Lamenting the Golden Age: Love, Labour and Loss in the Collective Memory of Scientists

Abstract

Academic science is often described as having a moral economy underpinned by curiosity, creativity and a love of the subject. It is also described as having a political economy tied to national programmes for socio-economic growth. According to many writers, in recent decades those moral and political economies have become disconnected through greater managerial, audit and commercial practices pervading the academy. Classic ideals of professional norms and ethos have been eroded in these new economically incentivised environments. Biomedical scientists working at a major UK university echoed these sentiments, lamenting a lost ‘golden age’ of science characterised by intellectual freedom, serendipitous discovery and a love of doing science. In practice, their lamentation serves as a myth and expresses a key tension in pursuing science as a job and as a vocation. Playing a performative role in scientists' own self-understanding, the myth not only underwrites scientific identity, but also supports research management by demarcating ‘science’ from the practices that manage, measure and commercialise it. The ‘golden age’ emerges as a significant explanatory narrative in contemporary science. It embodies a moral economy that is detached from its institutional contexts, and thus unable to resolve the inequalities and tensions produced through the political economy that relies on it.

Key Words:

• academic science
• commercialisation
• golden age
• moral economy
• myth
• scientific labour

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [PTA-033-2004-00008].

Notes

1 The term moral economy of science is borrowed from Lorraine Daston (1995). She argues that a relationship exists between the personal and professional investments made by scientists and the status of scientific knowledge. Daston argues that the scientific self is a subject position that exercises a form of epistemic virtue by practicing particular sets of values in order to create new certified forms of knowledge.

2 I refer here to new models of knowledge production presented by these authors. Gibbons et al. (1994) devised Mode 2, Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (1997), the Triple Helix, and Jasanoff (2005) explores of a new social contract for science. Each takes as given that a historical shift has occurred.