Article ID: CBB481449964

Revolutionary dreams: Future essentialism and the sociotechnical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark (August 2020)

unapi

Kasper Schiølin (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 50
Issue: 4
Pages: 542-566


Publication Date: August 2020
Edition Details: Sociotechnical imaginaries: An accidental themed issue
Language: English

In 2015, the World Economic Forum announced that the world was on the threshold of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technologies with unprecedented disruptive power. The next year, in 2016, the fourth industrial revolution appeared as the theme of the Forum’s annual meeting, and as the topic of a book by its founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. Ever since, the Forum has made this impending revolution its top priority, maintaining that it will inevitably change everything we once know about the world and how to live in it, thus creating what I conceptualize as ‘future essentialism’. Within a short space of time, the vision of the fourth industrial revolution was institutionalized and publicly performed in various national settings around the world as a sociotechnical imaginary of a promising and desirable future soon to come. Through readings of original material published by the Forum, and through a case study of the reception of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark, this article highlights and analyses three discursive strategies – ‘dialectics of pessimism and optimism’, ‘epochalism’ and ‘inevitability’ – in the transformation of a corporate, highly elitist vision of the future into policymaking and public reason on a national level.

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Article Sergio Sismondo (August 2020) Sociotechnical imaginaries: An accidental themed issue. Social Studies of Science (pp. 505-507). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Jasanoff, Sheila
McGonigle, Ian
Noam Bergman
Maxime Polleri
Spackman, Christy C. W.
Debbie Hopkins
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Imaginaries
Technology and politics
Sociotechnical systems
Renewable Energy Sources
Cross-national comparison
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
Places
Great Britain
West Virginia (U.S.)
South Korea
Singapore
East Asia
Ecuador
Institutions
NTU Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
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