On the metaphors and losers of academic capitalism

First of all, I would like to thank Mark Maguire for initiating this exchange and Cris Shore and George Marcus for their thoughtful comments. This is the sort of academic practice that makes scholarly work inherently valuable and that is in jeopardy of disappearing when pecuniary interests trump academic engagement within our professional vocabularies of motive. In a famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, made even more famous on YouTube, Chomsky insists that scholars specify the institutional conditions under which human potential can be maximised. In reply, Foucault suggests that we ought to get a better handle on the scope of the problem before we jump to solutions: ‘I admit to not being able to define . . . an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society. . . . If we want right away to define the profile and the formula of our future society, without criticizing all the forms of political power that are exerted . . . there is a risk that they reconstitute themselves.’ It seems to me that when it comes to understanding how science is being refashioned by the constraints of academic capitalism, we have a lot less of Foucault’s documentary orientation than we do Chomsky’s critical utopianism. I am glad that my esteemed critics suggest that ‘The New Tools of the Science Trade’ makes some headway toward balancing this disparity. This is also why I maintained a largely descriptive orientation that sketches the main logics, conceptual vocabularies and capitals of this trend rather than a polemical one that decides, a priori to empirical study, whose social capital will dominate. While I outlined the scope conditions of my findings, I certainly appreciate both Shore’s and Marcus’s insights into the variation across national and institutional contexts. I am, however, concerned that the approach Shore suggests can too easily ossify the varied institutional processes I am trying to keep as alive, in flux and contextualised as the on-the-ground practices I observed in my case studies. Rather than produce a scorecard of winners and losers, then, which reduces institutional life to the oversimplified yet pernicious metaphor of competitive individualism, the combined insights of Shore and Marcus offer an opportunity to sketch out not who loses but what we risk losing when this game gets played

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