Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

DOI 10.1007/s11186-011-9147-3

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political

sociological approach

Kelly Moore & Daniel Lee Kleinman & David Hess &
Scott Frickel

Published online: 10 June 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having

influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies
since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal
variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology
of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of
social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws
attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several
countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since
the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange
between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic
capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based
regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role
of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism;
and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics,
represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation,
activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.

K. Moore (*)
Department of Sociology, Loyola University-Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL 60660,
USA
e-mail: kmoore11@luc.edu

D. L. Kleinman
Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
e-mail: dlkleinman@wisc.edu

D. Hess
Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
e-mail: david.j.hess@vanderbilt.edu

S. Frickel
Department of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA
e-mail: frickel@wsu.edu
506 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

Keywords Political sociology of science . Scientization . New knowledge economy .

Epistemic modernization . Social movements

Beginning in the 1980s, changes in government, industry, and the university have
increasingly pressured academic and industrial scientists to align their research with
the goals of national competitiveness, regional economic development, and
marketplace opportunities. However, the changes have paradoxically opened new
opportunities for scientists and citizens to develop science in the interest of the
public and more specific constituencies. In this article, we argue that a new
framework for the study of science is needed, one that seeks to provide a balanced
understanding of both the new restrictions associated with the increasing influence
of the private sector on the scientific field and the new forms of citizen participation
and public-interest science that are emerging in response.
We develop a sociology of science that draws on concepts, tools, and approaches
from political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and
organizational sociology (Frickel and Moore 2006). Our political sociology of
science draws attention to the changing institutional and extra-institutional matrix of
the scientific field. In doing so, we build on, but depart from, two traditions in the
sociology of science: the institutional sociology of science, which focused on the
internal mechanisms of the scientific field such as the reward system (e.g., Merton
1973), and the sociology of scientific knowledge, which drew attention to the
microsociology of scientific networks and the social negotiations involved in the
construction of knowledge claims (Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983). In calling
attention to the institutional and extra-institutional matrix of the scientific field, we
also seek to avoid two theoretical pitfalls that have hampered previous attempts to
improve understanding of the relationship between science and extra-scientific fields
such as the economy. One problem emerges from the assumption that scientific
change is an exogenous variable that leads to technological transformation and in
turn influences the structure of the social order. Here, we end up with a reductive
technological determinism (Stehr 2002), a view that can be found in some analyses
of the “information society” (e.g., Castells 1996). A second, inverse problem begins
with social structure as the exogenous variable. Here, analysts argue that long-term
support by ruling elites for a system of knowledge production inevitably benefits
those elites’ class interests (e.g., Hessen 1971). An uncritical extension of this logic
to the study of the current historical moment would likely lead to a reductive
understanding of the relationship between globalization and science.
Our view springs from a third perspective, which assumes that science is a quasi-
autonomous field of power that is subject to influence from other fields but also
possesses a degree of self-governance (Fournier et al. 1975; Bourdieu 2001). The
partial autonomy is due in part to the internal logic of the field that has been
specified in both Mertonian and constructivist sociologies of science and in part to
degrees of freedom that emerge from the countervailing powers exerted—often
unevenly—by the economic, political, and civil society fields. This perspective
enables us to develop an historical sociology of the contemporary changes in the
scientific field that does not underplay the importance of structural change, including
the increasing power of multinational corporations in global economics and politics,
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 507

and recognizes the role of scientists, political and industrial reformers, and the
organized citizenry in charting alternative directions for the scientific field. We
emphasize two central themes that can be observed across different institutional
settings where science and neoliberal globalization meet: the existence of counter-
vailing tendencies and the intertwining of scientific and political language in ways
that asymmetrically stabilize and transform institutional relationships.

Background: globalization and neoliberalism

In defining the relation of science to neoliberal globalization as a central, new

problem in the study of science, we need to specify what is meant by the central
terms. We understand “globalization” as a descriptive characterization of an
historical change in the scale of society. World systems theorists have documented
the tendency for world systems to increase in scale and complexity over time (e.g.,
Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997), but the term “globalization” is used here to refer to
general changes that have occurred since World War II. As Hirst and Thompson
(1999) have argued, prior to World War I, the world was highly globalized on some
measures, but the two world wars and high trade tariffs from the 1930s through
1950s reduced the level of economic globalization. However, after World War II, the
world again became more globalized, and the changes can then be broken down by
societal field. For example, in the political field the term refers to the increasing role
of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations in organizing
access to rights, identities, and material benefits; in the economic field to the
increasing role of multinational corporations, and the interlocking of global financial
institutions; and in the social field to changes in the volume and types of
immigration and cultural flows.
As we use the term, “neoliberal globalization” is not a static or homogenous
phenomenon. As a broad concept it can only be used effectively if it is understood as
having undergone historical change and different levels of embeddedness across the
world. In this context, Harvey (2005) emphasizes some of the differences in the
institutionalization of neoliberalism around the world, and anthropologists such as
Ong (2006) and Ferguson (2006) have explored differences in its forms and scope
using ethnographic and other anthropological methods. Across these differences in
analyses of neoliberal approaches to globalization, one common characteristic of
neoliberalism at a global level is the new power of owners of large, multinational
corporations that benefit from economic policies associated with innovation, trade
liberalization, reduced government spending on entitlements and decreased state
restrictions on labor, health, and environmental hazards of production (Campbell and
Pederson 2001; Harvey 2005; Sklair 2001).
Just as there are various dimensions to globalization as an historical transforma-
tion, so there are various ideologies and practices that shape approaches to how it
should or should not occur. From the 1930s to the 1960s, dominant ideologies
included social liberalism (or social democracy) in the wealthy capitalist states,
socialism in the communist countries and some of the developing countries, and
developmentalism in other developing countries. Although highly diverse, the
orientations had a family resemblance in that they emphasized a relatively
508 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

