Normalizing Complaint

Introduction

Commercialization is the conversion of research results into products, services, and processes that can be used in commercial transactions (Downie and Herder 2007, 25). It is a phenomenon closely associated with the corporatization, marketization, and privatization of knowledge that are key features of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In the ideal knowledge economy, promoted by governments in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere since the 1980s, corporations work closely with the state, placing emphasis on individuals as economic actors. Market relations are expanded into traditionally public arenas, such as universities, and national science policies are created to encourage private investment in science and university–industry partnerships by strengthening intellectual property (IP) rights and decreasing public funding. The commercialization of science and the university is a core mission of the neoliberal economy, where “knowledge” must translate directly into commercial value. In this context, scientific inquiry focuses on producing marketable products. ¹ In this article, I argue that academic scientists across the career spectrum, from graduate students to full faculty, have in some ways accepted commercialization as the way things are done. The rules, incentives, policies, infrastructures, and funding arrangements transforming scientific inquiry are in many ways reproduced by researchers through their scientific work. At the same time, I am interested in the parameters, or boundaries, of scientists’ agency in the context of commercialization. To assume that all scientists unwittingly accept commercialization is to obscure the diversity of their experiences, including the various expressions of their agency, and it is an assumption I challenge. First, I elaborate on the idea of agency’s parameters and argue that the literature on commercialization pays insufficient attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I share insights from my empirical work in this area in order to reflect on some methodological challenges in attending to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy.

Agency’s Parameters

I begin with the premise that agency deserves further theorizing as a political phenomenon within science studies. I use the concept of relational agency developed by feminists such as Susan Sherwin (2002, 78), which “recognizes the importance of social forces in shaping each person’s identity, development and aspirations.” Agency is fundamentally affected by and developed amid relationships mediated by power. The current context of commercialization sets “parameters of agency,” the boundaries created by options that are both promoted and prevented, and those parameters affect how scientists think about their work. I offer directions for empirical work that can foster a pause in the thinking as usual ² inspired by the knowledge economy by investigating how scientists view their own parameters—to ask them about the ways that they are encouraged and discouraged when it comes to scientific discovery. This strategy offers opportunities for scientists to reflect on commercialization. It may also offer a solution to the increasing pressure to accept commercialization as the way that things have to be done; thus, my secondary goal is to “normalize” complaint; in essence, to encourage the continual criticism of commercialization so that it does not become an unaccepted and habitual norm.

Agency is always developed in context, and some contexts promote it more than others. To measure agency in a given context, an institution, an organization, or a laboratory, we can look to the extent to which actors think of the options they wish to pursue as promoted or prevented. In the context of commercialization, often the research options worth pursuing are those that can lead to profitable results. The option to pursue research that is not commercializable is still present, but it is not rewarded to the same extent in this context. The set of options that are encouraged, promoted, funded, and celebrated are those that serve the goals of commercialization. Scientists who believe in commercialization can fare well within these parameters. There can be other factors limiting their agency, but the norms of commercialization do not necessarily operate in a restrictive way—the parameters facilitate a certain kind of agency. Scientists who want to do research outside of those parameters can experience them as a restriction of agency; those scientists can also turn to forms of agency that can be conceived of as resistance.

I focus on agency to highlight the fact that academic scientists do not simply go along with commercialization and also to question the assumption that those who engage in commercialization practices necessarily support the broader trend toward commercialization in academic science. Although I argue that academic science has undergone a normative shift to accommodate commercialization, I disagree with those theorists who argue that the transition to science as a commercial endeavor has been fully accepted by academic scientists, because it doesn’t account for the complications of agency. Some make it seem like the neoliberal knowledge economy has infested the production of scientific knowledge in a very thorough way. And indeed, some studies suggest, as Stuart and Ding (2006, 103) put it, that scientists’ attitudes on commercialization have “evolved from opposition to acquiescence to acceptance.” Commercialization can start to shape the way that scientific researchers think about their work, but there is ample literature demonstrating that these academics have not entirely accepted the criteria of private economic gain (Agrawal and Henderson 2002; Azoulay, Ding, and Stuart 2007; Bienkowska and Klofsten 2011; D’Este and Perkmann 2011; Etzkowitz 1998; Glenna et al. 2007; Goldstein 2010; Slaughter, Archerd, and Campbell 2004; Slaughter and Rhoades 2010; Tartari and Breschi 2012). Such works demonstrate that while it is useful to pay attention to dominant ideas, it is important not to lose sight of forms of resistance—countermovements and objections. It is also important to find a way through the abstracted talk of a transformation to the practical experiences of the scientists themselves, because it is in the work of doing science that the tensions present themselves, and are interestingly overcome, or deepened to produce controversy and even debate. When we conceive of markets as external forces, we can lose sight of the complexity of how commercialization operates in the daily lives of researchers, and thus it can seem to be outside of actors doing things; we can forget about the frustrations, contradictions, and concessions involved in the transformation.

