Post-Academic "Big Science"

 

In the 1940s Robert Merton proposed the “prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions” that scientists come to feel bound to, the core of the scientific ethos if you will, were more or less captured by five fundamental norms or regulative principles: Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Originality, and Scepticism (CUDOS). John Ziman argues that these norms no longer properly describe the ethos of what he terms “post-academic science” or what others call “Big Science.” In other words, (academic) science in roughly the last third of the twentieth century underwent “a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that [it] is organized, managed and performed.” Of course this transformation was not absolute, thus we can speak of both continuities and differences between that sort of science which was formally and informally guided by CUDOS norms and post-academic and post-industrial science. Ziman contends this more straightforwardly industrial (and now highly technological and market-oriented) post-academic science is best understood by way of its alternative set of regulative principles or social norms (as Ziman explains, social and epistemic norms are closely bound up with each other):

”Very schematically, industrial science is Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, and Expert. It produces proprietary knowledge that is not necessarily made public. It is focused on local technical problems rather than on general understanding. Industrial researchers act under managed authority rather than as individuals. Their research is commissioned to achieve practical goals, rather than undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. They are employed as expert problem-solvers, rather than for their personal creativity. It is no accident, moreover, that these attributes spell out ‘PLACE.’ That, rather than ‘CUDOS,’ is what you get for doing good industrial science.”

Moreover,

“post-academic science is under pressure to give more obvious value for money. Many features of the new mode of knowledge production have arisen ‘in the context of application’—that is, in the course of research on technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. More generally, science is being pressed into the service of the nation as the driving force in the national R & D system, a wealth-creating techno-scientific motor for the whole economy.”

In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time.” Symptomatic of such control is Lewontin’s anecdotal observation that “No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.” Ziman explains how deeply this new ethos has been inscribed in the practice of scientific research:

“...[A]s researchers become more dependent on project grants, the ‘Matthew Effect’ is enhanced. Competition for real money takes precedence over competition for scientific credibility as the driving force of science. With so many researchers relying completely on research grants or contracts for their personal livelihood, winning these become an end in itself. Research groups are transformed into small business enterprises. The metaphorical forum of scientific opinion is turned into an actual market in research sciences.”

Ziman provides us with a bounty of reasons for thinking deeply about the vulnerability of scientists to “the demands of their paymasters,” be they of private provenance or the product of the State’s “science policy.” 

Reference [sic] & Further Reading:

• Amadae, S.M. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Annas, George J. Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and the Market. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Brody, Howard. Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
• Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War & The University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York: The New Press, 1997.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Elliott, Carl. White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Fisher, Jill A. Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Research Trials. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
• Fuller, Steve. The Governance of Science. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2000.
• Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 2000 ed. (1987).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• LaFollette, Hugh and Niall Shanks. Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation. London: Routledge, 1996.
• McCloskey, Donald N. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
• McCloskey, Donald N. Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Limits of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
• Sadler, John Z., ed. Descriptions and Prescriptions: Values, Mental Disorders, and the DSMs. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.  
• Shrader-Frechette, K.S. Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Ethics of Scientific Research. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.  
• Simpson, Christopher, ed. Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War. New York: The New Press, 1998.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
•  Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

My bibliography for Science & Technology.