Comparing regulatory processes in genome editing and autonomous vehicles: How institutional environments shape sociotechnical imaginaries

This study compares the regulation of two emerging technologies, the CRISPR genome-editing system and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in the United States. The study draws on 33 in-depth interviews with innovation and governance experts to study the relationship between their regulatory environments and developing beliefs about these technologies. Using sociotechnical imaginaries as a framework, we explore how social actors envision technologically driven futures and the social order that enables them. These imaginaries are essential to emerging technologies, where experts build a framework of potentialities for innovation still underway. While scholarship has documented how sociotechnical imaginaries arise among policymakers, groups of scientists, state and local stakeholders, and public actors in different countries, less has been said about how regulatory organizations and their actors shape expectations around technologies that are in the early and middle stages of development. This article finds that regulatory institutions shape emerging imaginaries along three related axes: the distribution of authority, technological novelty, and risk. Interviewees negotiate these three contingencies differently based on relevant extant regulatory structures and ideologies, resulting in distinct imaginaries around each technology. CRISPR actors envision genome editing as largely diminishing biomedical harm and eventually suitable for health markets, while CAV actors diverge on whether self-driving cars alleviate or exacerbate risk and how they may enter roads. That organizational structures and practices of regulation inform broadly held sociotechnical imaginaries bears significance for studies of innovation trajectories, suggesting regulators can take an active role in shaping how risks and benefits of emerging technology are defined.     

Welfare Reform, Mississippi Style: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Search for Accountability

Through an examination of the implementation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in the state of Mississippi, we explore the adequacy of traditional two-actor principal-agent theory. Using this as our lens, we suggest that the choices made by Mississippi in the area of welfare reform to privatize much of the work and to add several layers to the existing principal-agent relationship substantially reduced accountability and the effectiveness of the monitoring systems. We conclude that not only is traditional principal-agent theory an insufficient tool for understanding the complex interrelationship between democratic actors in this particular case, the decisions of the state of Mississippi to complicate the principal-actor relationship through privatization also undermined the reform effort itself in ways that may have general implications for other like-minded efforts in other policy areas.
There are those who are undermining what we are trying to achieve ...
—Bud Henry, Director of Economic Assistance, Mississippi Department of Human Services     

Negotiatory Alchemy: The Court Special Master as Scientist and Mediator

An environmental health scientist and mediator was appointed for the first time as a special master to oversee cleanup of a hazardous waste site in California. The case analysis examines the creative assimilation of Integra-live/mutual gains bargaining (mediation) into a distributive/zero-sum bargaining construct (litigation). The special master played multiple, overlapping, and conflicting roles as the case unfolded. The interfaces and tensions of these roles produced a hybrid style of dispute resolution, termed mediation-negotiation by the author.     

Analysis of psilocybin and psilocin in Psilocybe subcubensis Guzmán by ion mobility spectrometry and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

A new method has been developed for the rapid analysis of psilocybin and/or psilocin in fungus material using ion mobility spectrometry. Quantitative analysis was performed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry after a simple one-step extraction involving homogenization of the dried fruit bodies of fungi in chloroform and derivatization with MSTFA. The proposed methods resulted in rapid procedures useful in analyzing psychotropic fungi for psilocybin and psilocin.     

Empathy and Strategic Interaction in Crises: A Poliheuristic Perspective

Empirical evidence supports the poliheuristic (PH) theory of decision making, which states that leaders typically employ a two-stage non-compensatory decision-making process. In stage one leaders reject options that do not meet some minimum criteria of acceptability on one or more dimensions, and in stage two they choose among the remaining options using a more rational utility-maximizing rule. While PH theory has primarily been applied at the monadic level, to explain the process and content of states' decisions, we contend it has important implications for strategic interaction and can help to explain outcomes in world politics. Specifically, we argue that a crucial variable shaping crisis outcomes is the degree to which leaders' non compensatory decision criteria in stage one include options' acceptability to the opponent. When leaders empathize with their opponent and screen out those options the opponent considers unacceptable, crises will be resolved more quickly and with a lower likelihood of escalation. Empathy introduced during the second, utility-maximizing stage, may also dampen conflict but is less effective than stage one empathy. We illustrate this dyadic non compensatory model by examining two cases involving the U.S.–China and U.S.–Iraq bilateral relationships.     

The Italian Mediation Explosion: Lessons in Realpolitik

Between the time that the first modern Italian mediation statutes were issued in 1993 and March 2011, when mandatory mediation procedures under Italian Legislative Decree 28/2010 went into effect, an interesting paradox emerged in Italian mediation: mediation usage was virtually nonexistent despite the high success rates of mediated cases. Clearly, the mere availability of mediation was not sufficient to attract disputants away from the courts, even though the Italian court backlog skyrocketed to 5.4 million cases during this period. Decree 28/2010 was issued by the Italian government to address this paradox through a mandatory mediation requirement, but the law has faced significant opposition from some members of the Italian bar in the form of public strikes and legal challenges. Legislators have responded to this dissent with reactionary amendments to “cure” problems in the regulatory structure, even though there has also been significant positive attention paid to the Italian mediation model at the European level. As the opposition to Decree 28/2010 now appears to be diminishing and recent data indicate that mandatory mediation is achieving its objectives (to the tune of tens of thousands of mediated cases since March 2011), two lessons in realpolitik emerge for mediation proponents. First, nothing less than compulsion can rapidly increase mediation use. Second, the legislator who compels mediation without openly engaging the opposition is not mediation savvy, for even in compelling a policy choice, one should be respectful and mindful of the opponent's position, if for no other reason than to minimize his or her opposition to the final result.