With reference to the recent science studies debate on the nature of science-industry relationship, this article focuses on a novel organizational form: the technological platform. Considering the field of micro- and nanotechnology in Switzerland, it investigates how technological platforms participate in framing science-industry activities. On the basis of a comparative analysis of three technological platforms, it shows that the platforms relate distinctly to academic and to industrial users. It distinguishes three pairs of user models, one model in each pair pertaining (...) to how platforms act toward and conceive of academic users, the other model regarding users from industry. The article then discusses how technological platforms reconfigure the science-economy divide. While the observed platforms provide new institutional contact and interaction between academia and industry, new research collaboration does not necessarily materialize in practice. In this respect, science-industry mediation by way of technological platforms does not make science-industry boundaries more porous. Instead, the declared openness of public research with respect to industry, in the case of technological platforms, may contribute to maintain public science’s autonomy. (shrink)

Scientists continually face public concerns over the potential risks of biotechnology. This article reflects on the 1970s when leading molecular biologists established a moratorium, and initiated the second international Asilomar conference, on recombinant DNA molecules. Since then, this event has been widely perceived as an important historical moment when scientific actors took into account public concerns. Yet, by focusing on the history of the Public Understanding of Science discourse, we gain new insight into how ‘‘science’’ and the ‘‘public’’ have in (...) the meantime been framed in political discourses as homogeneous but antagonistic concepts. This sheds new light on the ways scientific, political, and administrative actors in biotechnology perceive the events, which occurred in the 1970s. Through interviews, we found that, with the Asilomar II conference serving as a quasi role model, the quest to reconcile ‘‘science’’ and the ‘‘public’’ is being traced back to a moment in history when such divisions had yet to be considered. This leads us to ask whether the politics of PUS contributed as much to the production of these two entities as it is claimed to have done in bridging the differences between them. (shrink)

A rise of academic capitalism over the past four decades has been well documented within many research-intensive universities. Largely missing, however, are in-depth studies of how particularly situated academic groups manage the uncertainties that come with intermittent and fickle commercial funding streams in their daily research practice and problem choice. To capture the strategies scientists adopt under these conditions, this article provides an ethnographically detailed (and true) story about how a single project in Artificial Intelligence grew over several years from (...) a peripheral idea to the very center of an academic lab’s commercial portfolio. The analysis theorizes an epistemic form—nimble knowledge production—and documents three of its lab-level features: 1) rapid prototyping to keep sunk costs low, 2) shared search for “real world problems” rather than “theoretical” ones, and 3) nimble commitment to research problem choice. While similar forms of academic knowledge transfer have been lauded as “mode 2,” “innovative,” or “hybrid” for initiating cross-institutional collaboration and pushing science beyond disciplinary silos, this case suggests it can rely on fleeting attention to problems resistant to a quick fix. (shrink)

–Whether celebratory or critical, STS research on science-industry relations has focused on the blurring of boundaries and hybridization of codes and practices. However, the vocabulary of boundary and hybrid tends to reify science and industry as separate in the attempt to map their relation. Drawing on interviews with the head of a research center in plant biology, this article argues that biology and biotech are symbionts. In order to be viable and productive, symbiosis needs to be carefully managed and given (...) room for divergence within mutual dependence. This process does not take place as the negotiation of a preexisting science-industry boundary. Rather, viability is obtained through a strategy of circumventing the science-industry food chain and sequestering biotech components within the research center. Symbiosis allows academic scientists to do biology while at the same time demonstrating entrepreneurial spirit. (shrink)

This thesis deals with the colonisation of the university by market forces. The object of inquiry is coproduction of academic knowledge between academic and non-academic actors in newly established universities and university colleges in Sweden. The development of knowledge as a main competitive advantage for commercial companies, and the shift in policies accompanying this development, provides an explanation for the introduction of market mechanisms into the governance of university research. The main contribution of the thesis, however, is the analyses of (...) three coproducing research centres – in service research, engineering and collaborative media – on the basis of epistemology, interpreted as different knowledge cultures. In most policy accounts knowledge is treated as homogeneous, which is problematic as it conceals differences in academic disciplines’ relations to the object or phenomenon of inquiry. Such differences have bearing on publication patterns, prospects of generating academic credibility and possibilities to engage external partners in coproduction relationships. Importantly, this has an impact on the prospects of attracting various sources of funding that are of significance for newly established universities and university colleges with fewer fixed resources than the old universities. It is argued that not only are we witnessing a colonisation of the entire university by market forces, but also a colonisation of social science and humanities by science - scientific perspectives and work ways and the technical knowledge interest. (shrink)