松本三和夫, Tekunosaiensu Risuku to Shakaigaku: Kagaku-shakaigaku no aratana tenkai テクノサイエンス・リスクと社会学：科学社会学の新たな展開 [The Social Risks of Technoscience]

K. Mikami

Book Review: The Social Risks of Technoscience

The English title of this book is slightly misleading. Despite its emphasis on social risks, the main discussion of the book is neither what kind of risks technoscience would pose to society nor in what ways such risks ought to be understood as social ones. The more precise idea of the book may be conveyed by its original Japanese title: Technoscience Risks and Sociology: New Direction in Sociology of Science and Technology (Tekunosaiensu Risuku to Shakaigaku: kagaku-shakaigaku no aratana tenkai テクノサイエンス・リスクと社会学：科学社会学の新たな展開). In this book, Miwao Matsumoto attempts to demonstrate how sociology, that of science and technology in particular, ought to approach what he refers to as technoscience risks and introduces an approach called the sector model. As he reveals in the afterword, “this book resulted from [his] impression that we need an alternative to the existing approaches to comprehend the interface between...