interventionist role of the state in the economy via public ownership, state planning,
or strong regulation of exchange markets; protection of domestic markets via import
substitution policies, industry subsidies, tariffs, and currency manipulation; and an
approach to poverty and social safety nets as the responsibility of national
governments through redistributive programs such as welfare, health insurance,
and social security (McMichael 2000).
The term “neoliberalism” is used here to describe ideologies and practices that
have also varied widely over time and across countries but have a family
resemblance on three issues: a tendency to prefer markets over governments as
instruments of policy (via privatization or, where regulatory policies are deemed
necessary, via regulatory interventions that use marketplace mechanisms such as
cap-and-trade systems); to favor trade liberalization over protectionism (with
reductions in tariffs, subsidies, floating currencies, and regional and global trade
agreements); and to approach poverty from the vantage point of self-responsibility,
decentralized public-private partnerships, enterprise development, and other ori-
entations to economic development expected to produce overall increases in the
standard of living rather than redistributive change. As Foucault (2008) argued,
neoliberalism emerged largely in response to the perceived totalitarian implications
of state planning associated with fascism and communism; it was “neo” in the sense
of encouraging a return to the state-economy relationship that had characterized
some Western societies during the nineteenth century. The early German neoliberals
(“ordoliberals”) were not anti-state; rather, they argued that the intervention of
the state in the economy was necessary to develop and protect markets. The
American variant of neoliberalism placed a stronger emphasis on new market
creation and entrepreneurialism, and it eschewed any contamination of homo
economicus by concerns with poverty and social responsibility (Friedman 1970).
As Harvey (2005) has argued, neoliberalism became politically influential as a
response to the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, and the rapid spread of
economic policies associated with neoliberalism can be explained by both their
perceived effectiveness in solving economic crises and their benefits to the world’s
economic elites.
Categories such as “social liberalism” and “neoliberalism” are ideal types, and on
many policy issues there are ongoing debates that show the continuing vitality of
each as well as various mixes of the two. For example, a neoliberal approach to
globalization (what we term here “neoliberal globalization”) was tested in Chile
during the 1970s, then introduced more broadly in the Reagan-Thatcher revolution
of the 1980s and in the structural adjustment policies forced on developing countries
as part of debt negotiation (Harvey 2005). After this “roll back” phase of
neoliberalism, the policies were softened to some degree by the “third way” reforms
exemplified by the Clinton administration and Blair government, each of which
emphasized state intervention in the economy to encourage industrial innovation and
competitiveness (Peck and Tickel 2002). Still, Clinton, Blair, and others tended to
accept some of the fundamental tenets of neoliberal globalization, including trade
liberalization and market-based solutions to policy problems.
Two factors are behind the differing forms and degrees of the influence of
neoliberalism on public policies. First, neoliberalism is instituted in particular
institutional, geographic, and cultural settings. As a result, it takes varied forms
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 509

because policies and ideas tend toward obduracy, not change. As we argue later,
neoliberal ideas, such as limiting or expanding the “risks” associated with new
technologies in the interests of promoting profit, are legally and culturally interpreted
in extant policy domains and legal systems. Second, neoliberal public policies have
been contested. Social movements, civil society organizations, socially responsible
businesses, and some governments have articulated alternative visions of globaliza-
tion, some of which call for a return to mid-twentieth century social liberalism and
democratic socialism and point to the democracy deficit of global governance (Keck
and Sikkink 1998; Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Wood 2005; Routledge et al. 2006;
Smith and Bandy 2005; Gautney et al. 2009). Alternative approaches to
globalization can be found not only among grassroots anti-globalization movements
but also among some of the prominent economists who were former insiders. For
example, Stiglitz (2007) has argued in favor of a form of globalization that would
retain trade liberalization but would work on the redistributive issues that have
tended to be avoided under neoliberal policies that promise to solve poverty
indirectly via economic expansion and increased productivity. Other social scientists
have also questioned some of the assumptions behind descriptive characterizations
of neoliberal globalization. For example, assumptions that place is no longer
important in an era of globalization have been challenged by studies that show the
reconstitution of place-based synergies leading to the creation of global cities
(Sassen 2000), triple-helixes of government-industry-academic partnerships in
regional development programs (Etzkowitz et al. 1998), and the renewed emphasis
on localism (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002; Winter 2003; DuPuis and Goodman
2005; Hess 2009a). Social scientists have also questioned the assumption that trade
liberalization and deregulation produce an economic tide that lifts all boats; instead,
new forms of inequality have been identified, such as growing inequality within
nations, even as newly industrializing countries have become wealthier (Schmitt
2000). Assessments of the impact of structural adjustment policies in developing
countries have also shown that their effects have often been deleterious for the poor
(Davis 2006; Portes 1994; Portes and Roberts 2005) and to women (Duggan 2004;
Lind 2010).
We extend the insight that the effects of neoliberal globalization have been
both unevenly distributed and varied into the study of science, technology, and
society. As we suggested earlier, under neoliberalism the economy is increasingly
characterized as a free market that contains its own logics and rules, such that it
operates outside of human direction. The naturalization of the market makes it
analogous to older understandings of nature that characterized it as operating
according to its own laws and rules that stood outside of human observation or
intervention but that could be understood by experts. The new language of the
economy-as-free-market black boxes the materiality, rules, and labor that are the
foundation of economic life, subsuming them under an obfuscating numericism.
Yet neoliberal policies and programs have never appeared in a standard fashion
across the globe, because in practice “free markets” encounter cultures, histories,
and geographies that make it difficult to implement, and give rise to resistances.
As a result, scientized neoliberal globalization appears to operate according to
natural law, but takes hold unevenly across the globe and in different institutional
settings.
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We argue that an understanding of the complex changes associated with neoliberal

globalization and science requires attention to three related processes: the growth of
the knowledge economy and new patterns of university-industry relations, new
regimes of science-based technology regulation in a global economy, and the
transformation of the relationship between science and social movements (or civil
society more broadly). In describing these three phenomena, we both develop a new
conceptual vocabulary for the study of science, and ground the concepts in a
synthesis of empirical research conducted by each of us as well as by other
sociologists and social scientists with similar interests.

Asymmetrical convergence in the new knowledge economy

As Noble (1977), Forman (1987), Kevles (1997), and other historians of science
have demonstrated, there has been a longstanding relationship between the research
needs of industry and the government and the general direction of research fields and
research priorities. Thus, the argument that neoliberal globalization has led to an
increasing impact of industry on scientific research needs to be inspected against the
historical background of an ongoing relationship that was evident well before even
the first articulations of neoliberalism. Our discussion in this section focuses on the
United States, but other studies indicate that related changes have occurred
elsewhere (e.g., Gibbons et al. 1994; Marginson and Considine 2000; Strathern
2000), and we hope that a comparative perspective will characterize future work in
the political sociology of science.
With respect to the general argument that industry has had a growing influence on
scientific research since 1980, one source of data is the pattern of changes in
funding. Whereas from 1950 to 1980 the federal government was roughly equal to
industry as a source of R&D expenditures, since 1980 government expenditures
have been level while industry expenditures have doubled (Boroush 2008).
Likewise, industry has also increased its share not only as a funding source, but as
a performer of R&D, so that by 2007 industry performed 72% of R&D, in
comparison with 11% for government R&D and 13% for universities and colleges
(Boroush 2008). The changes in the extent of industry funding of scientific research,
at least in the United States, provide a helpful picture of a background trend, but they
do not in themselves constitute evidence for a relationship between neoliberal
globalization and scientific research. One must ask instead what the changing
relationship between industry and scientific research means and how scientific
research has changed as a result.
A broad transformation in the role of the university in American society occurred
as a result of increasing industrial and government concern with global competition,
apprehension that predated trade liberalization but was heightened by its effects.
After World War II, smokestack industry—firms responsible for the mass production
of consumer durables—appeared as the “economic base” of the prosperity of the
economies of the United States and other wealthy industrialized countries. As
consumer goods production shifted increasingly to formerly agrarian societies with
developing industrial economies, political and industrial leaders in high-income
countries came to view science-intensive industries, such as information technology,
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 511

