SOCIOLOGY OF EXPECTATION AND THE E-SOCIAL SCIENCE AGENDA.

This paper explores the relevance of sociology of expectation in conceptualizing some of the tensions emerging in the UK context from the attempts to engage communities of social scientists, anthropologists and colleagues in cognate disciplines with e-social science. As the uptake of e-science proceeds fast in many scientific domains - from genetics to physics, from biology to clinical medicine - many social scientists and scholars in cognate disciplines remain apparently unaware or unimpressed by the promises of linking up large-scale data sets of fieldwork, and having access to the new tools and technologies that are being developed to cope with this scaling up of data set size. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has theorized technological innovations, and highlighted how they come packaged with expectations of their applications, their benefits and sometimes their risks. Future scenarios are projected in which a technology is integrated with society at large and with representations of everyday life. In line with an STS approach, instead of debating the likelihood of possible scenarios, this paper calls for uncovering the values and preferences that are implicitly inbuilt in the visions of the proponents of e-social science. It is only once these are rendered explicit that one can begin to explore the extent to which these values are shared across sections of the research community, or the extent to which they may be specific of certain stakeholders only. The process, it is argued, ultimately allows for a more transparent debate, and a negotiation of which values end up being up-taken in research policy and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]