David Tyfield

Rebecca Lave

Charles Thorpe

Samuel Randalls

The political economy of research and innovation (R&I) is one of the central issues of the early twenty-first century. ‘Science’ and ‘innovation’ are increasingly tasked with driving and reshaping a troubled global economy while also tackling multiple, overlapping global challenges, such as climate change or food security, global pandemics or energy security. But responding to these demands is made more complicated because R&I themselves are changing. Today, new global patterns of R&I are transforming the very structures, institutions and processes of science and innovation, and with it their claims about desirable futures. Our understanding of R&I needs to change accordingly. Responding to this new urgency and uncertainty, this handbook presents a pioneering selection of the growing body of literature that has emerged in recent years at the intersection of science and technology studies and political economy. The central task for this research has been to expose important but consequential misconceptions about the political economy of R&I and to build more insightful approaches. This volume therefore explores the complex interrelations between R&I (both in general and in specific fields) and political economies across a number of key dimensions from health to environment, and universities to the military. The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science offers a unique collection of texts across a range of issues in this burgeoning and important field from a global selection of top scholars. The handbook is essential reading for students interested in the political economy of science, technology and innovation. It also presents succinct and insightful summaries of the state of the art for more advanced scholars.

The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science

Dramatic and controversial changes in the funding of science over the past two decades, towards its increasing commercialization, have stimulated a huge literature trying to set out an "economics of science". Whether broadly in favour or against these changes, the vast majority of these frameworks employ ahistorical analyses that cannot conceptualise, let alone address, the questions of "why have these changes occurred?" and "why now?" Nor, therefore, can they offer much insight into the crucial question of future trends. Given the growing importance of science and innovation in an age of both a globalizing knowledge-based economy (itself in crisis) and enormous challenges that demand scientific and technological responses, these are significant gaps in our understanding of important contemporary social processes. This book argues that the fundamental underlying problem in all cases is the ontological shallowness of these theories, which can only be remedied by attention to ontological presuppositions. Conversely, a critical realist approach affords the integration of a realist political economy into the analysis of the economics of science that does afford explicit attention to these crucial questions; a 'cultural political economy of research and innovation' (CPERI). Accordingly, the book sets out an introduction to the existing literature on the economics of science together with novel discussion of the field from a critical realist perspective. In arguing thus across levels of abstraction, however, the book also explores how concerted engagement with substantive social enquiry and theoretical debate develops and strengthens critical realism as a philosophical project, rather than simply 'applying' it. While the first of these two volumes argues how mainstream economics is inadequate to the task of an explanatory and critical 'economics of science', the challenge in this second volume is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of disciplines offering more promising starting points. Two social scientific disciplines are particularly promising candidates, starting from 'economy' or 'science', namely heterodox political economy and science & technology studies respectively. Synthesising these into an 'economics of science', however, still encounters considerable hurdles, in that there remain some fundamental and mutual philosophical incompatibilities. Formulating an 'economics of science' thus demands that both 'economics' and 'science' be redefined. The book explores how a critical realist approach affords some common ground upon which this productive synthesis may be pursued, in the form of a cultural political economy of research and innovation (CPERI).

Volume 2: Towards a Synthesis of Political Economy and Science and Technology Studies

The Economics of Science: A Critical Realist Overview

Katharina Manderscheid

Tim Schwanen

Although Foucault’s work has been employed and embraced enthusiastically by some ‘mobilities’ scholars, discussion across these two traditions to date has mostly been partial and unsystematic. Yet Foucault’s work can make critical contributions, for example, to thinking about governing mobilities in contemporary societies, while conversely mobilities research opens up new perspectives on Foucault. In combination these bodies of work can illuminate issues as diverse as: the greater interdependencies between mobility systems (e.g. transport, tourism, trade, internet use); the proliferation of the undesired mobilities of viruses, of natural phenomena like fire, of (what is taken to be) criminality and other seemingly inevitable by-products of globalisation; the perceived threats to desirable forms of mobility as constituted by climate change, peak oil and energy security, and terrorism and warfare; and the increased popularity of logics of governance premised on choice, responsibilisation and the (re)coding of phenomena in economic terms under neo-liberalism. Against this background, this book brings together the first major collection of contributions from across the social sciences with a shared interest in both mobilities and Foucauldian thinking. This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Mobilities and Foucault

What can we do in this period of historic, global turbulence? Mainstream narratives have no plausible account of how to stop exacerbating the multiple, overlapping challenges; much less begin to address them meaningfully. The only thing everyone agrees is innovation will be needed. But what is innovation? Usually, it is understood as new technologies that will ‘solve’ specific ‘problems’ – and, it is hoped, return life to a ‘business as usual’ of progress in individual freedom and wealth. But innovation is a thoroughly social process with profound implications for the arrangement of power in a society, hence shaping the emergence of new social systems. Exploring evidence from the key arenas of low-carbon innovation, including in the pivotal location of a rising China, this book describes the global systemic crisis of a neoliberal world order and the embryonic emergence of an alternative global power regime of a ‘liberalism 2.0’. This augurs both a web 2.0-based revitalization of the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century and new Dickensian inequalities and injustices. Against hopes that the present is a ‘revolutionary’ moment, therefore, political engagement with this emerging power regime is thus presented as the most productive strategy for a progressive twenty-first century politics.

David Tyfield

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