biotechnology, and nanotechnology, as necessary for maintaining economic

leadership (Stehr 2002). Thus, in addition to shifts in funding that became weighted
toward industry, there was also increased attention to the value of universities as
sources of industrial innovation, often connected with regional industrial clusters
(Croissant and Smith-Doerr 2007; Kleinman, 2003; Kleinman and Vallas 2001;
Etzkowitz et al. 1998; Owen-Smith 2005; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). Although
concerns with the industrial competitiveness of the United States during the post-
World War II period predated the emergence of neoliberal policies, those concerns
were amplified by the growing pressure on American industries to innovate that
emerged partly due to one central policy associated with neoliberalism: trade
liberalization. As Fordist manufacturing in the industrial countries closed down,
governments became preoccupied with rebuilding industry in sectors where there
was a global advantage, specifically the knowledge economy.
New intellectual property regimes facilitated the repositioning of universities as
engines of the new knowledge economy. In the United States, the passage of the
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (which facilitated university ownership of intellectual
property) and the Supreme Court decision of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (also in 1980,
which enabled the patenting of life) correspond temporally with the Reagan
revolution and the emergence of the roll-back phase of neoliberalism. However, as
Berman (2008) has shown in an analysis of the factors behind the passage of the
Bayh-Dole Act, federal officials were driven more by concerns with national
competitiveness and the need for a new solution to the problem of technology
transfer than they were by neoliberal ideology. Certainly, one could make similar
arguments about the relatively unimportant role of neoliberal thought in the
Chakrabarty decision. In other words, one needs to exercise caution in attempting
to show the direct and explicit linkages between changes in the scientific field and
neoliberal globalization. Following Bourdieu (2001, 2005), we approach the
problem by looking for homologies or parallels in the transformation of the
scientific and political fields and for causal links between actors and the structures of
the fields in which they operate.
Although the two policy changes were not directly motivated by neoliberal
ideology, they created political opportunities in the scientific field for the
advancement of practices associated with neoliberalism. As the new intellectual
property regimes were established, universities began to systematize relationships
with industry via technology transfer offices. The emphasis on technology transfer
and extramural funding had implications for the power relations among departments
within universities. Not only were departments and schools with strong ties to the
welfare state (such as criminology, welfare, public health, and some of the social
sciences) eclipsed by departments and schools that were more closely aligned with
industrial innovation, but departments that had built power bases on older types of
industry linkages—such as chemistry and physics departments—were also chal-
lenged by emergent research fields such as information technology and biotechnol-
ogy. Furthermore, because the effectiveness of technology transfer offices was
uneven, the prestige relations among universities also shifted (Colyvas and Powell
2007, Owen-Smith 2005, Powell et al. 2007). For example, the Association for
University Technology Managers (2000) surveyed 142 universities and found that 70
reported annual licensing income of less than one million dollars. Fewer than 15% of
512 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

the universities made over $10 million; in other words, many universities lost money
on their investment. A wide swath of universities invested heavily in commercial-
izing the research of their faculty, but the benefits have accrued mainly to the largest
research universities. Universities that were able to establish research strengths in the
new research fields were able to benefit from the new emphasis on technology
transfer and industrial innovation.
Although the focus on technology transfer turned out not to be as broadly
beneficial as first envisioned, it enabled a more general spread of the “culture of
commerce” to academia. Here, one finds evidence of neoliberalism in the
proliferation of industry-oriented language and practices in higher education. Again,
one does not need to make the claim that individual administrators intentionally saw
themselves as neoliberal ideologues. As new institutionalists have shown, practices
often spread through changes in normative frameworks about how to handle routine
and existing problems rather than through explicit rational calculation (DiMaggio
and Powell 1983). In the new context of reduced government funding, enhanced
concern with industrial competitiveness, and opportunities for revenue streams from
technology transfer, administrators emphasized entrepreneurship and the spread of
private-sector practices to university management. Slaughter and colleagues have
explored the many related changes under the rubric of “academic capitalism”
(Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). One of the primary
features of academic capitalism is attention to the performance of academic units,
often using numerical standards. Enabled by information technologies and external
auditing agencies, university administrators could track with ease metrics such as
faculty/student ratios, extramural funding, graduate students supported, publications
generated, patents, and licenses. An “audit culture” (Strathern 2000) came to
permeate the university, in which faculty became objects of managerial discipline
and the financial autonomy of departments was undermined. Universities also
moved away from cultivating administrative leadership within the academy itself
and instead increasingly sought leaders with industrial or government management
experience. In some institutions, undergraduate students were reframed as consumers,
and faculty performance was measured within a frame of “customer satisfaction”
(Kleinman 2010).
More generally, universities increasingly drew on “codes of commerce” originally
developed in the corporate world. One of the most direct examples of the impact of
such codes of commerce in connection with neoliberalism is the cultivation of
entrepreneurialism, broadly construed, to encompass grantsmanship, program
development, and technology transfer (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Donoghue
2008). With faculty, students, and even administrators understood as entrepreneurs,
the reward systems changed fundamental attitudes toward risk-taking, program
development, and research portfolio choices. On the one hand, scholarly and basic
research into fundamental questions as well as teaching on such topics, a prerequisite
of the autonomy of the scientific field via control over research and teaching
agendas, was weakened. Unfunded research or poorly funded research, even if it
generated significant prestige among other knowledge producers, was devalued. On
the other hand, opportunities opened up for scientists to develop both new academic
programs and new partnerships with industry that in turn could lead to a more
diversified set of funding prospects and the potential for economic benefits via
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 513

licensing and start-up businesses. The changes produced tremendous pressures on

young scientists as well as shifts in their evaluation of career opportunities. The
scientist-entrepreneur may have emerged as an exemplar of the neoliberal academy,
but not for all scientists in all fields. Rather, scientific fields tended to become
structured by a tension between a producer pole that emphasized independence and
traditional scholarship, and a practical pole that emphasized new collaborations and
industrial applications. The dominant pole varied across disciplines (Albert 2003).
As some areas of university R&D become commercialized and subject to an
entrepreneurial ethic, the codes and practices of academia were simultaneously
finding their way into industry, especially in the high-tech sector. We term this
double transformation asymmetric convergence (Kleinman and Vallas 2001; Vallas
and Kleinman 2008; see also Owen-Smith 2005; Rabinow 1996). For example, some
firms, generally in the high-technology sector, were situated on what they term
“campuses.” The benefits of an academic research environment went beyond
recreational facilities, park-like settings, child care, libraries, and visiting lecturers; in
some cases, industrial researchers had control over their on-campus hours and
leeway in defining research programs, as long as they could be defended as potential
new sources of revenue for the firm. In some ways, the new industrial R&D settings
even offered advantages over university-based research. Whereas universities were
often constrained by departmental structures, new industrial R&D settings promoted
up-to-the-minute interdisciplinary research, cross-laboratory relationships, and multi-
institutional collaboration, and they sought to promote open communication,
especially within the firm. In this sense, the new structures of industrial R&D may
have afforded greater autonomy for scientists, even though there were constraints on
scientific communication outside the firm and on researchers’ ability to pursue
fundamental research problems that cannot be linked clearly to product innovation
and new profits (Vallas and Kleinman 2008).
Thus, high-technology industry increasingly offered benefits once characteristic
of university settings, even as universities became subject to the managerial practices
associated with the corporate world. This convergence is asymmetrical because in
many instances industry maintains an economic and (increasingly) cultural
advantage. For example, in interviews, graduate students in the sciences have
expressed disappointment upon discovering the high levels of entrepreneurialism
required to keep a university laboratory afloat, and many have decided instead to
pursue careers in high-technology industry, where ironically they believed they
would have more autonomy and flexibility, experience less pressure than in
academia, and be better able to serve the public good (Vallas and Kleinman 2008).
Similarly, in an analysis of 2000 life scientists in the United States, Smith-Doerr
(2004) found that female Ph.D.s in biotechnology firms were nearly eight times
more likely to be in leadership positions than Ph.D.s in more hierarchical
organizations, including universities. Consistent with the idea of asymmetrical
convergence, where we see attributes widely thought to characterize academic life
shaping high technology industry, Smith-Doerr contends that the networked
character of high-tech firms promoted transparency and teamwork, which stresses
collective over individualized rewards and benefits women scientists.
In summary, neoliberal globalization and the new knowledge economy intersect
in two ways. First, neoliberal globalization is a background condition that facilitated
514 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

