ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Foundations of STS: Oil, Energy, and Philanthropy in the Early Institutionalization of US Science Studies

• In Event: Contested Science (and Technology Studies): Histories of STS and Its Forerunners, Interlocutors, Competitors, Targets, and Patrons

English Abstract

This paper’s title borrows Langdon Winner’s 1986 joke that “The Foundations of STS” were “the Sloan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Exxon Foundation, … and so forth.” What was obvious to Winner, but has disappeared from participant and scholarly histories since, was that philanthropic foundations were, well, foundational to early US STS programs and that they supported scholars such as Franklin Long, Max Black, Harvey Brooks, and Rob Kohler who helped establish the field’s core methods and questions. Winner’s point was that foundations were only interested in critique that warded off real change: “Better Understanding for Business as Usual.” Implicit in Winner’s list, but surprisingly not suggested by Winner himself, is that the main “business” involved was oil. The Rockefeller family and Exxon—directly and through the Exxon Education Foundation—supported several early STSish initiatives, as did Shell, DSM, and other oil and petrochemical companies. Most active was Atlantic Richfield, both through its own philanthropy and through the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (AIHS), controlled by ARCO’s CEO Robert O. Anderson. Anderson's patronage of STS began in 1969, when he hired Joseph Slater (a former oil executive) away from the Salk Institute to run the AIHS. At Salk, Slater had started an STSish Council for Biology in Human Affairs; at Aspen, he formed a Science, Technology, and Humanism program—under climatologist Walter Orr Roberts—that sponsored Long, Black, and Brooks at a time when Long was both founding Cornell’s STS program and serving on Exxon’s board of directors. Roberts and Slater also worked with the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study (the “scientific arm of the Club of Rome”), especially in soliciting oil industry funding for STS-adjacent scholarship at IFIAS member institutes such as Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit and the predecessor of what is now Maastricht University’s UNU-MERIT. Here I explore (mainly) US STS’s oily origins, their motivations, and consequences.

Author

• Cyrus C. M. Mody, Maastricht University