| Each year, governments must determine how to allocate resources for science and technology: which problems to pursue, which programs to fund, and what a nation's science portfolio will be. Budget processes require decision makers to weigh competing interests and values, to prioritize one community's problems over another's, and to determine which areas of science will best benefit society. These are value judgments. They are not obvious and they have no formula.;A vast and ever-increasing body of scholarship has grown up around the study of such judgments and decisions. Decision makers and scholars alike extol its value. Referred to here as Science, Technology, and Decision Making (STDM), this scholarship comes from a variety disciplines and approaches, and is bound together by a similar goal1: to evaluate, inform, and engage decisions about science and technology so that the knowledge production enterprise may better meet society's needs.;To accomplish this goal, many STDM scholars promote a new approach to science---one that is engaged with society rather than autonomous from it. This dissertation evaluates the extent to which STDM scholarship succeeds to this end---the extent to which it influences decisions about science. It asks: How well integrated is STDM scholarship within the research priority decisions of major science programs in the US and the UK?;Through interviews, budget analyses, and assessments of program solicitations and government and scholarly documents, this dissertation evaluates the extent to which government research priorities, as well as research prioritization processes, integrate STDM scholarship. It does so in the context of nanotechnology and climate research priorities in the US and the UK.;The evaluation reveals that due to significant structural and cultural barriers within the scientific enterprise (e.g. unassigned responsibility for STDM integration, under-developed networks for integration, and mental models, assumptions, and reward structures that encourage the separation of STDM), STDM scholars cannot currently achieve the goals assigned to them in either nanotechnology or climate research, and in either the US or the UK. The evaluation does, however, reveal opportunities by which both scholars and decision makers might erode these barriers (e.g. sustained STDM-natural science relationships, explicit efforts of STDM scholars to promote cultural change, and decision maker leadership in support of integration), and thus turn science studies into science action.;1STDM scholarship includes science policy research, science and technology studies (STS) research, as well as any number of research from other fields. However, it only includes that scholarship from these fields that seeks---either formally or informally---to inform decisions. It therefore does not include basic social science research. |
