Ordinary Work and Controversy: the rise and transformation of responsability issues in the management of transgenic crop field trials.
Résumé
Public and scientific controversies over Genetically Modified Organisms have been thoroughly studied in various aspects, but little attention has been paid to the implementation and the management of transgenic crop field trials as a practical set of activities. However, such trials have been put at the forefront of the controversy, especially in France with the campaigns of “ripping up” crops led by activists. In order to shed light on this dimension of the controversy, our communication aims to understand how the actors in charge of GMO field trials have been facing growing concerns about responsibility. Drawing from a case study on a French Agricultural Technical Institute (ICTA) which has conducted since 1995 a risk assessment programme of GM plants involving long-term field trials, we focus on the activities of experimenters managing GMO field trials in three locations, from 1995 to 2003. Indeed, our research shows tat engineers and technicians actually have to deal with some of the core issues of the controversy, both in their daily work and with their local environment. For instance, they face conflicting options about the publicity of the trial at the local level (transparency vs. opacity) and the interpretation of ambiguous and emerging regulations (taking risks in order to experiment risks vs. avoiding any risks) as well as difficulties to ascribe a justification to their work (civic responsibility vs. professional responsibility). Then, a comparison between teams of experimenters in different locations, at different periods of time – before and after the emergence of the controversy – allows us to account for the construction of different patterns of responsibility in practice.