Too Enabling to Fail: Tracing Sub-politics Across Tensions Between Nanosafety and Innovation
Doctoral thesis, 2025
Previous research has emphasized a need for new governance of science and technology because of the perceived failures of risk regulation in the context of emerging technologies in technoscientific capitalism. This need has coincided with nanotechnology, positioned to enable a future safer and more sustainable economy. New governance combines regulation with soft regulatory innovations that lack legal force, such as codes of conduct, standardization bodies, and public engagements. These arrangements render previously ‘non-political’ institutions, especially science and industry, as political.
This thesis pursues how these arrangements can be understood through sub-politics, a framework introduced by Ulrich Beck. Nanotechnology in Europe is the empirical setting for the governance horizon of pursuing nanosafety towards innovation, generally conceived as responsible development and increasingly as safe innovation. This thesis argues that pursuing this horizon must involve mediating its political tensions, rather than filling a governance gap with toolkits.
These tensions are elaborated through three empirical studies that deploy stakeholder analysis, argument mapping and expert interviews. Five appended papers are presented using Beck’s framework of sub-polities, sub-policies, and sub-politics. They highlight various sub-politics in European nanotechnology governance that reflexively coalesce values of safety and responsibility with progress and innovation.
Tracing these sub-politics offer three signal contributions. First is to propose a hybrid organization of the promissory advocate, an amalgam of intermediary, advocacy and promissory organizations. Second is the paradox of a multiplication of uncertainty amongst proliferating tools of soft regulation. Third is the tendency to promissory legitimation crisis, when confronted by promissory credibility and reflexive scientization. Together, it is argued that the political-economic commitment of nanosafety through innovation renders nanotechnology Too Enabling to Fail.
This thesis pursues how these arrangements can be understood through sub-politics, a framework introduced by Ulrich Beck. Nanotechnology in Europe is the empirical setting for the governance horizon of pursuing nanosafety towards innovation, generally conceived as responsible development and increasingly as safe innovation. This thesis argues that pursuing this horizon must involve mediating its political tensions, rather than filling a governance gap with toolkits.
These tensions are elaborated through three empirical studies that deploy stakeholder analysis, argument mapping and expert interviews. Five appended papers are presented using Beck’s framework of sub-polities, sub-policies, and sub-politics. They highlight various sub-politics in European nanotechnology governance that reflexively coalesce values of safety and responsibility with progress and innovation.
Tracing these sub-politics offer three signal contributions. First is to propose a hybrid organization of the promissory advocate, an amalgam of intermediary, advocacy and promissory organizations. Second is the paradox of a multiplication of uncertainty amongst proliferating tools of soft regulation. Third is the tendency to promissory legitimation crisis, when confronted by promissory credibility and reflexive scientization. Together, it is argued that the political-economic commitment of nanosafety through innovation renders nanotechnology Too Enabling to Fail.
economic sociology
soft regulation
sub-politics
reflexivity
nanosafety
risk governance
nanotechnology
political economy of research and innovation
technoscientific capitalism
risk sociology
Author
Nicholas Surber
Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Science, Technology and Society
Legitimation crisis in contemporary technoscientific capitalism
Journal of Cultural Economy,;Vol. 15(2022)p. 373-379
Review article
Looking beyond the ‘horizon’ of RRI: moving from discomforts to commitments as early career researchers
Journal of Responsible Innovation,;Vol. 9(2022)p. 124-132
Other text in scientific journal
Surber, Nicholas. “Who’s Who and Where: Responsible and Economic Development in the Evolving European Nano-race.”
Palmås, Karl, and Nicholas Surber. “Regulatory fictions as coordination devices: How professionals anticipate future bans on chemicals.”
The development of science and technology is becoming key to economic growth and sustainability. As science and technology depends on public investment and legitimacy, this development is increasingly political. This has been the case, previously, for nuclear power and GMOs. Which technology might be next?
This thesis relates these political challenges to the case of nanotechnology, which is a novel technology that operates at the small scale of 1-100 nanometers. It is argued that effectively governing nanotechnology demands an awareness of politics, instead of relying solely on technical toolkits. This is understood as a contrasting tension between nanosafety research (a field aiming to address hazards and risks of nanotechnology) and innovation which must be negotiated.
Politics is analyzed through the theoretical perspective of Ulrich Beck, in the notion of “sub-politics” occurring outside of the political system. This is often referred to through broad-based approaches of governance and responsibility that include civil society, business, and industry. Instead of thinking about institutions as “too big to fail”, the emerging co-dependence between science, technology, and the economy suggests that some technologies are Too Enabling to Fail.
Nicholas Surber is an economic sociologist, specializing in risk, innovation and sustainability, at the division of Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is his dissertation as part of his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidacy.
This thesis relates these political challenges to the case of nanotechnology, which is a novel technology that operates at the small scale of 1-100 nanometers. It is argued that effectively governing nanotechnology demands an awareness of politics, instead of relying solely on technical toolkits. This is understood as a contrasting tension between nanosafety research (a field aiming to address hazards and risks of nanotechnology) and innovation which must be negotiated.
Politics is analyzed through the theoretical perspective of Ulrich Beck, in the notion of “sub-politics” occurring outside of the political system. This is often referred to through broad-based approaches of governance and responsibility that include civil society, business, and industry. Instead of thinking about institutions as “too big to fail”, the emerging co-dependence between science, technology, and the economy suggests that some technologies are Too Enabling to Fail.
Nicholas Surber is an economic sociologist, specializing in risk, innovation and sustainability, at the division of Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is his dissertation as part of his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidacy.
Mistra Environmental Nanosafety Phase II
The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra) (2013/48), 2019-04-01 -- 2023-03-31.
Driving Forces
Sustainable development
Innovation and entrepreneurship
Areas of Advance
Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Science and Technology Studies
Political Science (Excluding Peace and Conflict Studies)
Other Nanotechnology
Sociology
DOI
10.17196/9789181032277
ISBN
978-91-8103-227-7
Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 5685
Publisher
Chalmers
Vasa 7, Vera Sandbergs Allé 8, Chalmers.
Opponent: Associate Professor Clare Shelley-Egan, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands