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"The historical and sociological coordinates of promoting scientific and technological revolution in the rich and the poor nations do not harmonise; even they might run at cross purposes implying international relationships of domination, exploitation and neo-colonialism."
Social Contents of Scientific and Technological Revolution*
YOGENDRA SINGH
An attitude of ambivalence prevails today about science and technology and its social contents. Its roots lie in such questions as: how far does the revolution in science and technology hold promises for successful realisation of the goals of social revolution in most human societies? How far are the two revolutionary processes compatible with one another?
Does scientific advancement in world's developed nations promote advancement of ideologies commensurate with its postulated ethos-the ideology of rational humanism, socialism and world brotherhood?
If it does not, what are its reasons, and where does the root of this failure lie? Does it lie in the nature of the technological and scientific systems or in the structure and process of social systems themselves? To what extent does the inner structure of societies, class character, elite composition and moorings of ideologies determine the goals and directions of scientific and technological revolutions, and in this context what is the role of principles and processes of social stratification within nations and between nations in successful and unsuccessful institutionalisation of science and technoology?
The answer to most of these questions belongs to the domain of the content of scientific and technological revolution. It is related to the historicity of the mode of institutionalisation of science and technology in various societies and their specific socio-cultural responses to its challenge. If we look at the many analyses that social science offers to us on the problems of scientific and technological revolutions in the developed and the poor nations of the world we would notice a naive assumption underlying most of them. This assumption is based on the simplistic definition of the
* Secretary's address at the Plenary Session I of the VIII World Congress of Sociology, held at Toronto, on 19th August, 1974, on "Social Aspects of the Scientific and Technological Revolution."
