Exploring the growing division among academic scientists over a profit
motive in research.
The commercialization of research is one of the most significant
contemporary features of US higher education, yet we know surprisingly
little about how scientists perceive and experience commercial rewards.
A Fractured Profession is the first book to systematically examine the
implications of commercialization for both universities and faculty
members from the perspective of academic scientists. Drawing on richly
detailed interviews with sixty-one scientists at four universities
across the United States, sociologist David R. Johnson explores how an
ideology of commercialism produces intraprofessional conflict in
academia.
The words of scientists themselves reveal competing constructions of
status, conflicting norms, and divergent career paths and professional
identities. Commercialist scientists embrace a professional ideology
that emphasizes the creation of technologies that control societal
uncertainties and advancing knowledge toward particular--and
financial--ends. Traditionalist scientists, on the other hand, often
find themselves embattled and threatened by university and federal
emphasis on commercialization. They are less concerned about issues such
as conflicts of interest and corruption than they are about unequal
rewards, unequal conditions of work, and conflicts of commitment to
university roles and basic science.
Arguing that the division between commercialists and traditionalists
represents a new form of inequality in the academic profession, this
book offers an incisive look into the changing conditions of work in an
era of academic capitalism. Focusing on how the profit motive is
reshaping higher education and redefining what faculty are supposed to
do, this book will appeal to scientists and academics, higher education
scholars, university administrators and policy makers, and students
considering a career in science.
