2001 AAAS Workshop on Science
and Technology Policy Careers

Keynote Address
Susan E. Cozzens
Chair and Professor
School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology

Let me extend my special thanks to those who made this gathering possible: first, the AAAS Office of Science and Policy Programs, under Al Teich, who have supported this field over the years, not just through gatherings like this but also through its directory of graduate programs in science, technology, and public policy; second, the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy of AAAS, for taking up this project; and third, Scott Hauger, who played a key role in the conception of this event and will play a key role, we hope, in following through on it.

Science and Technology Policy Professionals:
Jobs, Work, Knowledge, and Values

I am vastly encouraged to see this gathering. Those of us in an older generation of science and technology policy professionals know that we came into this interesting, stimulating intellectual space through many quirky routes, and we know that some of those routes are closed. So sometimes we wonder where the next generation will come from. Your presence here today testifies to the fact that while old routes may be closed new routes are opening. We are very happy to see this.

I would like to set the stage for you today by discussing three topics. First is what you can expect from a career as a science and technology policy professional, based on what those of us in the older generation of such professionals have experienced. I will say a bit about what kinds of jobs you can expect to get, as well as what kinds of work you can expect to do in those jobs. Second, I will talk about what you need to know to be a science and technology policy professional, stressing the complementarity between policy research and policy practice. Third, I will talk about why to take up this career -- what values we embody as science and technology policy professionals.

Careers in S&T Policy

As preface, let me draw a distinction between two types of careers in science and technology policy. One begins by getting to the forefront of research in a field of science or engineering, or more rarely the social sciences. After achieving research notability, those following this path become leaders in their universities, or perhaps professional societies, then start "committee careers," sitting on peer review panels, advisory boards, committees of the National Academy of Sciences. Eventually they may move into positions on the National Science Board or the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

We as science and technology policy professionals will be working closely with the folks in this other career path over the years, and we have much in common; and yet there are important differences. I don't know exactly what to call people in this other career path, but since today we are discussing the careers of S&T policy professionals, for today's purposes only, I will refer to them as "the amateurs." I do not mean this term to be derogatory. These are people of great experience, great wisdom, and often, great vision. But their day jobs are elsewhere. They move into the world of science policy quite regularly, but they do not live here.

In contrast to the amateurs, S&T policy professionals are steeped in the knowledge base of the field; trained in the techniques of analysis; and carry a special public responsibility, one that is different from the public responsibility of the amateurs. Very seldom are the roles of amateurs and professionals in S&T policy combined. Only a few examples come to mind. One is Shirley Malcom, who both serves as Director of the Education and Human Resources Office of AAAS and has been a member of both the National Science Board and PCAST. Another is Linda Wilson, currently President of Radcliffe College, a chemist by training who took a year during her committee career to study at the Science Policy Research Unit in Sussex, England, to spend time with the knowledge base underlying S&T policy.

When I began to put this talk together, I thought I would be able to divide S&T policy professionals into those that spent their career in academe and those that spent them in government. As I thought through example after example, however, I realized that this neat line could not be drawn. Let me give you some illustrations of people in the field and how they have moved through their careers, to give you the flavor of the exciting work you have chosen for yourself.

• Norine Noonan. Ph.D. in cell biology from Princeton. AAAS Congressional Fellow. Budget examiner and later branch chief at the Office of Management and Budget. Vice president for research and graduate studies at a technological university. Then back to government as head of the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency. She is currently in private consulting, looking to get back to the university.
  
