Competition and the Rise of the Hierarchical Academic Lab in the Biomedical Sciences

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Industry Emergence and Evolution

Abstract

Despite the debate about changes in academic science occurring due to increasing commercialization of research and university-industry ties since the 1970s, there has been an assumption in science and technology studies (STS) that there has been little change in the organization of academic labs. Considerable change in the size and structure of academic labs in the life sciences, however, has occurred during this period. In the 1960s and 1970s, in Canada as in the U.S., a typical academic lab was small, a professor and perhaps a technician and maybe a graduate student or two, but academic labs now often have many members, most of which are graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. How and why did these changes occur? How is research conducted in these academic labs, now that most of their members are trainees? Based on data from work history interviews with older professors during an ethnographic study of academic labs in the biomedical sciences in leading Canadian universities, this paper suggests that a transformation of the organization of production of research has occurred in this field since the 1970s due to new competitive conditions in federal funding arrangements. Through changes in practice, this socio-historical analysis suggests that the emergence of larger academic labs in the biomedical sciences since the 1970s was more precisely the rise of a hierarchical academic lab following the creation of new role for the professor in this field, as competition for federal funding became a major ongoing task for the first time in the 1980s.

Author

• Annalisa Salonius, University of Pennsylvania