Toward a Convergence Regime: Science and Neoliberal Governmentality

• In Event: Corporate Influence on Science and Regulation – I

Abstract

After the WW2, Western governments promoted economic policies that constituted technological innovation as a growth factor, thus contributing to defining innovation as the manufacture and marketing of technical artifacts. The idea that science should be as autonomous as possible in order to guarantee the production of knowledge necessary for inventions and innovations has been replaced by the idea that scientific research should produce applications capable of fuelling the innovation process. Although the autonomy of science has always been relative, it is now obvious that, since the 1980s, it has been undergoing a process of increased heteronomisation.
Since 2000, T. Shinn shows that science is very complex and proposes to distinguish four regimes of production and dissemination of science (disciplinary, transitory, utilitarian and technico-instrumental regimes). In recent work, he describes a whole series of evolutions: emergence of a "new disciplinarity", reduction of the distance between disciplinary and utilitarian regimes, multiplication of injunctions to interdisciplinarity.
The aim of this paper is to propose an analysis to explain these macro-social developments. Our hypothesis is that a fifth regime has gradualy emerged. This "convergence regime" is closely linked to the implementation, over the past 30 years, of innovation policies that encourage and organize the translation (transfer and transformation) of knowledge between previous regimes in order to boost the production and commercialization of technoscientific artifacts. These innovation and research policies are part of the neoliberal governmentality described by Foucault.

Authors

• Pascal Ragouet, Université de Bordeaux - Centre Emile Durkheim

• Léo Mignot, Université de Bordeaux - Centre Emile Durkheim

• Vincent Grimaud, Université de Bordeaux - Centre Emile Durkheim