Some of the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is affected by the norms and rules of commercialization and betrays a tacit acceptance of commercialization as necessary and inevitable (Barbolla and Corredera 2009; Lerner 2005; Lockett and Wright 2005; Litan, Mitchell, and Reedy 2007; Rothaermel, Agung, and Jiang 2007; Nelles and Vorley 2011). This is present in outright statements of support, but also in the omission of a discussion of alternatives to commercialization, even while documenting its many problems. This limits the purview of debate on commercialization, again setting parameters for what is possible, and possibly restricting agency. Some of the empirical work that attends to the agency of social actors in this context also promotes the tacit assumption that commercialization is inevitable. For example, Biscotti and colleagues (2012) emphasize the “relational work” of university–industry collaborations. They point to the agency of social actors and do not assume that researchers accept commercialization without thinking, but suggest that the tensions present in that relational work can be fixed to handle researchers’ objections. Thus, they assume that it is important to accommodate the progress of commercialization and in doing so reinforce the idea that it is necessary and inevitable.

There is some literature that both demonstrates the agency of academic scientists and puts commercialization in question. For instance, Slaughter and colleagues (2002) situate researchers as social actors and avoid the suggestion that commercialization is inevitable, thus paying attention to researchers as social actors who face tensions and contradictions when attempting to manage the pressures of commercialization. Several science and technology studies (STS) scholars have attended to researchers’ choices in scientific research. For example, Cooper (2009) surveyed 1,822 biological scientists, asking how the commercialization of the university affects the problems academic scientists pursue. He argues that this reorientation of scientific agendas results in a shift from science in the public interest to science for private goods. His attention to choice in scientific research acknowledges that it is not a single moment where a researcher decides on what they will do, but “should instead be considered a collection of the intentions, actions, and experiences that enter into the directed pursuit of scientific research” (p. 634). His survey indicates that scientists who receive support from industry are more likely to choose research problems based on the ability to commercialize their findings (p. 639). Thus, it could be argued that the context of commercialization affects individual decision making by researchers. Commercialization has provided a set of rules and priorities to which researchers must aspire. In this way, faculty are key actors, but they are situated in a broader political structure where commercialization is an organizing logic.

Cooper and others (e.g., Moore et al. 2011) use Bourdieu’s work to understand the mechanisms through which ideology operates in everyday life, and through which dispositions can generate particular practices. Sorting through ideological orientations in academic research, Vallas and Kleinman (2008) suggest that the line between university and commercial science has blurred and that this produces new and often contradictory knowledge regimes. These authors acknowledge that codes and practices “flow in both directions” between academia and industry, but they also demonstrate “asymmetrical convergence,” where the commercial ethos has the upper hand, “especially in an era of sharpening economic competition and the global diffusion of neo-liberal economic policy generally” (Vallas and Kleinman 2008, p. 305). They write

Our point here is that the structural reconfiguration of academic science generates an increasing tension between the “ideal” culture of academic science and the “real” culture of market-oriented logics governing the pursuit of capital in one or another form. How scientists and administrators manage this tension constitutes an important question for future research. (Vallas and Kleinman 2008, 305)

This kind of tension is an opportunity for dialogue and reflexivity about the diverging “regimes” of traditional science (a concept that has been contested) and the commercial ethos. Future empirical work in this area could attempt to describe the dialectic between the political apparatuses of the knowledge economy that have worked to propagate and “normalize” commercialization and the way that researchers experience that political context in their everyday work.

