Social Science Research Council

Where teaching and research were still, until recently, “crafts” indissolubly attached to the person performing them, scholars are now regarded as a “bundle” of functions that can and should be “unbundled,” desubjectivized, and broken down into as many discrete tasks that can be fulfilled more efficiently, and on demand, by interchangeable operators – a development made possible by the pervasive introduction of ICTs as instruments of coordination.

This last week I attended a talk by Professor Paul Duguid of the UC Berkeley I-School. Prof. Duguid teaches on the topic of information quality, and recently has begun research on the history and development of trademarks and branding. As with his previous work, his talk raised issues that question the embrace of the current popular culture of open web based systems, and his commentaries are well worth sharing.

Excerpts from the first chapter of Philip Mirowski’s forthcoming book, ScienceMart™: A primer on the new economics of science, to be published by Harvard University Press, will regularly appear on Knowledge Rules as The Viridiana Jones Chronicles.–N.G.
It’s not easy making a living in the knowledge biz these days. Of late our heroine, the intrepid academic researcher Viridiana Jones, often feels trapped between the Scylla of Disneyfication of higher education and the Charybdis of Free EnronPrise in securing a patron to support her inquiries, and finds herself sometimes wistfully wondering what life might have been like if she had gone and gotten that law degree instead….