CONCEPT
Co-Production of Knowledge and Social Order
Jasanoff's foundational thesis that scientific knowledge and social arrangements are made simultaneously — each constituting the other — dissolving the fiction that technology develops first and society responds.
Co-production is Jasanoff's analytical framework for understanding that the technical and the social are not independent variables but mutually constitutive phenomena. When a new scientific claim is established or a new technology is deployed, it does not merely add to the stock of knowledge or the inventory of tools. It reorganizes the social world — creating new categories of people, new institutions, new hierarchies of authority, new distributions of power. Simultaneously, the social order shapes the science and the technology: what gets studied, what gets funded, what counts as evidence, what applications seem natural. This framework dissolves the common distinction between 'the technology' and 'its social effects,' revealing them as inseparable dimensions of a single process. Applied to AI, co-production means that the productivity gains, the skill transformations, and the professional identity disruptions are not sequential but simultaneous — all produced by the same process of technological and social reorganization.
