ABSTRACT
The book investigates the mutation of the conception, organization, and function of science and technology in the evolution of industrial societies, which started in the late 1970s in the context of energy crises. The goal is to explain an obsessing and well-known paradox: this mutation led to scientific discoveries and technological innovations that transformed economies and societies around the world. But these mature industrial societies are diagnosed as being in a long-term recession, in a search for policies to overcome this recession, restore economic growth, and sustain the social fabric. The successive waves of the systemic crisis, which erupted in 2008 from an initial financial crisis, to intensified climate disruptions, to the present Covid-19 pandemic, keep pushing the world through a faceless transition. Environmental constraints further intensify disorder. Policies expected to respond to these disruptions rely on science, technology, and engineering, on universities, education, and training, on economic and management models. Their failures call for epistemic and institutional reforms.