Laboratory Strife: Hegemonic Tensions in Scientific Work

There are methodological lessons to be learned from the social studies of science, which are invaluable to the project I advocate. In the 1970s, researchers in the field of STS entered the laboratory in an effort to show how scientists do the work of producing scientific knowledge. In Laboratory Life (1986), Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar famously aimed to treat the practical day-to-day work of science as unfamiliar. Several theorists in this field have built on the work of laboratory studies. Early laboratory studies focused on local actions of and interactions among actors trying to create knowledge, emphasizing the contingency of local situations. ³ Recent works in the social studies of science have argued that early laboratory studies did not fully address the political features that shape what can be knowledge (Frickel and Moore 2006; Kleinman 1998). Others have sought to expand laboratory studies beyond the lab, to understand how broader political forces operate in the daily work of science (Mirowski and Sent 2008; Mirowski 2011; Tyfield 2012; Kleinman 1998).

STS must be put in closer dialogue with political economy in order to grapple with what commercialization means for science. Much of the work in STS has not been able to deal with how different structural features of the economy have accommodated and paid for different forms of scientific research (Mirowski and Sent 2008, 636; Tyfield 2012). Economists have entered this discussion to address how economics shapes science and how science affects the economy (e.g., Mirowski 2011; Stephan 2012). Political economists address inequalities and power and economic resources in a historically specific context dominated by the search for profit (Armstrong and Armstrong 2010). I advocate this approach because there is room for more laboratory studies that attend to the tensions in the work that people do and its relationship to the structures of capitalism. As Moore and colleagues (2011, 509) write, “The new language of the economy-as-free-market black boxes the materiality, the rules, and labour that are the foundation of economic life, subsuming them under an obfuscating numericism.” STS offers some of the analytical tools to open that black box, but requires a more theoretically grounded engagement with political economy in order to accomplish that task.

An expansion of the traditional “laboratory study” addressing the political and economic context of the lab has been undertaken by Kleinman, who pays attention to the structural or institutional context in which a lab is situated, shaping the practices within it (1998, 2003), and draws attention to the degree to which contemporary university science is increasingly “woven into a commercial web” (1998, 296). Kleinman importantly takes on the analytical limitations of some strands of STS, for instance, critiquing Actor Network Theory (ANT) and the social world’s approach for their focus on agency and construction, or coconstruction, with no distinction between context and content, outside and inside. He argues that emphasis on agency has led analysts to ignore the constraints placed on agents in their efforts to act, and restrict analysis of institutional constraints to which actors are not particularly attentive (Kleinman 1998, 288). The ANT focus on how active agents construct their worlds misses the effects of the already constructed attributes of the world in which science is practiced and ignores asymmetrical relations of power by overemphasizing the centrality of agency (Kleinman 1998). Kleinman (1998, 289) contrasts ANT and the social world’s view with a structural, organizational, or institutional perspective, holding that structures can constitute rules of play that establish resource distributions, capacities, and incapacities with constraints and opportunities for actors depending on their structural location. These structures are not fixed and sovereign, but rather constructed historically along with interests, actors, and identities (Kleinman 1998). Social actors confront these structures as “external” and sometimes “constraining” (Kleinman 1998, 290).

I build on Kleinman’s theorization, agreeing that the “micro” and the “macro” exist in a dialectical relationship “at every instant,” and arguing that the ability to express agency is limited, conditioned, and enabled by a person’s context. This context involves the changes in government, industry, and the university that have increasingly pressured academic and industrial scientists to align their research with the goals of national competitiveness, regional economic development, and marketplace opportunities (Moore et al. 2011), namely, globalization and neoliberalism. The “pressure” comes in the form of laws, regulations, restructuring of national granting councils, and university restructuring. Not all scientists participate in the creation and enforcement of these forces in a determined and coherent fashion. The people who do that work with intent have a significant amount of power, which enables their ability to set the “rules.” As social actors, we can indeed reproduce the ideas and practices that propagate those policies and weave them into our everyday relations. But we do not always do so. And we do not always do so in a determined and conscious fashion. Sometimes we decide, in a conscious and determined way, not to propagate those policies, not to follow the rules. But of course, there are costs to such actions. ⁴ As Moore and colleagues (2011) point out, actors do have an influence on industry, but industry has a rather consistent and powerful and determining influence on social actors in academia—it’s asymmetrical.