• Albert H. Teich. B.S. in physics, Ph.D. in political science. Held three university positions before coming to AAAS, at Syracuse, SUNY, and George Washington Universities. He has been head of the science policy staff at AAAS for more than two decades.
• Willie Pearson. Ph.D. in sociology, with a dissertation on the shape of scientific careers. Professor at Wake Forest University, and OTA fellow in the late 1980s. Currently Chair of COSEPP and working on a book on the careers of the pioneer generation of African-American chemists and chemical engineers. We are delighted that he is joining us at Georgia Tech as Chair of the School of History, Technology, and Society.
• Irwin Feller. The exception that proves the rule. Ph.D. in economics, and has spent his entire career in the university, and in fact at one university, Penn State, where he is currently Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation. Throughout his career, Irwin has been a policy analyst, working on one study after another of the effects of federal and state programs on innovation.
• Vivian Weil. Ph.D. in philosophy. Head of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Also primarily an academic, but Vivian came to Washington for two years as a program director at the National Science Foundation. She has worked extensively with engineering professional societies on ethics issues.
• Daryl Chubin. Ph.D. in sociology. Reached full professor status at Georgia Tech before moving to the Office of Technology Assessment in the mid-1980s. Since leaving OTA, Daryl has held two senior positions at the National Science Foundation, spent time at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and is now vice president at NACME, the National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering.
• Gail Pesyna. Ph.D. in chemistry. Congressional staffer and OMB budget examiner, before going to DuPont as a senior manager. She returned to government in the 1990s as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Energy with responsibility for DOE waste management. Like Chubin, she is now in the non-profit world, as program officer for a program of industry studies at the Sloan Foundation.

These real, live people illustrate the kinds of careers you have started into. First, they show the range of disciplinary backgrounds that folks bring into this field, from the sciences and engineering through the social sciences and right into the humanities. Second, they show the movement among positions, in different sectors, including an in-and-out-of-government pattern that places them in many different kinds of jobs across government. Third, they illustrate the wide range of jobs outside government that this field opens up to you, in private industry, non-profit organizations, and universities.

The work of S&T policy professionals

What do these people actually do in their work? The mix of tasks varies from job to job, but in general involves some combination of administration and management, analysis, and research.

In their administrative and management roles, S&T policy professionals participate in the decision processes of research-related organizations of various kinds. Their lives may be endless meetings, but they are nonetheless using their knowledge, skills, and concepts to shape the world. For example, when I was at NSF in the 1990s, I was part of the senior leadership team, participating in strategic planning and program development. This work was combined with leading the main jobs of my office, namely, designing a planning and assessment system for the foundation and exploring options in the peer review process. The budget examiners' jobs are another interesting example -- quiet, behind the scenes, yet highly influential through the quality of information gathering and advice to budget decisionmakers.

The second job, analysis, is a bit harder to define. The policy sciences have been trying to do so for decades. My view of analysis is shaped very much by my experience as a practitioner of the art, as a junior policy analyst at NSF in the early 1980s. A policy analyst brings systematic information to bear on policy decisions. Because the analyst is generally asked to do this on a short turnaround basis, she works largely with existing data and existing research. This means that he needs to know his data bases really well, and also know the literature in the area of his analysis. The analyst organizes existing information in a way that responds to policy questions. A key skill is being able to take the fuzzy, ill-formulated question that is in the mind or on the lips of an amateur or a decision maker and translate that into a problem that can be addressed with data. The outputs of the analysis process are sometimes written, and when they are written, they need to be short, readable, to the point, and practical. More and more frequently, those outputs take the form of oral and visual presentations, so the skills of speaking simply and presenting data visually are becoming more important in this part of the S&T policy professional's work. Analysis is rooted in the work of S&T agencies themselves, but extra-government, non-profit units also get drawn into the work, often through medium-term projects. For example, RAND's S&T Policy Institute and SRI's S&T Policy Program do lots of work directly for the policy analysts inside government.

The fact that the analyst's job is short-term does not mean that it is without a conceptual basis. I think it is very important for us to understand that whether we think about this conceptual basis or not, we are using one. If we do not think about our concepts, then we are probably using the received wisdom as our conceptual framework –that is, frequently, the amateur's view of the world. It is a practical necessity of our work that we not get too far away, conceptually, from the conceptual framework of those we work for. If we do, they will not follow. This also means, however, that if you want to change that conceptual framework, you need to work for a visionary who shares your goal. The relationship between Dan Sarewitz and the late Congressman George Brown exemplifies this possibility well. Dan wrote speeches for George, but we can imagine that they also had many mutually stimulating conversations about the way science policy was done. George undoubtedly learned from Dan, and Dan got the chance to articulate some ideas for delivery by a powerful spokesperson. Our S&T policy world was moved by the combination of their talents.

