The rhetoric of consensus politics: a critical review of technology assessment

Abstract

Technology Assessment is a policy scientific lstoolrs which has recently enjoyed a great deal of increasingly enthusiastic attention, yet there is no clear idea of what it is. In this article, the author examines the literature on TA, and attempts to develop an analysis of its real political significance, as opposed to those overly optimistic prognostications that have seen it as the new panacea. In his view, TA is constrained in its scope and depth by implicit assumptions and commitments of a political character. These premises are obscured by the further founding canon of TA, namely that knowledge begets social consensus, and that where there exists no social consensus as to the evaluative framework by which society will assess its technology, then it can be objectively created by gathering and disseminating more social data. The author argues instead that this data collection (social indicators) is selectively constrained and structured by the prior commitment to consensus around a particular idea of the goals, purpose and meaning of social life. TA is in fact an integral part of a much more broad-ranging attempt to secure social consensus around a corporate-industrial consumer society, in which the latter institutions control a much wider range of social activity that even hitherto. Much of the lstheoryrs of TA can be seen as a rhetoric by which this paradigm is lstried outrs on the public; by ldtelling them how things arerd, this rhetoric at the same time tacitly asks them to adopt a view of social reality which corresponds with the premises framing the corporate industrialists' world view.