SOCIAL CONTRACT FOR SCIENCE

The social contract for science is an evocative ideological construct used to describe the relationship between the political and scientific communities. Participants in science policy debates often invoke the social contract for science uncritically and flexibly, ritually referring to Vannevar Bush as its author and Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) as its text. The term, however, has no explicit connection to Bush, but explaining its history and usage is enlightening.

Historical Origins and Decline

There are two helpful hypotheses for origin of the phrase. One focuses on what Don K. Price called the "master contract" that formed the "basic charter" of the postwar relationship between the U.S. government and the scientific community (Price 1954, p. 70). This relationship "gives support to scientific institutions that yet retain their basic independence" (Price 1954, p. 67–68). A second hypothesis holds that the social contract for science is related to a social contract for scientists, which describes how the profession of science is bound as a community to uphold behavioral norms and to "rely on the trustworthiness" of each other (Zuckerman 1977, p. 113).

Harvey Brooks polished the promise of the social contract for science as "widely diffused benefits to society and the economy in return for according an unusual degree of intellectual autonomy and internal self-governance to the recipients of federal support" (Brooks 1990, p. 12). Brooks's definition takes into account both hypotheses of origination by relying on the overall structure of Price's formulation and on the rationale of Zuckerman's formulation as why the unusual degree of autonomy and self-governance could be offered to science. That is, science could be granted autonomy because its members maintain their integrity by upholding group norms (Merton 1973).

In addition to evoking the contractual nature of the relationship between the public patron and the scientific community and the tacit trustworthiness of scientists to one another, the social contract for science has additional descriptive power. As with more formal social contracts from political philosophy, it offers an account of the provision of a public good, and it suggests the conditions of an original consensus against which change can be measured and evaluated (Guston 2000). Some scholars and policy makers, relying on a tacit understanding of the social contract for science, argue variously that science has been faithful to it but politics not particularly so (Press 1988); that the contract died in the late 1960s with a decline in research funding, only to be resuscitated in the 1980s (Smith 1994); and that the contract crumbled in the 1990s through various policy changes (Stokes 1997).

Using the Social Contract in Policy and Ethics

Guston (2000), however, argues that to serve as a baseline for historical change, the social contract for science must have its tenets elaborated in clear historical detail and have criteria for change derived from there. Thus although there is a consensus that any such agreement dates to the immediate post-World War II period, Science, The Endless Frontier is not the sole articulation of postwar science, and John Steelman's report, Science and Public Policy (Steelman 1947) must also be taken into account. Although these two analyses differed on how they imagined the organization and funding of postwar science, they both held—along with much theoretical writing of the period—that the political community would provide resources to the scientific community and allow the scientific community to retain its decision-making mechanisms and in return expects forthcoming but unspecified technological benefits. Such a contract was premised on the automatic provision of scientific integrity and productivity, which thus becomes the central criterion against which to measure change.

There were many potential challenges to the social contract for science, thus specified, over the postwar period in the United States, including inquiries into the loyalty of scientists in the 1950s, the changes in financial arrangements and funding in the 1960s, and greater emphasis on applied research and questions about the limits of scientific inquiry in the 1980s. But no challenges altered the presumption of the automatic provision of scientific integrity and productivity until the conflicts over scientific (or research) misconduct and over technology transfer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Political perceptions in this period held that scientists might have broken the contract through the failure to control misconduct and to produce sufficient economic benefits. But scientific perceptions held that politicians might have broken the contract through meddling. Neither perspective is completely right (or wrong), but it was through their instigation of organizational innovation—the creation of the Office of Research Integrity and of offices of technology transfer—that these issues marked the end of the social contract for science and its assumption of the automatic provision of scientific integrity and productivity. The political and scientific communities collaborated over the creation of these institutions, and they ushered in a new era in which the political and scientific communities engage in a collaborative assurance of integrity and productivity instead. Scholars have traced similar transitions in science policies in European nations as well.

DAVID H. GUSTON

SEE ALSO Research Integrity;Science Policy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Harvey. (1990). "Lessons of History: Successive Challenges to Science Policy." In The Research System in Transition, eds. Susan E. Cozeens; Peter Healey; Arie Rip; and John Ziman. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Guston, David H. (2000). Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Merton, Robert K. (1973 [1942]). "The Normative Structure of Science." In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman W. Storer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Press, Frank (1988). "The Dilemma of the Golden Age." In The Presidency and Science Advising, Vol. 6, ed. Kenneth W. Thompson. New York: University Press of America.

Price, Don K. (1954). Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy. New York: New York University Press.

Smith, Bruce L. R. (1994). "The United States: The Formation and Breakdown of the Postwar Government-Science Compact." In Scientists and the State: Domestic Structures and the International Context, ed. Etel Solingen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Steelman, John R. (1947). Science and Public Policy. 5 Vols. The President's Scientific Research Board. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Stokes, Donald E. (1997). Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Zuckerman, Harriet. (1977). "Deviant Behavior and Social Control in Science." In Deviance and Social Change, ed. Edward Sagarin. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.