An obvious source for a view of the S&T policy world that is somewhat different from the received wisdom is the conceptual base of the field itself. This brings me to the topic of policy research. Policy research builds the knowledge base that S&T policy analysis uses in its short-term work. First, it develops concepts. In our field, the decades-long development of innovation theory illustrates. Second, it develops methods. The methods base of research evaluation illustrates. Yesterday at the S&T Policy Colloquium, many of you saw a presentation by Diana Hicks, using patent and publication data. She made it look easy, but in fact what she showed was made possible by decades of development both of data bases and of ways to analyze them. This development task has been spread across the private firm she works for, the academic unit she used to work for, and a range of other academic, non-profit, and for-profit organizations engaged in policy analysis over the years. Finally, policy research is necessary for the analytic tasks that require long-term empirical studies. In this field, career studies illustrate. The large-scale analysis we are used to requires much painstaking work with huge data bases, and a knowledge of the sophisticated statistical techniques that are necessary to tease patterns out of them. Without policy research, we would know much less in this area.

Thus, the lifestyle of the policy researcher contrasts with that of the policy analyst. Her projects are longer-term and larger scale, and her knowledge base is more cumulative, requiring footnotes into a literature. The projects done at non-profit organizations sometimes contributes to that literature, but policy research really requires an academic base as well if it is to succeed in its role in the overall profession. It also requires funding, which has been in scarce supply in the last decade in the United States for this field. Luckily, governments in Europe, Japan, and South America have been investing heavily in the human resources and knowledge of S&T policy over the last two decades, so we have the work of excellent colleagues to draw on from outside the U.S., as well as a hardy band here.

The knowledge base

So what is in this knowledge base? What do you need to know to be an S&T policy professional? A year ago, I had the privilege of co-teaching a class with Dave Roessner, a member of the "older generation" in the field. In fact, this was his last class before he retired from teaching at Georgia Tech (he has continued in his research relationship with the campus). The class was a capstone course for Ph.D. students in S&T policy, and to prepare its syllabus, we had to put together a reading list that reflected what we thought our students should know before we sent them out into the professional world I have just described to you.

Dave and I had never actually worked together, although we had known each other for many years, yet it turned out that we had a very good shared sense of the books that should be on that list. We included

• A few good overviews, although old, for example by Barke, Lambright, Price, and Morin
• Histories of science policy and of the research university, for example by DuPree, Kevles, Greenberg, and Geiger
• A set of books that represented new thinking and critical perspectives, for example by Chubin and Hackett, Gibbons et al, Stokes, Sarewitz, Shapley and Roy
• A few weeks of reading in innovation theory, from classics by Gibbons and Johnston, Nelson and Winter, Pavitt, and Rosenberg, through more recent work by Mansfield, Freeman, Mowery, and Branscomb
• Writings on science for policy, that is, the use of expertise in government decision making in other areas, like energy and environmental policy, including works by Jasanoff, Nelkin, and Morone and Woodhouse
• New growth theory, including Romer and David.

Our Georgia Tech colleagues expanded the list with readings in high-technology development strategy and technology assessment, and if we were doing it again, we would add a week's readings on careers and human resource development for S&T. We also found several areas missing from the literature. We had a hard time locating books or articles in comparative S&T policy, even though the international network of S&T policy professionals has strengthened considerably over the last two decades. We also found that the literature was long on concepts but short on illustrations of actual S&T policy programs in action, and we realized that we had built up our knowledge of programs over the years through participating in the emerging issues of S&T policy analysis. Both these are gaps I hope that scholars in the field can fill in the years to come.

In addition to having a sense of this knowledge base, of course, you also need certain kinds of skills to be an S&T policy professional. I have hinted at these before. You need the skills of the analyst: setting up a problem for analysis, evaluating and presenting data, and clear, simple communication, in written and oral form. These form the methodological canon of our field, and should be subject to professional standards. Indeed, my experience with other analysts in this field is that the standards are high indeed, and that we do a good job of enforcing them.

Finally, I commend to you a habit of mind that makes the difference between a good policy professional and a great one. That habit of mind is to keep the big picture in view, to watch trends and develop a sense of underlying dynamics in the enterprise. The amateurs in S&T policy can be particularly useful in this, and I urge you to use your partnerships with them to help you keep your head up and see where we are all going.

Why bother?

Now you know what you will be doing, let's stop and ask the question: Why do it? What values are we embodying when we work in this field? What are we investing our lives in?

I use the investment metaphor a lot in my own life. I "spend"" my time, and I try to spend it on things that will create momentum for the kinds of things I want to see happen in the world. I have "sunk costs" in S&T policy at this point, and will certainly spend the next fifteen or so years of my career using the knowledge I have built up here to accomplish objectives that I value.

But you have a whole different investment decision to make. You are just starting. Is being an S&T policy professional the kind of thing you really want to spend your time on? To answer that question, it is useful to know what we stand for. I will therefore offer a personal viewpoint on that in closing.

First, S&T policy professionals believe in the transformative power of science and technology. We believe that S&T can make life better for all of humankind. This view may be controversial, but I think there needs to be a little "gee whiz" about science and technology in every S&T policy professional -- a little sense of how much S&T can change our worlds. My dissertation was about a discovery in the neurosciences, and I chose that topic precisely at the moment I realized how fascinated I was with the idea that brain cells communicate with each other through chemical messengers. Without that fascination, I don't know that I would have had the spark to do that particular piece of research.

But having a little "gee whiz" in us does not mean that we need to be uncritical of the S&T enterprise. In fact, as professionals, we have just the opposite responsibility. We have to maintain our professional standards in data analysis, as I have already pointed out; we must remain true to the data in what we report. But we also have a responsibility to stand outside the enterprise and give it a hard look, precisely because we believe in the transformative power of that institution.

It is patently true -- has been in my career, will be in yours -- that science and technology do not live up to their full potential for making life bettter for all of humankind. This is because the S&T that actually gets done reflects, not an optimized answer to the question of what is needed, but the real-world outcome of a process of struggle among various interests, played out through public and private decision making processes. These interests, all of which are legitimate, include:

• The interests of private firms in making a profit
• The special interests of segments of the organized public, for example, the breast cancer lobby
• The general interest in economic development voiced through elected representatives
• The interests of researchers and research organizations themselves
• And the faint voices that express the interests of the world's poor, most of whom live outside the United States but whose lives are strongly influenced by what we do in S&T policy here.

It is a fact of life that you as an S&T policy professional will work for an organization that represents one of these interests. To do a good job and have a successful career, you will need to represent that organization's interests well. But at the same time, as a professional, you have a special responsibility to the public. It is part of your job to make sure that S&T produce as much benefit as they can for all of humankind through the actions and activities of the organization you are working for. To some extent, you will carry out that responsibility through the concepts and assumptions you carry into your work. Equally importantly, you will have a chance to articulate alternative forms of action in your various jobs, choices that your organization makes that can produce more or fewer benefits for the world's people. Very importantly, you will invest your life in a set of values by choosing which of those various organizations you work for. Before you take a job, study the mission statement of the organization you are considering, to see whether it matches what you want to accomplish with your life. And quiz the people you are working with about what they care about. If it is not what you care about, you may be looking at the wrong job.

In summary, then, I see three central values in the work of S&T policy professionals:

• The transformative power of science and technology,
• Sound analysis and critical perspective, and
• Public benefit

The joy of this work – the pleasure of this very rich and fascinating professional community – is that the combination of these three values produces a great diversity of specific views that can be carried out in a wide variety of jobs.

Congratulations, then, on having chosen a career that is not only challenging and interesting, but will also have a high impact.

Copyright ©2001