Science, Regulation, and Values: Introduction to a Special Section

ates people who, under the correct circumstances, will place its interests above their own, as when they are called upon to die in battle. Societal mechanisms regulate more than the behavioral aspects of human existence, however, for societies also regulate technology in a number of different ways. When most people talk about regulation, they envision modern industrial societies and their bureaucratic and legal attempts to control the economic, physical, and occasionally the political consequences of technological change. But anthropologists have shown that even tribal societies regulate technology and that their cultural values also respond to the introduction of new technologies. The articles in this special section of Science, Technology, c> Human Values attempt, therefore, to go beyond such a narrow and more conventional view of regulation and to place the regulatory activity in its larger