The methodology and its critics

Technology assessment started by examining the technical characteristics of a given technology, such as the automobile or nuclear power, and then attempting to explore all the possible social, economic, environmental, health, and ecological effects of its application. This simple definition runs into difficulties, however, since it implies a notion of technological determinism, a unidirectional causality from technology to society. The social impact of a technology - indeed its environmental impact as well - depends on the social supporting systems and ancillary or supporting technologies that accompany its large-scale deployment. These ancillary systems may well be different in different societies and political systems, as in the case of television broadcasting. There is therefore the question of whether the term "technology" in TA refers just to a single artefact or whether it refers to the whole system of ancillary technologies and social supporting systems actually used in connection with the widespread deployment of the dominant artefact.

A great deal of effort and debate have gone into the methodology of TA. The field has been criticized as "non-paradigmatic" and, by inference, therefore not cumulative [22, p. 7]. In a survey of actual TA projects in the United States, Rossini et al. [18] found that TA practitioners seldom used any of the quantitative techniques that had been widely advocated in the theoretical literature. Wad and Radnor point out that in fact specialists "have a disdain for [quantitative techniques], preferring to rely on their own judgments and intuition in the selection of approaches and in the design of the TA" [22, p. 38]. This has implications for the use of TA in developing countries. As observed by Wad, "if the techniques of TA receive scant attention from practitioners within the very society from which TA evolved as a body of knowledge, it is very questionable whether they would have much relevance in other, quite different societies" [22, p. 39]. This criticism of pure technique could be an advantage if it makes TA more accessible to societies in which sophisticated knowledge is in short supply. On the other hand, a well-defined paradigm would offer a common language, making it easier to transfer TA across cultures than is the case with intuitive practices.

Another criticism is that the evaluation of technology in a society, and indeed all so-called "objective knowledge," is primarily a reflection of the power interests of various social groups and the resulting "imperatives for the reproduction and legitimation of existing social structures and [power] relationships" [7, 25, 26, p. 108]. Thus seemingly technical debates about the choice or regulation of technology are nothing but political power struggles in which science is just another instrument. There is some element of truth in this view in that political and cultural biases, often heavily weighted with perceived self-interest, can never be completely expunged from discussion of "science for policy." However, Laudan [10] argues that the role played by such social and political factors varies inversely with the uncertainty and immaturity of a scientific field. As evidence accumulates and a field matures, rationality becomes more and more of a constraint on social construction The assessment depends on both the scientific uncertainty and the political stakes and power of the various players. The critics thus maintain that science is largely if not wholly irrelevant to actual policy outcomes. They may be correct in the implication that policy assessment and implementation, no matter how technical in nature, must be sensitive to the distributional implications of the conclusions reached, and that analysts must try to anticipate the effect of this on the implementability of their recommendations. However? this must not be taken to mean that either science or policy analyses are valueless.