Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines, criticalintervention, and the“big”questions in the controversyover non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

authored by

Kathrin Braun, Sabine Könninger

Abstract

NIPT has become a matter of controversy in Germany over the past years, there is now a widespread concern that it raises fundamental social and ethical questions. Starting from the assumption that responsible governance requires governance actors to address these questions, the article examines how the main governance actors realized their responsibility in the sense of conceiving and performing it. Building on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we study how actors are doing responsibility within a given institutional and political context. We show that critical interventions disrupted institutional routines and caused governance actors to struggle with conflicting commitments of complying with institutional rules and exercising responsibility by taking social and ethical considerations into account. Whereas these conflicting commitments posed a predicament for political decision-makers, who solved it through shifting responsibility for social and ethical issues elsewhere, there was no such predicament for the producers; for them, routine and responsibility converged.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Political Science

External Organisation(s)

University of Stuttgart

Type

Article

Journal

New genetics and society

Volume

37

Pages

248-267

No. of pages

20

ISSN

1463-6778

Publication date

26.07.2018

Publication status

E-pub ahead of print

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Health(social science), Genetics, Health Policy, Issues, ethics and legal aspects

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2018.1495555 (Access: Closed)