ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the possible social and political practices on the basis of which rules and restrictions for the utilization of new knowledge and technical devices could be first articulated, then negotiated and constructed. On the embeddedness of such activities, motives, and methods in specific social, political, cultural, and economic contexts, such a discussion is necessarily limited to broader sketches of work-in-progress in efforts to regulate knowledge, to decide the manner in which governance organizes, and to resolve the objections that may typically be voiced against the control of knowledge. Knowledge politics is not a matter of ethics that could be left to ethics committees, but rather of the ways in which collective issues are decided and how the decisions are managed and implemented in democratic societies. The social control and regulation of scientific knowledge that is moved from the state of being-in-progress to some form of completion, and that is implemented outside of the scientific community, is quite extensive.
