History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Norma Morris
Department of Science & Technology Studies
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UK
Tel (0)171 419 3703
Fax (0)171 916 2425
e-mail: ucrhnom@pop-server.bcc.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
Researcher Perspectives on the Technologisation of the Biological Sciences
This paper discusses what researchers understand by technologisation, how they respond, and how this interacts with other pressures on their work. In a recent study seeking the views of resesearchers in four university biological sciences departments on forces driving their research programmes, researchers cited the technologisation of the biological sciences as a main factor shaping the character and conduct of their research. They instanced effects on team size, patterns of collaborative working, pace of new developments, and changing institutional structures and management responsibilites. All these areas are equally subject to other powerful shaping influences, notably scarcity of funding overall and policy demands of research-funding agencies.
The data suggest that technologisation is mediating a significant change in the relationships of individual researchers and departmental management; (on lines according with observations in the literature on trends in institutional change) and that in this and some other areas there is a synergistic effect with policies of funding bodies having a similar thrust. Technologisation is a more palatable justification of changes in ways of working than external pressures, and can be used to bolster researchers individual and collective strategies to maintain the primacy of scientific judgments and values, while co-existing with scientifico-political policy requirements. In contrast to the accommodation achieved here, researchers face an unresolved conflict in their interactions with the operational systems of funding bodies, which remain geared to conventions that pre-date the aceeleration in the pace of scientific developments.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006