Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/Glos

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Goodbye Azodye UCL iGEM 2014

Anticipatory socialisation: Adopting norms, values, standards and behaviour of a group, which non-members of the group aspire to join. Through social interactions and experience, these individuals learn to take on the role they have yet to assume in order to facilitate their assimilation and eventual participation in the group (Marshall 1998).
Black-boxing: Ignoring or not paying attention to the internal workings of a scientific or technological achievement, or as Bruno Latour describes it, "the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become" (Latour 1999).

Commodification: Making a commodity out of goods, services, ideas or other entities that are usually not considered as salable things. This concept from Marxist political theory describes a process where market values are attributed to something that did not have such economic or commercial value before, and therefore sometimes replace certain social values.

Discourse: "A specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorisations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities" (Hajer 2000: 44)

Dual-use technology: Technologies which can be used for more than one goal, usually having both civilian or peaceful purpose and military aims. They imply a dilemma "because it is difficult to prevent their misuse without forgoing beneficial applications. [...] [M]any of the emerging technologies with the potential to do the most good are also capable of the greatest harm" (Tucker 2012 :1).

Ecological modernisation: Optimistic theory "that aims to harness the power of human ingenuity for the purposes of harmonising economic advancement with environmental improvement" (Cohen 1997:108; Huber 1985; Jänicke 1985; Simonis 1988).

External accountability: (for synthetic biology) Accountability to the people outside the community of practising synthetic biologists, whose lives are affected by the implications of the technology. As a social actor, this community provides external accountability by acknowledging that there are concerns from others with regard to their actions within their scientific discipline. Internal accountability, on the other hand, refers to already existing chains of command within an institution (Zhang et al. 2011).

Governance: Refers, in its broadest sense, to the various ways and processes in which social life is coordinated. Therefore, alongside markets, networks and hierarchies, conventional governments are one of the modes in which institutions can be involved in governance, meaning that many heterogeneous actors are involved. Hence, the distinction between state and society has blurred so that new ways of governing are introduced, whether is be beyond the territoriality of the nation-state, or networks between government and other entities, or even by making adaptations to the way governments themselves work. The term governance, however, usually denotes how politics became less about governmental mechanisms of 'command and control', and more about procedures of 'consultation and deliberation', which sometimes favours an increasing presence of market mechanisms (Heywood 2002: 6).

Ignorance: Knowing that the knowledge is limited in a certain area. It increases with every state of new knowledge.

Late modernity: The continuation of modernity as it is today, which is characterised by the way we have strongly developed into a global society. This is in contrast with the idea that we instead live in postmodern times and therefore have left modernity. Authors of the risk society theory and reflexive modernisation rather believe that modernity still aptly describes the times we currently live in, despite various technological and social changes that have emerged in late modernity.

Non-knowing: A type of ignorance with "knowledge about what is not known but taking it into account for future planning" (Gross 2010: 68).

Reflexive modernisation: Process of modernisation that manifest itself in the risk society whereby reform and adaptations of already existing institutions (i.e. politics, science, economy) are essential to accomplish progress. The role of science and technology here is instrumental in re-evaluating such institutions like science itself, as technology is also considered to be the cause of the new hazards in this risk society. Science and technology are thus used in a reflexive manner to manage the risks of technologies developed in the process of modernisation. The adaptations and reforms are hence found in the way science, politics and business operate, thereby generating strategic concepts such as sustainability and precaution with which they can set out a new trajectory. On a political level, this reflexivity has expressed itself through subpolitical forms of non-governmental organisation and new social and environmental movements.

Risk: A situation of uncertainty in which some of the possible outcomes involves an undesirable outcome. In this case, the way a system operates and behaves is well-known so that one can anticipate the outcome and quantify the distribution of risk probabilities. As a result, assessing risk can be calculated objectively and rationally under conditions of controlled uncertainty (Gross 2010: 61).

Risk society: A society increasingly preoccupied with the distribution of (technological) risks, and "dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself" (Beck 1992:21). These risks differ from other times because "(1) they are undetectable by direct human sensory perception; (2) they are capable of transcending generations; (3) they exceed the capacity of current mechanisms for compensating victims" (Cohen 1997: 107) a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.

Subpolitics: Expression of political modernisation where new stakeholders emerge and take on roles of leadership to drive institutional reform. This is especially the case in environmental governance where environmental movements, non-governmental organisations, businesses, and other stakeholders are increasingly present in political decision-making of environmental policy.

Uncertainty: "A situation in which, given current knowledge, there are multiple possible future outcomes" (Gross 2010: 3).