Ott Ingrid

This author's articles

• Public Image and Social Acceptance of Nanotechnologies

  2 April 2008
  To understand the motives of the public to support technological innovations is essential for several reasons. On the one hand, it enables to build an «acceptable social balance » but it allows to consider the civil society as an active partner in the diffusion of technological innovation as well. In the case of nanotechnologies, defective information exists about the way in which the public constructs a relationship to such abstract technologies. These defectives have to be rounded out by paying attention to the

• Convergence or mediation? : Experts of vulnerability and the vulnerability of experts’ discourses on nanotechnologies – a case study

  17 July 2007
  Since 2004, risk has been criticized as too abstract and all-inclusive of a category. Moreover, the concept of risk is not precise enough to describe the potential issues related to the development of nanotechnologies. Instead, the experts of technological development speak more about risk communication. Within the field of nanotechnologies, they even redefined this expression in February 2005 in relation to the question of the societal acceptance of nanotechnologies.

• Converging institutions. Shaping the relationships between nanotechnologies, economy and society

  22 January 2007
  This paper develops the concept of converging institutions and applies it to nanotechnologies. Starting point are economic and sociological perspectives. We focus on the entire innovation process of nanotechnologies beginning with research and development over diffusion via downstream sectors until implementation in final goods. The concept is applied to the nano–cluster in the metropolitan region of Grenoble and a possible converging institution is identified.