History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Jochen Gläser
Australian National University, jochen@coombs.anu.edu.au
The impact of commercialization on the mode of production in scientific communities
The aim of this paper is to assess the currently observed conflicts between the commercialization of publicly funded research and the traditional practice of scientific research. To date, only anecdotal evidence is available that does not support claims of fundamental changes in science. However, science might be in an early phase of a trend that might have a substantial impact in the future. In order to explore the potential of these conflicts, the social structures they are rooted in must be analyzed. While it is relatively clear what social structures are referred to with ‘market’ (property rights, contract rights, competition, coordination by price), a certain confusion can be said to exist with regard to the social structures that underlie the production of scientific knowledge. It will be demonstrated that knowledge production can be best understood as a collective enterprise of a producing community, i.e. a collectivity of scientists that constantly enhances and partly restructures a common body of knowledge. Thus, coordination of actions is achieved by all actors' reference to the collective work's common subject matter rather than by norms. Thus, market structures co-ordinate individual production while community structures co-ordinate individual contributions in a collective production.
The juxtaposition of these two social structures enables us to distinguish conflicts according to the level on which interactions between individual-centered market structures and collective-centered community structures occur. Firstly, market structures affect the behaviour of individual scientists. The main effects of commercialization on this level are secrecy (withholding research results for a certain time) and production of interest-based knowledge claims. Withholding research results was already common practice in science before commercialization set in. However, it is boosted by commercialization and might reach a critical level beyond which the whole mode of production might be endangered. Trust in research results is decreasing due to the perception of scientists' financial interests. This trend, which can already be observed in some fields, may have an effect similar to increasing secrecy. Secondly, commercialization may concern a larger share of a scientific community's (former) common body of knowledge. In this case, the privately owned and produced knowledge can be subject to quality problems because it lacks the unique mode of quality control established by producing communities, namely quality control by a variety of foreseen and unforeseen applications of that knowledge.
The assessment of these trends leads to the conclusion that in the future levels of commercialization may be reached which affect the core of science's mode of production. However, it is difficult to assess the counteractions of science's community structures which are also expanding due to the extension of scientific work practices.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006