This discussion of the way that material structural relations of power can operate in the everyday lives of social actors, who “go along” with rules that are sometimes quite explicitly not in their interests underscores the relevance of Gramsci’s hegemony. Sometimes, as some of the aforementioned empirical work has demonstrated, scientists express frustration with the fact that the structures of commercialization do not allow them to pursue the kind of scientific research they think of as important or valuable or ethical. Nevertheless, they are invested in their careers, their work, and their livelihoods, which are increasingly being tied into a system of knowledge production they feel they cannot rival or refute. Gramsci offers some insight into how this system of “consent” operates.

Although Gramsci’s work has been used by some prominent scholars in STS, there seems to be a lack of attention to the fact that Gramsci was a Marxist and activist who was determined to bring about social change. Fujimura (1996), for example, uses the concept of hegemony in a way that is completely separated from Gramsci’s Marxist orientation and revolutionary objective. She refers to hegemony as a dominant way of knowing (1996, 72). Gramsci’s concern was not simply to describe which ways of knowing are dominant, but further to understand why the working class had not been able to organize to defend its class interests. It is difficult to derive a clear and succinct definition of hegemony from Gramsci’s work, because his writing evolved over a series of notes he drafted while in prison, but Terry Eagleton (1991, 114) cogently remarks:

The concept of hegemony thus belongs with the question: How is the working class to take power in a social formation where the dominant power is subtly, pervasively diffused throughout habitual daily practices, intimately interwoven with “culture” itself, inscribed in the very texture of our experience from nursery school to funeral parlour? How do we combat a power which has become the “common sense” of a whole social order, rather than one which is widely perceived as alien and oppressive?

According to Gramsci, a social group or class manifests its supremacy as domination or coercion, or “intellectual and moral leadership.” These latter types of supremacy constitute hegemony, where a dominant and common social-moral language is spoken, informing thoughts and behavior (Femia 1981, 24). This hegemony is rooted in the economy and operates through consent. The kind of consent that is generated by hegemony sometimes operates as a contradictory consciousness, whereby the way that social actors think is not coherent or consistent over time, but “disjointed and episodic” (Femia 1981).

Thus, hegemony is not static but has to be renewed and re-created in response to counterhegemonic forces—it is relational and dynamic (Eagleton 1991, 115). We see this process underway in science. Commercialization is put forward as the lynchpin of the knowledge economy, and thus essential for a viable and sustainable global economy. In Canada, the Harper government addresses this message directly to scientists and science policy makers. In a letter to the 2013 Canadian Science Policy Conference, he wrote “Through our Science and Technology Strategy, we are bolstering our country’s innovation strengths. Canada will require a wealth of knowledge to support job creation and stimulate economic growth.” Obama’s policy direction is similar:

America’s economic growth and competitiveness depend on its people’s capacity to innovate. We can create the jobs and industries of the future by doing what America does best—investing in the creativity and imagination of our people. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/economy/innovation, downloaded December 9, 2013).

These are broad policy directions, and their implementation is considerably varied. Nevertheless, these kinds of statements are rooted in the neoliberal knowledge economy, which practically means that the orientation of federal funding agencies has increasingly turned toward commercially relevant research in the United States and Canada (Slaughter and Rhoades 2010, 185) and in Canada (Buchbinder 1993; Buchbinder and Newson 1990; Downie and Herder 2007; Sá and Litwin 2011; Polster 2002; Newstadt 2013). Scientists respond to these changes in contradictory ways. To this point, their expressions of dissent have not approximated the coherence of the message from the State. For the most part, scientists consent, but perhaps not happily. They lack, most basically, the material resources to take on global capitalism. But they also lack a counternarrative—one that says things need not continue in this way. Hegemony is the result of persistent and cumulative processes which reiterate a prevailing discourse, making it normal. Commercialization is not a new phenomenon, while many have argued it has gained momentum in recent decades. It has become an integrated component of scientific inquiry, where universities now commonly have a technology transfer office, and where funding arrangements increasingly favor “partnership” with industry. Because these processes have become embedded over time with no significant alternative model on offer, they develop an ideological permanence; objections are often sideline or co-opted.

