How to Make the Mode 2 Thesis Sociologically More Robust?

Abstract

Over the last years, the intense and vivid debates which had developed around the so called mode 2 thesis after the publication of “The New Production of Knowledge” (Gibbons et al. 1994) and “Re-Thinking Science” (Nowotny et al. 2001) seem to have significantly abated. Nevertheless, the controversial issues that were raised in those disputes are, of course, far from settled or out-dated. Quite to the contrary, the questions concerning the changing relations of science and society and the potential emergence of new forms of knowledge production and expertise, termed “socially robust knowledge” and “socially distributed expertise” by Nowotny et al. (2001), still are highly relevant for STS. Given this background, the publication of Monika Kurath’s (2009) and Janus Hansen’s (2009) papers in the last issue of STI-Studies offers a good chance to reconsider these issues from some temporal distance. In my comment, I will make some remarks on how the mode 2 thesis is addressed and criticised in each of the two papers and then, in my short conclusion, argue for a primarily heuristic use of this thesis and the concepts mentioned above.