Social Organization of Work in Academic Labs in the Biomedical Sciences: Transformation through Competition

• In Event: Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Epistemic Values, Practices & Assets - I

Abstract

The debate in STS about how university-based research in the life sciences has been changing since 1980 has focused primarily on the influence of the increasing commercialization of academic research and enhanced university-industry ties. There is a widely held assumption that the organization of academic labs themselves during this period has remained essentially the same. This study examines an episode that challenges this assumption: the emergence of larger lab groups in the biomedical sciences during this period. The analysis shows how, in the case of Canada, changes in federal funding arrangements for biomedical research during the 1980s, after universities had incorporated funding into the career structure in this field, led professors to adopt new practices, transforming both their work and the conduct of research. Based on evidence from work history interviews with older and retired professors done during a larger ethnographic study of work in academic labs, the main argument is that a key shift in the structure of competition for grants in the biomedical sciences in the 1980s led to a transformation of the social organization of work in this field, including institutionalizing a new role for the professor and giving rise to larger hierarchically-organized labs.

Author

• Annalisa Salonius, Independent Scholar, formerly University of Pennsylvania