Knowledge: Articulation and Consequence in Global Transformations

The trouble with the contemporary condition of our modern civilization is that it stopped questioning itself. Not asking certain questions is pregnant with more dangers than failing to answer questions already on the agenda; while asking the wrong kind of questions all too often helps to avert eyes from the truly important issues. The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering. Asking the right question marks, after all, the difference between fate and destination, drifting and traveling. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of the services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves. —Zygmunt Bauman, "Globalization: The Human Consequences"

Knowledge transforms social life, institutions on all scales, and the character of the world. But that axiom's limitations, and potentials, are much too poorly understood, especially for how much we believe it to be true.

Knowledge and Change

Not all accounts of transformations attribute terrific significance to knowledge. Environmental shifts, demographic pressures, changes in the mode of production, and alterations in state capacities to wage war or collect resources are among the greater explanations of social transformation. But even in these instances, knowledge plays a typically critical role.

That critical role is most obvious in the commentary beginning this chapter. Zygmunt Bauman offers the characteristic nightmare problem of which not only intellectuals should be afraid. We can dedicate our lives, our institutions, and our worlds to refining our answers to the questions posed by our particular domains of expertise and particular interests or ideologies. But what if those questions, those domains, those interests and ideologies, are misplaced in their emphasis, direction, or concern? What if we are asking the wrong questions? That's ultimately the most foundational knowledge question, but it cannot be the most consensual. After all, we are far more likely to agree on the importance of a question, or knowledge, when we can see its significance in an already constituted body of knowledge. That, ipso facto, makes any disciplined critical question rarely so heretical as Bauman's urgent service. We more typically, especially in this era, focus on technology.

When viewed on the grandest scale, as Gerhard Lenski has offered, this "information about how to use the material resources of the environment to satisfy human needs" (Lenski, Nolan, and Lenski 1995, 42) is the most transformative knowledge of social relations (Kennedy 2004a). From the development of horticulture and then the plow to the revolution in the means by which we communicate with each other electronically, innovations in technology are central to change. And with those transformations, technology becomes central to our ideologies of change.

Those who wish to minimize the energy crisis argue that new modes for extracting fossil fuels will enable us to continue relying on a carbon energy base. Some of those who put their hopes on new greener technologies for saving our planet from global warming put similar stock in the relationship between knowledge and global transformations. And in energy's example, the significance of technology's embeddedness in culture and social relations becomes apparent.

That embeddedness is long recognized. Karl Marx (Marx and Engels [1848] 2012) never argued that the enormous dynamism of capitalist innovation was the single motor of change. It mattered also because it was driven by conflicts within and across classes. Max Weber ([1905] 1930) proposed that what counted was not just matters of accounting; rather, a certain kind of knowledge about God initially moved capitalists to accumulate wealth vigorously. Much more recently, Manuel Castells (2009), Saskia Sassen (2008), and others take the microelectronics revolution seriously, but they explain global transformations by considering the technology's interactions with other social forces. Energy technology optimists don't assume that new and appropriate technologies will emerge by themselves. People who consider the question will argue that one might develop such economically and environmentally consequential technologies only under pressures of market demand or state intervention.

In this sense, the "knowledge" critical here is not just of the technology in question but the accompanying forms of knowledge embedded in the world and about the world that make any technology matter. Are these understandings of the world also knowledge?

Technological innovation typically claims the knowledge mantle with ease given that it reflects an unprecedented combination of information or its application to novel circumstances. But characterizations of markets and demands about adoption of green technology are often debated as if they are ideological rather than knowledgeable interventions into change. The climate warming debate illustrates this problem.

Although most scientists expert in the field debate within parameters assuming unprecedented human contributions to global warming, a few scientists challenge those frameworks. Their interventions in turn lead some beyond the scientific community to charge ideological bias to the scientific majority's discussion. That in turn moves similar charges against these accusers. This debate between minority and majority turns less on scientific terms and more on the ways in which science is shaped by social forces beyond the laboratory, on how knowledge is embedded in, or apart from, the world (Hoffman 2011; Keller 2009).

Categorical thinking about science—is it apart from or embedded in the world?—is all too common and naïve whatever its conclusion. Sociologists are more inclined to ask about degrees of autonomy for science, or forms of influence of the world on science making. But this is not just a sociological question, as the climate science debate illustrates. It is a profoundly important public issue and a place where sophisticated thinking helps. One might ask about the conditions of science's autonomy, building on Robert Merton's (1973) famous account of the ethos of science. One might also consider the ways in which specific scientific problems are tracked through networks and actors both human and nonhuman, as Bruno Latour (2005) and his colleagues would have it. Pithily put, one might argue that one must develop a social science to use science well in public policy (Prewitt, Schwandt, and Straf 2012). These approaches, and this general question about science in the...