ABSTRACT
I began meeting with researchers for this study in summer 2002. Thirtyfive research scientists and engineers whose work takes place at the nanoscale were among those who agreed to participate. All have been interviewed once. Twenty-three have been interviewed twice. By the time this book has been published, about 18-20 should have been interviewed three times. The interviews last an average of 1 to 1.5 hours. On occasion, the researcher is happy to continue, but most have very demanding schedules and are pressed to give even 1hour of their time. On large part, this work is intuitive, on my part. My hope has been to evolve a theory of how particular values and themes comprise the structural framework for meaning making and beliefs about nanotechnology. Having only recently been introduced to it, I have come to see that my intuitive approach to the conversations, and my interpretations of them, closely resemble the evolving Grounded Theory approaches of Glaser and Strauss. Using the methodology of Grounded Theory (which refers to theory developed inductively from a corpus of data; in this case, the conversations themselves), I can take a discourse-oriented perspective that assumes variables interact in complex ways. Grounded theorists are concerned with or largely influenced by emic understandings of the world, using categories drawn from respondents themselves, toward making implicit belief systems explicit.1