There has been a lack of organizing or broad-scale debate on the subject. ⁵ Granted, lately there have been some expressions of dissent in the form of movements for “science in the public interest,” ⁶ advocating for the public to be engaged with questions of science, to shape research to benefit human beings. But this is at a point where the research context has been transformed to adapt to commercialization strategies, where scientists have difficulty getting funding that is not tied to the private sector and are continually expected to patent their results. Movements for change face an uphill battle when scientists operate in a context in which their daily work is so intricately tied into the expectations of commercialization.

The concept of hegemony helps us to grasp how power is lived in a given context, and how certain regimes of power—remembering that no regime is uncontested—are produced and reproduced in the everyday lives of individuals (Crehan 2002). Social scientists have used quite extensively Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” and more generally his concept of hegemony. Recent theorizing has critiqued the way that Gramsci’s work has been understood and used. For instance, Kate Crehan (2002) details Gramsci’s historical location as a revolutionary, resurrecting his argument that culture and class are rooted in basic power relations, which are inequalities in the practicalities of day-to-day life (p. 200) and the social relations that produce that inequality (p. 174). She argues against the traditional anthropological use of Gramsci’s hegemony—the idealist version of hegemony that simply describes a process of ideological domination and ignores the material relations of power, what she calls “hegemony lite.” The strengths of his work, according to Crehan (2002, 7), are that he recognizes fundamental systemic inequalities while rejecting crude economic reductionism, and insists that we attend to the complexity and specificity of cultural worlds that people inhabit from their own mappings of those worlds. Hegemony is not only a system of ideas, and commercialization is not simply a shift in an understanding of the norms and values of scientific inquiry: it is a material transformation of the way that science is done.

Methodological Directions and Empirical Challenges

I have addressed the abovementioned concerns and interests through empirical work that explores how researchers see the process of doing research differently depending on their career stage; ⁷ the everyday tensions, negotiations, and contradictions of doing scientific work in the commercialization era; the kind of “common sense” that is produced in the course of creating the “products” of commercialization, such as spinoffs, patents, services, drugs, and devices; the constraints that researchers encounter when they attempt to work outside the structures of commercialization; and the ways in which support for commercialization is articulated by researchers as valuable, inevitable, and necessary. I will show how the concept of hegemony illuminates the various facets of the experience of commercialization.

As a part of a qualitative investigation of the commercialization of health research at Dalhousie University in Canada, I have interviewed thirty health researchers and attended numerous events on campus related to patenting and commercialization. I have also followed the federal government’s science policy initiatives, particularly regarding commercialization, and the countermobilizations challenging the Canadian government in the form of protests, public meetings, and online petitions. I will briefly outline four ways in which this work has attempted to address how scientists struggle with commercialization amid hegemonic discourses of the neoliberal knowledge economy.

First, in attending to inequalities or tensions between emerging researchers (grad students and postdocs) and established researchers (professors), building on the concerns outlined by Herder (2013), this empirical work has generated some insights about power relationships and the way that consent can be manufactured in the laboratory. Emerging researchers are sometimes the most exploited members of the community of academic scientists, and at the same time have not been privy to a full debate over the transformation of science—they enter a context that has already undergone a transformation and is thus in some ways presented as the only option. Emerging researchers who have participated in this study were either fully invested in doing commercializable research (some were enrolled in a program that was specifically directed at teaching graduate students about how to commercialize) or said commercialization did not enter into their work at all. When professors talked about mentorship of emerging researchers, it often involved encouragement to patent and commercialize. This message is reinforced by a series of sessions and reports aimed at emerging researchers with dire predictions for the academic job market and a concerted effort to teach “entrepreneurial skills” (Holloway 2014). Some established researchers said they now encouraged their best students to go into industry or medicine, because funding for the sciences is so precarious, and they were genuinely conflicted over this. Emerging researchers rarely debated the pros and cons of commercialization. One Master’s student said she did not understand why she would debate it when it was already a stated objective. Whether commercialization or patenting had been relevant for their work to this point, particularly postdoctoral researchers were trying to turn their attention toward patenting and commercializing because they either wanted to be able to continue getting funding to do their work, or because they had decided that working for industry was a more viable option than seeking an academic position in the currently competitive and rather dismal academic job market.

