Normalizing Complaint

Abstract

In recent decades, academic science has increasingly been directed toward commercializable ends by neoliberal governments. In this article, I outline a concern that academic scientists have not been consulted about the transformation of science, but nevertheless, in some ways accept commercialization as the way things are done. I focus on the ways in which academic scientists attempt to exercise agency, albeit within the parameters of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In this economy, scientific inquiry has transformed to be focused more on producing marketable products. In order to explore the parameters of scientists’ agency in the context of that transformation, I first elaborate on the idea of agency’s “parameters” and argue that the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I propose a methodological direction that can attend to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy.