The past and future of constructive technology assessment

Constructive technology assessment (CTA) is a member of the family of technology assessment approaches, developed in particular in the Netherlands and Denmark. CTA shifts the focus away from assessing impacts of new technologies to broadening design, development, and implementation processes. Explicit CTA has concentrated on dialogue among and early interaction with new actors. The idea has been taken up by actors other than governments (consumers, producers). CTA implies a modulation of ongoing technological developments, and an understanding of the dynamics of such modulation is used to identify and briefly discuss three generic strategies for CTA: technology forcing, strategic niche management, and loci for alignment. Modulation activities are to be located in the broader issue of how our societies handle new technology at all. The established division of labor between promotion and control should be mitigated by sociotechnical criticism. This underlines the need for reflection on role and value profile of CTA agents. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Inc.