general economic changes that were already occurring as industrial production

became more internationalized. The increase in global competition, which trade
liberalization under neoliberalism facilitated, resulted in a shift of government and
industrial research funding toward technological innovation, and new intellectual
property regimes facilitated new relationships between universities and industry.
Likewise industrial R&D spending shifted away from “blue sky” research toward
potentially marketable technologies. Second, codes and practices associated with
neoliberalism, especially the emphasis on entrepreneurialism, have come to permeate
the research universities. In this context, industrial R&D centers, although more
attuned to technology transfer issues than in the past, have adopted some of the
practices associated with university-based research.
While the tendency is toward asymmetrical convergence between universities and
industry with industrial models of work maintaining key economic and cultural
advantages, countervailing patterns also emerge. The emphasis on entrepreneurial-
ism and technology transfer has generated openings for research projects that are
aligned with public interest concerns, such as environmental and health research,
provided that this work also brings in extramural funding and prestige. The ethos of
entrepreneurialism can be rechanneled in the form of social entrepreneurship, which
diverts a portion of research portfolios toward pro-bono projects funded by
governments, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and even, in some cases,
corporate benefactors. Such social justice-oriented initiatives are also of special
interest to universities, particularly those that are located in impoverished urban
areas and in poorer countries, where the effects of deindustrialization and the
dismantling of welfare-state protections may be visible in the deterioration of
neighborhoods bordering campuses or in a society more broadly (Haufler 2006;
Valdiya 2010). Moreover, many sites within the university—departments associated
with public service roles rather than industrial innovation, faculty and governance
structures, curricula and student programs that encourage voluntarism as a solution
to collective problems, and connections with community development efforts and
local political leaders—provide a countervailing force for the patterns of academic
capitalism. We do not suggest a monolithic approach to understanding how global
neoliberalism and the knowledge economy intersect–what we find, instead, is that
the knowledge economy helps generate capital in university settings, and that
knowledge-based firms have come to look more like universities.

The scientization of international regulation

Habermas (1970. p. 62) described the process of “scientization” in politics as

involving an increasing orientation of state actors “to strictly scientific
recommendations in the exercise of their public functions.” Today, the
intensification and expansion of scientization is broadly evident in the global
knowledge economy, where firms and governments increasingly rely on science
and technology to achieve, maintain, and strengthen their competitive positions.
This has not gone unnoticed. As new materials and technologies are unleashed
on markets, public concerns have mounted internationally with respect to the
health, safety, environmental, and social implications of those products. As those
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 515

concerns become reorganized, public challenges that push against regulatory

efforts to reduce state interference in international markets have become more
frequent. Somewhat paradoxically, rather than curtailing contestations of
neoliberal policies in international regulatory arenas, scientization seems to have
focused and intensified those challenges.
Understanding why requires a conceptual framework that goes well beyond the
concept of “deregulation.” As the early German neoliberals argued, the role of the
government is not to retreat from the economy completely but to make markets
function efficiently (Foucault 2008). That goal may require some regulation not only
to limit marketplace inefficiency, such as a tendency toward monopoly or
inefficiencies in trading systems, but also to address public concerns that could
otherwise lead to a collapse in confidence in markets. Thus, in the era of neoliberal
globalization, the regulatory field becomes a complex arena in which battles take
place less over “regulation versus deregulation” than over the types, degrees, and
scope of regulation and its effects, particularly internationally.
This section identifies three intertwined changes that are occurring in the
regulatory field and that directly implicate science. First, contrary to the
argument that under neoliberal globalization voluntary industry self-regulation
and deregulation by states have replaced state regulation, there is evidence that
regulation is increasingly taking place in international governance bodies.
Second, as international organizations have come to play an important role in
the regulatory field, the influence of multinational corporations—and their
backing by industrial science—has increased. Third, technology regulation is
often framed, particularly at the international level, in a discourse of scientism
that utilizes the authority of the scientific field but also depoliticizes the regulation of
new technologies.
To map out these processes of change, we focus our attention in this section on
food and agricultural biotechnology, partly because biotechnology is one of the
central industries of the new knowledge economy and partly because biotechnology
regulation is in some ways more developed than other emerging fields of technology
regulation, such as nanotechnology. As a result, the study of biotechnology
regulation can serve as a model for future research on technology regulation in the
neoliberal era. We explore the problem comparatively and draw out key themes that
frame our argument, including the existence of countervailing and contradictory
forces and the multifaceted ways in which neoliberalism and science are understood
and applied.

International governance

In the past, nation-states often created international organizations as means of

coordinating relatively autonomous national policy efforts. International gover-
nance organizations have become even more important in coordinating
international trade as economic systems have become more globalized. Thus,
we find a paradoxical situation in which some aspects of neoliberal globalization
have led to deregulation, such as the reduction of national trade barriers, while at
the same time the increased internationalization of markets has created ongoing
pressures for stronger international standards.
516 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