These emerging researchers are responding to an existing set of limitations and expectations that have already been “pervasively diffused throughout habitual daily practices” to reference Eagleton again (1991, 114). Factors such as the restructuring of funding models from public granting institutions, the academic job market, and the federal government’s policy on science and technology have a different impact on researchers depending on career stage; while established researchers in some cases wrestle with the tensions that these pressures produce, emerging researchers are expected to adapt, and sometimes see those pressures as preestablished parameters for the kind of science that they can do.

Second, in an attempt to understand how the external pressures mentioned earlier have an impact on how health research is practiced, I have asked questions about patenting, meeting with the Industry Liaison and Innovation Office, attending events about commercialization, and going to conferences in order to understand whether commercialization entered into the daily work of science. These questions helped to understand how certain practices are encouraged and discouraged in the daily work of science, thus contributing to the parameters of agency. Scientists do have agency in deciding to participate in commercialization; at the same time, there is a sense among many that if they did not pursue this route they would not be successful (defined in different ways). One established researcher said “If you sit with your head in the sand and say ‘I don’t like commercialization,’ then you’re gonna be gone. Because you’re not going to get the money from anywhere and you’re not going to get the support.” Patenting is a part of the research process for many. As one established research put it when discussing IP, “So it’s just part of being in the lab just like washing beakers is part of your work…IP is just part of our work. It’s just what we do.” For some “basic” researchers who had nothing to patent, it was something they hoped to contribute to or achieve at some point in their career (particularly for emerging researchers because with the job market as it is they knew they would have to be open to working for industry). Some participants indicated that they are more hesitant to share their work at conferences because of the risk of getting scooped. This was less the case for those who said they did not to “commercializable” work, like in evolutionary biology. But other “basic” researchers reported that conferences have changed across the sciences, because their colleagues are more aware of disclosing possibly patentable inventions.

Third, there appeared to be different forms of disruption in the normalizing trajectory of commercialization. Researchers have a number of criticisms and complaints about how funding agencies favor commercializable research, how training graduate students in patenting and commercialization can take away from important core learning about science, how scientific research at some level requires open questions that are not directed at producing “widgets.” Most of these researchers said they have not had any opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of commercialization outside the laboratory. At the same time, there have been a series of campaigns of scientists who are criticizing the Canadian Federal government’s science policy. Although this policy quite adamantly promotes commercialization, that has not been a central topic of the campaigns. Rather, scientists who march on parliament hill appear to be concerned more with the “muzzling” of government scientists, declaring the “death of evidence” (Turner 2013). There seems to be a dissonance between these two seeming solitudes; scientists who march on parliament hill and the researchers in the labs of Dalhousie who do not openly debate commercialization, but nevertheless register a series of complaints. Ultimately, there are many complex ways actors may shape a counterhegemonic ideology, for instance, by openly challenging hegemonic ideas by speaking with colleagues or refusing industry money for research; also by simply doing work that is not commercializable or intended to be commercialized. To this point, there are numerous objections but they are not coordinated.

Finally, some researchers support commercialization as valuable, inevitable, necessary, and such. Many of the participants of this study suggest that commercialization is a scientific responsibility. Some said that commercialization is an obligation because it is the way to have an impact in the public, specifically in the patient community. Most who argued for this idea of commercialization as a responsibility said that they were concerned with some aspects of commercialization—particularly the way that funding agencies support commercializable research over “basic” or foundational research. At the same time, it is necessary and inevitable. It is “the world we live in.” And some said it just would not make sense to just give this knowledge away for free, not because they wanted to personally profit from their innovations but because it is imperative that Dalhousie derive revenue from researcher innovations. This normalized conception of commercialization as a scientific responsibility is a window into how the structural components of commercialization enter into the daily work of science. Although participants outline criticisms of the commercialization of research, it is put forth as necessary and inevitable. The parameters of agency have to some extent been defined by the broader economic imperatives of the knowledge economy, indicating how certain regimes of power—remembering that no regime is uncontested—are produced and reproduced in the everyday lives of individuals (Crehan 2002). Commercialization has become a lens through which these researchers understand their ability to have an impact in the community. One established researcher said “the only way that you can get something that’s used in the hospital to help patients is if it’s commercialized.” Further, some participants argued that patients will suffer if they do not commercialize, because they will never get life-saving drugs. This notion that commercialization is not just an option but a responsibility has the potential to further entrench the practice as an unquestionable norm. Invoking the health of the patient makes commercialization a moral imperative. This is possibly an instance of the dynamic character of hegemony, which changes in relation to social actors (Forgacs 2000, 242). The kind of responsibility that has traditionally been a valuable part of scientific work has been adapted (albeit unevenly) to suit and respond to commercialization.

