in practice.