Under global neoliberalism, standards for the production, storage, and distribution
of internationally traded goods are increasingly organized by international
organizations that translate economic and social interests into scientific frameworks.
Rather than synchronizing state-level regulation, some of the most prominent
international trade and regulatory organizations have formulated entirely new
standards, which rely heavily on scientific language and expert knowledge (Jasanoff
2004; Miller 2004; Kingsbury et al. 2005; Biermann 2002; Halfon 2010; Winickoff
and Bushey 2010; Winickoff et al. 2005). We treat this process as as example of the
general phenomenon of scientization noted above.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission provides an instructive example. The
international organization was formed in 1962 by the Food and Agriculture
Organization and the World Health Organization of the United Nations. Responding
to global concerns about food additives, the Codex standardized the content of
internationally traded foods and the processes by which foods were created and
stored. Until 1994, the rules in the Codex were noncoercive; states could voluntarily
use them and by doing so could engage more easily in international trade with
participating partners. But in 1994, the World Trade Organization (WTO) built into
its regulations incentives for participating nations to base their food regulations on
those formulated in the Codex. While the use of Codex standards is still voluntary—
participating nations can use the Codex standards or use a science-based risk
assessment system—countries are advantaged in legal battles if they use the Codex
standards (Post 2005). Since 1994, the number of countries that have joined the
Codex Consortium has risen from 37 to nearly 200, and its rules cover the foods
eaten by 97% of the world’s population. This effectively makes the Codex the de
facto basis for international food regulations (Post 2005; Winickoff and Bushey
2010; Lindne 2008). The very character of internationally traded food is based on its
alignment with international scientific standards for moisture, purity, and other
measures, not cultural meanings or national standards. Since the Codex governance
system favors representatives from national governments—but particularly those that
can afford to pay full-time members who can serve on highly influential
subcommittees—it leaves food definitions in the hands of scientists and policy-
makers. Yet it also offers opportunities for input from NGOs, citizens in participating
countries, and scientists who can contribute independent reports, providing for at
least some grassroots influence. Still, given that the WTO rules require decisions
about the safety of food to be based on scientific and economic criteria, claimants
using other forms of argument are at a disadvantage (Winickoff and Bushey 2010;
Halfon 2010; Livermore 2006; Post 2005). More generally, given that nation states,
not citizens or NGOs, are members of these kinds of regulatory organizations, even
those that allow petitions by citizen groups are likely to be attentive to interests of
nation-states, not external petitioners.

Countervailing effects of corporate influences

The second trend in the neoliberal regulatory field is countervailing. The increasing
autonomy of the international regulatory organizations from the influence of
individual nation states is counterbalanced by an increase in the types and volume
of scientific input from industry into government regulations. Often these shifts in
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 517

input are supported by the neoliberal frame that values enhanced public-private
partnerships. In the extreme case rulemaking by national governments and
international organizations is replaced by standards set by international industrial
consortium groups (Haufler 2001; Busch and Bain 2004; Vogel 2008). In some
cases, industrial actors play a critical role in setting standards for trade, but there is
less novelty in that practice—which has been taking place for centuries—than in the
newest form of industrial self-regulation: the mitigation of the social and
environmental effects of production and trade. Haufler (2001) points out that early
industry self-regulation that developed in medieval Europe was organized around
lowering transaction costs in production and has mainly continued to take that form
until recently. Newer forms of international industry self-regulation, such as
certification councils (e.g., the Forest Stewardship Council) are organized as a
result of pressures from civil society and activist groups. Rather than submit to
government regulation, producers and distributors set new scientific standards
(sometimes with input from NGOs) to moderate unwanted or suspect social impacts
(Haufler 2006).

Scientism as politics

Across these new forms of governance, there is evidence of the growth and uneven
spread of “scientism” as a basis for regulatory policy (Kinchy et al. 2008; see also
Winickoff and Bushey (2010) on “risk” as a specific type of scientism). By scientism
we mean a discourse or framework for discussion that excludes consideration of
distributional and other social impact criteria in the determination by a regulatory
agency that a product is or is not suitable for markets. Scientism operates as an
ideological frame that helps drive the broader process of scientization identified by
Habermas. In its neoliberal form, scientism tends to restrict democratic participation
and weaken the options for governments to regulate new technologies in ways that
protect citizens rather than corporations. The influence of scientism in regulatory
policy is uneven; that is, it varies considerably across different countries due partly
to differences in political cultures (Jasanoff 2007). For example, although evidence
of the influence of neoliberalism is pervasive in the European Union in comparison
with the United States, the EU policymakers tend to be more tolerant of higher levels
of government intervention in the economy—as revealed by the regulation of
recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH), the first agricultural product of the
biotechnology industry.
In the United States, neoliberal ideology was evident generally in agricultural
policy during the 1980s, when changes in farm legislation required farmers to
depend increasingly on market prices for their incomes. Such market-oriented
policies were extended to agricultural biotechnology as well, where the government
policy favored a hands-off approach to private-sector innovation. The multinational
agrichemical company Monsanto first sought market approval for rbGH in the
United States in 1986, a time of dairy surpluses and widespread fears of what the
commercialization of the substance would do to the US dairy industry. In
congressional hearings, social scientists pointed to studies that suggested that the
commercialization of rbGH would lead to substantial consolidation of the industry,
thereby hurting small producers and undermining the iconic family farm.
518 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

These prospects led to the mobilization of grassroots opposition to the substance.

Many opponents of rbGH promoted a moratorium on commercialization of the drug
on the basis of the likely adverse socioeconomic impacts it would have, and despite
a broader political environment that favored deregulation, the arguments had some
short-term impact, leading to a temporary federal moratorium and two state
moratoria. Nevertheless, the US Food and Drug Administration ultimately rejected
the arguments raised about socioeconomic impacts and insisted instead on using a
narrow interpretation of health risks as the sole criterion for evaluating the
acceptability of the product for use in milk. Thus, the agency yoked a narrowly
scientistic orientation toward regulation to the general political commitment to free
markets, and in 1993 it approved the commercial use or rbGH in the United States
(Kleinman and Kinchy 2003).
The trajectory of rbGH regulation in the EU provides a valuable contrast. In the
EU, years of debate and several temporary moratoria focused on the likely
socioeconomic impacts of rbGH. The European Commission argued that commer-
cialization of rbGH would run counter to the longstanding Common Agricultural
Policy, which in part aimed to protect small-scale farming in EU countries. The
Commission justified several temporary moratoria during the 1990s using this
rationale. However, in 1996 Monsanto and Elanco challenged the Commission’s
position in the European Court of Justice, and in 1998 the Court ruled that
socioeconomic regulation was inconsistent with international (neoliberal) trade
agreements. rbGH could only be prohibited for narrowly technical reasons of health
and safety. With evidence of the debilitating effects that rbGH can have on dairy
cows, the Commission had a justification that would meet neoliberal muster, and EU
ministers voted in favor of a permanent ban on rbGH in December of 1999.
In both cases, debate over the social impacts of new technologies was closed
down, and social regulation ultimately was marginalized in favor of narrow
considerations of technical risk (as also occurs in other regulatory fields; see Wynne
2005; Winickoff and Bushey 2010). However, if neoliberal globalization were
homogenous in its effects, the EU’s policy process on rbGH and other agricultural
policies would mirror that of the United States. Instead, forces in the European
Union pushed persistently for the social regulation of rbGH and, despite
international pressures toward neoliberalism that prevented the implementation of
explicitly social regulation of rbGH in the European Union, opponents of the
substance were able to align a discourse of scientism with opposite results from
those achieved in the United States. Similarly, during the 1990s, in the wake of the
Mad Cow Disease scare, the European Parliament considered new ways to ensure
that European food was uncontaminated enough to prevent health problems.
The Biosafety Protocol, adopted in 2000, suggests yet a different outcome
in the regulation of agricultural biotechnology (Kleinman and Kinchy 2007)
and illustrates another dimension to the unevenness of scientism. Signed by 159
nations, the Biosafety Protocol is an international agreement that seeks to protect
biodiversity and environmental health by regulating the transport and use of living
organisms modified by biotechnology. Although not a party to the negotiations,
the United States and its allies persistently pushed for a policy that would mirror
US agricultural biotechnology regulation. This US-led group of countries,
representing the world’s major producers of agricultural biotech products, argued
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 519