Throughout this empirical work, I have specifically avoided the assumptions that commercialization is inevitable, that scientists’ accommodations to commercialization or lack of organized resistance means support for commercialization, and that there is no resistance to commercialization, ultimately to avoid the assumption that commercialization is stable or necessary because history never is. In doing so, I value the dynamic and multifaceted types agency demonstrated by researchers in the context of commercialization. Tyfield (2012) notes the paradoxical nature of the fact that science is currently tasked with resolving the economic crisis and acting as the core of a new economy (referred earlier as the knowledge economy) while at the same time public funding for scientific research is reduced. To this point, my investigation has shown the degree to which scientists are aware of this paradox. In many cases, commercialization is a part of their daily work, or affects their prospects for funding, their career choices, and their ability to freely share their work. They are aware of the problems inherent in all of these trends, and at the same time have come to see it as a responsibility, given the economic and political climate. In outlining the tensions and contradictions of commercialization they demonstrate their agency; in accepting the flaws of that framework because there is no other option they demonstrate the parameters of their agency—there is no option but commercialization; and finally they point to the rifts in the hegemony of commercialization. It is perhaps not a fully accepted norm.

Normalization Interrupted

Commercialization is a kind of common sense. This is demonstrated in some of the literature that appears consumed with debating how to improve the function of technology transfer offices, expand “entrepreneurial education,” better measure “outputs” in terms of patents and spin-offs, and maximize the speed and volume of commercialization activities and by the preliminary findings of my investigation, which suggest researchers commercialize without engaging in a debate about whether it is ultimately beneficial for science and the health of patients. With notable exceptions, few criticize commercialization outright, meaning that it begins to appear to be the only way of doing things. This is perhaps because all of the options are confined to the purview of the neoliberal knowledge economy. As Tyfied (2012, 158) argues when outlining the different economic models of science policy “without inclusive and informed public debate about these frames, it is unlikely that the politics dominating science & technology policy will reflect the actual concerns of citizens.”

Scientists can find ways around the confinement to the parameters, and some argue, for instance, that commercialization is just a jargon they use to secure funding and nothing else. But there is certainly a risk that it becomes more than jargon—and that those who most convincingly play the game are the ones that truly demonstrate that their work is commercializable. The idea that commercialization has been normalized should be tempered with the recognition that it has not been wholly accepted by researchers, and that there are even organized efforts to challenge commercialization. ⁸ The normalization of commercialization is not inevitable if there are spaces for discussion to engage the conflicts, the contradictions, the disgruntlements, and the debates. For this reason, there is a need for empirical work that can highlight how those rifts operate in the scientific laboratory, and how commercialization is interwoven into the daily work of scientists. Commercialization appears inevitable and unchangeable because it is rooted in a material and ideological restructuring of work and funding arrangements taking place globally. But that restructuring does not simply come from “above,” enforced by governments against the will of researchers. In fact, commercialization is reproduced and supported from within the university, by the minority of scientists who openly support it, but more pervasively by the majority of scientists who accept it as a “necessary evil,” as one participant put it.

Researchers have agency because they make choices and articulate the tensions of their work, but they also accommodate, create, and re-create the parameters of that agency by engaging in commercialization. The constraints are produced by decisions made within and outside of the university, through funding frameworks and university restructuring, for instance, but also through the work of the laboratory. In other words, it is not just the most powerful actors of the state that enshrine commercialization as the way forward; it is also the tacit acceptance of this direction in the daily work of science that makes it a material reality. Thus, the challenges, contradictions, and tensions that scientists explore when they think about commercialization must come to the fore; they must be articulated and interrogated if there is to be any change in the daily work of science or the direction of scientific inquiry. Academic researchers can continually reproduce the products and ideas of commercialization and they can also choose not to reproduce those ideas, and there are challenges in both directions. The contradictions faced by researchers are important. If we pay attention to the complaints emanating from the field, we may entertain possibilities for change.