Social Science Research Council

Of all the trends that impinge upon Viridiana’s day-to-day activities, this is the one that is treated as obvious by all her peers. The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the Federal government in the US has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal dollar expenditures for R&D have been more or less flat over the last 15 years. Science policy experts know this wasn’t only a matter of tight budgets, but that it involves a dramatic reversal of principles which had become ingrained in the political psyche in the years just after WWII.

The globalization of corporate R&D is one of the characteristic hallmarks of the new regime of knowledge production. Of course, multinational companies headquartered in smaller countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland have long internationalized their R&D activities essentially from their inception; but the more striking trend is the sharp rise in international outsourcing of research across the board since the 1980s.

In a 2004 article published in the International Herald Tribune, the former general secretary of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Donald J. Johnston argued that as educational systems are increasingly facing international competition for jobs, the demands for new technologies, and the broader needs of the knowledge economy, they are bound to [...]