for (in our terms) a fusion of neoliberalism and scientism that would limit
regulation of biotechnology. However, an array of countries from the global South
and a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) opposed this approach
and instead argued for a protocol that would place socio-economic regulation of
agricultural biotechnology front and center. Negotiations over the Protocol began
in 1995 and ran across five years and seventeen meetings. While the structure of
negotiations provided space for countries from the global South and their NGO
allies to push for socioeconomic regulatory provisions, the requirement that the
final agreement reflect a consensus put the balance of power in the hands of
countries that are leaders in the agricultural biotechnology market. Without their
acquiescence, a comprehensive agreement on socioeconomic regulation would
have been effectively meaningless. Thus, pressure from the United States and its
allies led the socioeconomic provisions to become progressively weaker during
the five years of discussion. The final provision requires that social regulation be
consistent with international agreement. The provision likely means that any
social regulation must be consistent with free trade agreements, and because
social regulation is an explicitly interventionist approach to markets, the provision
may mean that social regulation is impossible. At the same time, this case
suggests that neoliberalism and scientism can be delinked, because some
advocates of social regulation argued for the scientific assessment of likely social
impacts.
A final valuable comparative case is Austria’s regulation of agricultural
biotechnology. Unlike those countries considered above, Austria has established a
policy requiring that regulators ascertain likely socioeconomic impacts before
commercialization of new biotechnologies can move forward. The socioeconomic
regulatory provision of the Austrian Genetic Engineering Act of 1994 prohibits
licensing of genetically engineered products if they will impose “an unbalanced
burden on society” or entail unacceptable social, economic, or moral costs (Seifert
and Torgersen 1997: 302). Austrian industry favored neoliberal regulations of the
type developed in the United States, but the legislation was adopted when a
coalition government took power in 1990. Under pressure from social movement
organizations, the coalition was compelled to resolve the matter before Austria
entered the European Union. The provision on social regulation is unambiguous, but
it was apparently part of a compromise which entailed more economically liberal
regulation in other areas.
As the examples summarized in this section suggest, the effects of neoliberal
globalization are not monolithic and cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas
such as “deregulation.” But in general there is an increasing tendency toward
scientism and the technocratic and elitist politics associated with international
and corporate-led globalization and influence on regulatory bodies. Yet, this
tendency coincides with emergent alternatives such as social regulation and even
reappropriations of scientism that create spaces for greater levels of civil society
participation. One source of the openings is that despite the efforts of its
architects to make it appear to be positivist and unambiguous, at a legal level, the
language of regulatory science remains murky, for the meanings of “risk
assessment,” “risk prevention,” and “risk mitigation” are interpreted in courts
and by nation-states in different ways (Halfon 2010).
520 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

In parallel with efforts toward the privatization of regulation, shifts from

government-based regulations to industry standards, and a few examples of
deregulation, there is also some evidence of increased autonomy of international
organizations that emerges in part due to trade liberalization, the globalization of the
economy, and the repeal of national governmental regulations. The field of
technology regulation that has developed at the international level has become
increasingly coercive, while at the same time industry has become intimately
involved in shaping the regulation of technology-intensive industries and in
structuring international agreements to weaken efforts to promulgate state-based
regulation. These dynamics are uneven. Neoliberalism in the regulatory field is both
contested and constructed differently in diverse legal and geographic contexts, with
its effects most evident in the United States and less so in the European Union.
While industry and its allies in states and regional and international governing bodies
clearly have the upper hand, oppositional politics have also shaped international
regulations, both challenging and using the language of science. We turn next to a
fuller discussion of these processes.

Social movements and the epistemic modernization of science

A growing body of literature has suggested the importance of social movements for
health, environmental, and other scientific and technical issues (e.g., Allen 2003;
Brown 2007; Clark 1998; Epstein 1996; Frickel 2004; Hess 2007; Klawiter 2008;
McCormick 2009). In turn, the increasing role of social movements and NGOs in
science and technology issues is part of a broader “epistemic modernization” of the
scientific field (Hess 2007), which has facilitated new forms of public participation
via consensus conferences, community-based research, participatory research,
science shops, and other deliberative and participatory institutions. At the same
time, activists have also gone outside of these forms of politics, staging
demonstrations and other forms of direct action that put pressure on governments,
international governance bodies, and international corporations involved in science-
based regulation and production. Epistemic modernization is intended to capture the
shifts in the governance of science that have involved escalating levels of scrutiny by
civil society actors toward scientific research and technology regulation, the growing
permeability of the scientific and industrial fields to both partnerships with and
opposition from various civil society actors, and the increasing legitimacy and
institutionalization of such relationships through innovative collaborative arrangements
and new forms of governance.
Epistemic modernization has its roots in the “unbinding” of the relationship
between scientists and the authority of science (Moore 2008). Prior to the conclusion
of World War II, social protest and other civil society challenges to the state were
rarely characterized by critiques of science and technology. Beginning in the 1950s,
however, a host of new concerns about technologies, such as the possible dangers of
thalidomide, fluoride, and nuclear fallout, gained prominent public attention. In the
1960s and 1970s, citizen activists and scientists alike became increasingly skeptical
of view that an unfettered research enterprise, new technologies, and technocratic
forms of governance were optimal for providing social benefits. Since 1980, the
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 521

unbinding of scientists from scientific authority has greatly amplified and

diversified. Patients, groups affected by environmental problems that result from
industrial production, religious groups and many others increasingly debate and
contest scientific knowledge, drawing on their own knowledges and those of experts.
Scientists themselves represent a wide range of positions on any given public
technoscientific debate, offering more possibilities for partnerships with activist
groups, governance groups, and NGOs.
As more technologies that implicate bodies, cultural identities, and the
environment circulate around the world under neoliberal trade arrangements, science
has become implicated in a wide array of social movements of the right and left,
from large professionalized national networks to small under-resourced community
groups. The extraction, manufacturing, and distribution of goods under neoliberal
globalization have often harmed communities culturally, environmentally and in
terms of health. In the name of “free trade,” many of the protections from the harms
of industrial production that had been legally mandated in many western countries
were either weakened, or were never put in place by multinationals that sought less
restrictive geographical areas around the globe (see Pellow 2007).
This section builds on the two previous sections. Here we argue that neoliberal
globalization has meant an increasing focus on the market and industry as a target of
social movement action, new political partnerships between scientists and lay people
that are in part driven by the scientization of the regulatory field, and new forms of
stakeholder governance. The results of these challenges and forms of engagements
are not uniform: as with the other shifts that we have documented, here we see
unevenness in outcomes shaped, in part, by the flexibility of the meanings and uses
of science under neoliberal globalization.

