Steering with big words: articulating ideographs in nanotechnology

Nowadays, science should address societal challenges, such as ‘sustainability’, or ‘responsible
research and innovation’. This emerging form of steering toward broad and generic goals
involves the use of ‘big words’: encompassing concepts that are uncontested themselves, but
that allow for multiple interpretations and specifications. This paper is based on the premise
that big words matter in the structuring of scientific practice and it empirically traces how
three ‘big words’ – ‘sustainability’, ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘valorization’ (a term
closely linked to knowledge utilization) – steer research activities within a Dutch research
program of nanotechnology that is explicitly related to societal challenges. To do so, the
theory of articulation is extended with the concept of ideographs. We report on how the topdown
steering ambitions of policy are countervailed by the bottom-up dynamics and logics
of researchers. We also conclude that when ‘big words’ are used in an organizational and
administrative setting, it changes their effects.