Doing science in a culture of accountability: Compliance through resistance to alienation and estrangement

Abstract

New Zealand's system of public funding of research was restructured during 1990–92 to delineate the policy, funder, and provider roles. Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) were created as companies operating in a competitive, global, market‐led economy, in order to be efficient in the use of public money and accountable to government goals. This paper explores how restructuring impacted on those who work in science, through an ethnographic study of a CRI. This CRI responded to this environment by corporatisation, instituting a management system which, through accountability requirements and normative control, sought to gain power over scientific workers. As a result they experienced alienation and estrangement, which they resisted by developing compliance tactics that enabled them to stay in employment and ostensibly align with organisational and governmental goals, while maintaining and protecting their self‐identities and making their work meaningful. The implications and risks of this response to the research funding system are discussed.

Keywords:

• alienation
• compliance
• corporatisation
• estrangement
• ethnography
• work
• normative control
• resistance
• restructuring
• science practice
• self identity
• sociology of work