Markets and industries as targets

As regulatory functions have shifted from national governments to international

bodies or industry organizations, social movements have followed the politics into
the new arenas. Many social movements have become ever more transnational in
scope, a feature that social movement studies has recognized in general (Buttel and
Gould 2004; Wood and Moore 2002; Wood 2005; Della Porta and Tarrow 2005;
Keck and Sikkink 1998). Less well understood is the diversification of social
movement targets. Although governments and international governmental organ-
izations remain targets, activists have also increasingly targeted industry directly to
demand changes in the practices and policies of multinational corporations
(Schurman and Munro 2004; King and Soule 2007; Bonnano and Constance 2007,
2008; Weber et al. 2009). One form of relationship to industry is the industrial
opposition movement, such as those opposed to genetically modified food and
nuclear energy (Levidow and Carr 2009; Wright and Midderndorf 2007). Although
these types of movements can be seen in earlier periods as well, we contend that the
form that they take in the contemporary period of neoliberal globalization is
distinctive.
One key distinction is that the arenas of political debate in which social protest
now takes place are constituted by international industries, international NGOs, and
loci of political adjudication that are transnational. In the 1960s, if a US citizen
522 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

group wanted to protest environmental damages by a manufacturer, it would likely

petition a US corporation in the US courts, but it would have difficulty finding
scientists to serve as expert witnesses. But in the contemporary era of neoliberal
globalization challenges to markets and industries look different. For example, in
1999, eleven Mexican community organizations formed Consejo Estatal de Parteras
y Medicos Indigenas Tradicionales de Chiapas (CEPMITC) to oppose a $2.5 million
dollar bioprospecting program initiated by the University of Georgia (UGA).
Working with their UK-based commercial partner, Molecular Nature, Inc., the
University of Georgia hoped to use local knowledge and scientific surveys to
discover new commercially viable biological products. Using the language of
scientific ethics, CEPMITC made the case that UGA had not received permission
from relevant communities. When UGA and their commercial partner tried to form a
new NGO, PROMAYA, that they hoped would be able to provide such permission,
CEPMITIC undertook two years of lobbying the Mexican and US governments
and protests against UGA and Molecular Nature, Inc., with assistance from several
international NGOs and sympathetic scientists. CEPMITIC prevailed in 2001, and
the UGA project was terminated (Barreda 2003; see also Hayden 2003). The forms
that this contestation took, and the array of actors it involved, represents a new form
of challenge to industry under neoliberal globalization.
Another way that science-based political contestation has changed in the context
of neoliberal globalization involves the emergence of “alternative industrial move-
ments.” Alternative industrial movements include two movement sub-types. One
sub-type is certification movements, in which local and transnational social
movement organizations work to change industry production standards and
marketplace labeling. The movements for dolphin-safe tuna and the fair trade
movement are two examples (Conroy 2007). Certification movements work with the
private sector to certify products as meeting certain social and environmental goals
(e.g., social justice, sustainability). In these movements, challengers often shift over
time from being stridently oppositional to having partnership in the construction of
new science-based standards to guide the certification process. Because of power
differentials that often characterize negotiations between social movement organ-
izations and private firms, the potential for cooptation is high. Moreover, because
certification movements are consumer-based, they are in some ways consistent with
the neoliberal ideology of high levels of individual consumption based on market
choices. They may thus have little effect on overall levels of consumption or on the
broader system of exploitation and profit, while encouraging consumers to use
scientific standards that make ever finer distinctions about the effects of purchases
on labor, the environment, and consumers’ bodies (Cohen 2003; Steigerwald 2006;
Szasz 2007).
The second sub-type of alternative industrial movement is the technology- and
product-oriented movement (TPM). Rather than seeking to reform existing industrial
practices, the goal of these movements is to support the development of alternative
pathways to industrial production through new products, such as complementary
medicine, organic food, or open-source software (Hess 2007). TPMs may include
civil society organizations that have advocacy roles as well as entrepreneurial
orientations to the pioneering of new technology. By carrying out politics either by
directly focusing on firms as targets of social change or by building alternative
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 523

products and market certification schemes, to some degree social movements can be
seen as acquiescing to the neoliberal view that markets can often solve political
problems better than government policy. Here too, the potential for cooptation is
enormous, and our research suggests that it is not uncommon for the alternative
technologies and products of the TPMs to undergo redesign via a complementariza-
tion process as they are mainstreamed into existing industries. However, by carrying
politics directly into the marketplace, social movements can also challenge
neoliberal nostrums such as Friedman’s (1970) argument that “the social responsi-
bility of business is to increase its profits.” Furthermore, by politicizing issues such
as product standards and design, social movements can draw public attention to the
need for regulations and thus help open up political opportunities for government
intervention, as the case of anti-GMO maize mobilizations in Mexico shows (Kinchy
2010).

New political partnerships

A second transformation of social movements with respect to science and

neoliberalism involves the problem of how to respond to scientism in regulatory
policy. As discussed above, regulatory policy is often framed in narrow terms that
tend to exclude general social considerations and may require considerable technical
expertise to interpret the rules. The situation presents a dilemma for social move-
ments and other civil society organizations that want to influence the policy process.
These movements and organizations may choose to remain on the outside and argue
for a broader basis for regulatory policy, such as social regulation, but in doing so
they may be excluded from the policy process and lack any influence on a decision.
Alternatively, they may seek to develop the needed expertise to participate in a
regulatory decision-making process, but to do so they need to build partnerships
with scientists. Here, the decision to acquire technical expertise is related to the
scientism of regulatory policy settings, which in turn is indirectly related to
neoliberalism in that it limits the scope of government intervention in the economy
to narrow, technical grounds that favor industry (see Ottinger 2010).
Even when movements generate partnerships with firms that are organized
through voluntary regulations, they may still be unequal players in a field defined by
the expertise of firms. For example, the 1992 Convention in Biological Diversity
reframed the commercialization of biological products as an “ethical” issue that
required that communities whose biological products were used benefit in some way.
Yet corporations that seek partnerships with groups whose biological resources they
want to use often generate their own scientific definitions of “products,” “benefits,”
and “communities” and frame the ethical issue in terms of charity rather than justice
and equity. Activists often find themselves in a position of contesting the scientific
frameworks that international regulations have set in place, but without the kind of
input or transparency that state-level regulation required or allowed (Hayden 2007).
In other cases, movements that adopt a position in opposition to industry but (in
the view of activists) also in the broader public interest will tend to find that the
scientific field is characterized by substantial pockets of “undone science” (Frickel et
al. 2010; Hess 2007). To address undone science, challengers adopt various
strategies that have been identified in science studies. First, activists themselves
524 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

