Actores valorizando la ciencia en regimenes científicos estrategicos

With the underlying hypothesis of a shift toward strategic or neoliberal science regimes, much work has been done to analyze the multiple transformations of science institutions and policies over the last decades (e.g. Mirowski and Sent 2008; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Bruno, 2008). The trends towards privatization and commodification of science are undisputable but we argue that little attention has been paid so far to the various political conceptions of research and innovation (R&I) coexisting within strategic science regimes. Cognitive approaches to public policy already stressed the circular relationship between meaning and power (e.g. Muller and Surel, 1998; Roe, 1994), but strategic science has remained out of the scope of such analyses. Regarding R&I policies, this leads to different ways to conceive of the “value” of science, some related to preexisting institutions and narratives, and some branching out toward new cognitive resources to achieve politico-economic aims. In this article, we hypothesize the coexistence of at least four justificatory narratives which help structuring the representations and actions of scientists and policymakers when they address science as a political object: ‘science for the sake of science’, ‘science, the endless frontier (continued)’, ‘knowledge-based economy’ and ‘grand societal challenges’. Each one attributes a different value to science, proposes a specific organization for the R&I system, and addresses the relation with economy and society differently. In order to understand how these justificatory narratives are locally enacted, and thereby grounded in R&I policymaking, we analyze the political discourses on science of actors from biotechnology labs, university management boards, and science policy advisory boards in Wallonia, French-speaking Belgium. We find traces of every of the four ideal-typical narratives that we identified, either in almost “pure” versions or in hybridized forms. We conclude that these developments are part of the same multidirectional movement of re-contextualization of science in society and we attend to some of the implications induced.