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The notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has increasingly attracted attention in the academic literature. Up until now, however, the literature has focused on clarifying the principles for which research and innovation are responsible and on examining the conditions that account for managing them responsibly. Little attention has been reserved to exploring the political-economic context in which the notion of RRI has become progressively more prominent. This article tries to address this aspect and suggests some preliminary considerations on the connections between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as ‘neoliberalism’. To do so, we try to illustrate how the idea of responsibility has evolved over time so that the specific characteristics of RRI can be better highlighted. These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility. Eventually, we reaffirm a view of RRI centred on fundamental rights as a possible point of departure between these two perspectives on responsibility.

The article investigates the sociocultural implications of the changing modern workplace and of pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) as a potential adaptive tool from the viewpoint of social niche construction. We will attempt to elucidate some of the sociocultural and technological trends that drive and influence the characteristics of this specific niche, and especially to identify the kind of capabilities and adaptations that are being promoted, and to ascertain the capabilities and potentialities that might become diminished as a result. In this context, we will examine what PCE is, and how and why it might be desirable as a tool for adaptation within the workplace. As human beings are, or at least should be allowed to be, more than merely productive, able-bodied and able-minded workers, we will further examine how adaptation to the workplace niche could result in problems in other domains of modern societal life that require the same or other cognitive capabilities. In this context we will also focus on the concept of responsibility and how it pertains to PCE and the modern workplace niche. This will shed some light on the kind of trends related to workplace niche construction, PCE and capability promotion that we can expect in the future, and on the contexts in which this might be either beneficial or detrimental to the individual as a well-rounded human being, and to other members of society.

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RESUMEN: Después de revisar algunas de las iniciativas más relevantes de regulación suave en el campo de lo nano y de examinar algunos de los factores más relevantes que explican el reciente rol de la regulación suave en la gobernanza nanotecnológica, el presente trabajo explora las representaciones mutuas de los stakeholders italianos sobre la nanotecnología para mostrar cómo las consideraciones acerca de la identidad (percibida), en términos de motivaciones y roles en los procesos de regulación y comportamientos esperados en los actores sociales que están involucrados en el desarrollo de la nanotecnología, entran en los razonamientos de los actores para justificar la elección, apoyo o desecho de diferentes soluciones e instrumentos regulatorios, dígase la alternativa entre regulaciones suaves y regulaciones mandatorias.

Introduction: Governing technologies under uncertainty conditions 1 Academic literature and public debates alike have increasingly acknowledged the pervasiveness of uncertainty in science, technology and their governance. Uncertainty is no longer viewed as a residual area of ignorance and risk to be gradually reduced by way of increasing expert knowledge and enhancing technological control. On the contrary, uncertainty is viewed as the unavoidable consequence of the interaction of technology with its environment, that is, of technology's ecological nature (Luhmann 1993). As an effect of these limitations of our experimental knowledge, the introduction of new technologies in society becomes a form of "societal experimentation" (e.g. van de Poel 2009; Felt and Wynne 2007), and risks and possible developments can be detected only after technologies have been introduced in and have displayed their impacts on society. Notions like "manufactured risk" (Giddens 1999) or "secondary consequences" (Beck 1992) were introduced to interpret this paradoxical relationship between increased contingency and the unprecedented knowledge about and control of social life and the physical world, characterizing new and emerging technologies. Indeed, the increased manipulative knowledge of nature and society produces uncertainty rather than reducing it (Coeckelbergh 2012).

The techno-moral scenarios (TMS) approach has been developed to explore the interplay between technology, society and morality. Focused on new and emerging sciences and technologies, techno-moral scenarios can be used to inform and enhance public deliberation on the desirability of socio-technical trajectories. The article presents an attempt to hybridise this scenario tool, complementing the focus on ethics with an explicit acknowledgement of the multiple meanings of responsibility and of the plurality of its regimes, i.e. the institutional arrangements presiding over the assumption and assignment of responsibilities. We call this integrated technique 'rTMS' to stress the continuity with the original technique and, at the same time, to highlight the additional element we aim to develop: responsibility. The article describes this approach and illustrates a loosely standardised procedure that can be used to organise and conduct public engagement workshops based on rTMS.