Article ID: CBB582502078

Normalizing Complaint: Scientists and the Challenge of Commercialization (September 2015)

unapi

In recent decades, academic science has increasingly been directed toward commercializable ends by neoliberal governments. In this article, I outline a concern that academic scientists have not been consulted about the transformation of science, but nevertheless, in some ways accept commercialization as the way things are done. I focus on the ways in which academic scientists attempt to exercise agency, albeit within the parameters of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In this economy, scientific inquiry has transformed to be focused more on producing marketable products. In order to explore the parameters of scientists’ agency in the context of that transformation, I first elaborate on the idea of agency’s “parameters” and argue that the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I propose a methodological direction that can attend to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB582502078/

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Authors & Contributors
Waide, Robert
Rijcke, Sarah de
Melkers, Julia
Moats, David
Franssen, Thomas
Williams, Logan D. A.
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Research
Science and politics
Scientific communities; interprofessional relations
Capitalism
Power (social sciences)
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
United States
Canada
Great Britain
Singapore
China
Institutions
National Cancer Institute (U.S.)
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