may undergo training in which they come to acquire a degree of expertise that
enables them to engage the policy issues (Epstein 1996; Klawiter 2008; Nelson
2011; Clarke et al. 2009). Second, activists may recruit scientists to help them in
specific research projects via community-based research, and citizen-scientist
alliances (Brown and Zavestoski 2007; Brown et al. 2006; Brown 2007). In the
process, scientists and activists may form “shadow mobilizations,” or loosely
structured social networks that span disciplinary and institutional boundaries to tie
variously positioned professionals to movement constituencies, social movement
organizations, state regulatory bodies, and one another (Frickel 2010, 2011). For
example, groups of farmers, scientists, and regulators have begun to generate an
Africa-wide network that proposes alternatives to the monoculture, export-based,
agriculture model favored by the WTO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Organizing around the idea that farmers have knowledges that should be shared so
that collective, rather than private, benefits incur, these groups are working to
reorganize both knowledge and governance in Africa by creating new science-based
treaties and laws that recognize social as well as property rights (Mushita and
Thompson 2008).
Activists working in large civil society organizations with substantial resources,
such as some of the environmental organizations, may have the resources to fund
“civil society research” on their own (Hess 2009b). These arrangements have
emerged in response to the weakening of state and supra-state governance of the
harms from industrial and others forms of production and distribution and the
simultaneous movement of harmful products beyond the geographic boundaries
where they were produced.
The strategies summarized above suggest that activists are capable of responding
to the increasing but uneven scientization of regulatory policy, but in doing so they
encounter a dilemma that is parallel to the one described for intervention in markets:
operating within a framework of scientistic regulation can result in policy changes
advocated by the activists, but it can also mean accepting a narrowly defined basis
for technology regulation, and in this sense, the strategy can unintentionally
contribute to scientization. This said, it is also possible both to participate in
scientistic technology politics and attempt to discredit them by pointing to alternative
bases for regulation such as social regulation. As we noted earlier in the discussion
of regulation, because the scientization of regulations can be ambiguous, challengers
have openings that they can exploit.

New forms of stakeholder governance

Another area of change involves the role of movement groups in new institutions of
governance that have developed under neoliberalism, including international
regulatory groups and NGOs. As activists step into public policymaking processes
where technical knowledge is being debated, many claim to represent a broad public
or general interest, with some apparent success. In general surveys of public trust,
NGOs tend to have greater credibility than elected political officials and the media,
and slightly higher credibility than business (Edelman 2008), and the development
of NGOs into trusted entities representing a broad public interest may be seen as a
positive development. However, a more critical reading suggests, to some degree,
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 525

the failure of the liberal model of democracy, in which elected political leaders and
their appointees are representatives and guardians of the public good. Here, we
encounter another connection between the scientific field and neoliberal globalization:
the shift from government to stakeholder governance.
By stakeholder governance we mean the shift in political decision-making from
official government bodies to extragovernmental bodies of stakeholders. Under
government decision-making, there is a premise that the authority ultimately rests on
elected political officials. Even if much decision-making occurs in regulatory
agencies by appointed officials, ultimately they are accountable to a public interest
as defined by elected officials who must pass the test of periodic voter approval.
Government-based decision-making can also make use of deliberative institutions,
such as consensus conferences, in which laypeople are selected on a random basis
and asked to spend some time learning about an issue and then giving a report (see
Barns 1995; Kleinman, et al. 2007).
The new institutions of “governance beyond the state” have a Janus quality
(Swyngedouw 2005). On the one hand, they may enable greater public participation
and representation of conceptions of the public interest beyond those defined by
industry. For example, stakeholder governance has been used effectively in
grassroots ecosystem management governance in the western United States, where
environmentalists, ranchers, regulators, and local governments have sometimes been
able to broker agreements that resolve longstanding stalemates (Weber 2003).
Furthermore, in international governmental and standards-setting organizations,
where, as we argued above, regulatory decision-making has grown in influence,
there are no directly elected political officials. In such circumstances stakeholder
forms of governance are the only available mechanism to air versions of public
interest at odds with those of global industry.
On the other hand, even where government is subjected to open elections and
attends to public opinion via opinion polls or consensus conferences, industry
often has a high level of influence over the political process due to intense
lobbying, high levels of campaign contributions, and control and influence over
the media. For its part, stakeholder governance shifts decision-making from
governments and institutionalizes participation by industry groups. In this sense,
it is consistent with the neoliberal goal of shifting policy solutions to markets.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of stakeholder governance is highly dependent on
who controls which stakeholders get to participate, who has the power to
adjudicate disagreements, and how the outcomes of such participation translate
into policy. Consequently, processes can be set up to favor market-oriented
solutions in contrast with outcomes from the standard, governmental political
process. At best, activists may find it possible to combine participation in
stakeholder forms of governance with outside opposition (Hess 2010). At its
worst, such organizations may find that their participation in stakeholder
governance mechanisms legitimates a process that is undemocratic and an outcome
that is not aligned with their understandings of the broader public interest.
Participation in such fora may also divide movements over strategic issues of
maintaining opposition on the outside that attempts to delegitimate stakeholder
processes and outcomes, versus attempting to have some influence on the inside
even if that means accepting unwanted compromises.
526 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

In considering the relationship between neoliberal globalization and the field of

social movement and civil society participation in science and technology, we
suggest three developments. First, social movements themselves have undergone a
change in response to the relative tightening of political opportunities for
government intervention in the economy. While not giving up on public policy as
an avenue for social change, activist groups have diversified their targets of social
change to include direct engagements with industry. Those relations can include
industrial opposition movements, with the traditional repertoires of protest and civil
disobedience now turned directly on industry, and alternative industrial movements,
with their emphasis on entrepreneurship, certification, and partnership with industry.
Second, movement groups have in some cases responded to the scientization of
regulatory policy by becoming more actively involved in the construction of
technical expertise. Third, social movement groups have become part of the new
institutions of stakeholder governance, which themselves are subject to complex
cross-currents: they displace traditional government but can also amplify traditional
government with new avenues for democratic participation; in turn the democratic
participation by stakeholders can be coopted by industry groups that wish to pursue
a neoliberal agenda with respect to government policies.

Conclusion

We have explored a number of changes in the relationship between science and

society from the 1970s to the present, examining the relationship between those
changes and the broader economic and political trends associated with neoliberal
globalization. We have emphasized the unevenness of the intersection of neoliberal
globalization and science while identifying some of its major forms and trends.
Previous theory traditions in the sociology of science that maintain a specific focus
on the internal dynamics of the scientific field—the institutional sociology of science
associated with Robert Merton and the constructivist “sociology of scientific
knowledge”—have had relatively little to say about these issues. Although a broader
literature in science and technology studies (STS) has explored political sociological
issues such as science-government and science-industry relations, there is little
analysis that considers the broader nexus of science, government, industry, and social
movement relations from the perspective of the historical changes associated with
neoliberal globalization. The framework for a political sociology of science
presented here fills this gap, in part by drawing on insights and perspectives from
political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and
organizational sociology. The result is an analysis of the scientific field that charts
changing relationships with industry, government, and civil society and has the
potential to contribute to diverse fields of sociological theory.
The project of a political sociology of the scientific field under neoliberal
globalization requires developing a new family of concepts linked to the formulation
of new empirical research problems. We have delineated three central areas of
attention: the knowledge economy and the changing practices of academic and
industrial R&D, the construction and institutionalization of new regimes of science-
based technology regulation, and the changing face of social movement and civil
Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532 527

society participation in scientific and technological decision-making. Within those

central problem areas, we have identified particular changes, such as the asymmetric
convergence of academic and industrial R&D, the scientization of regulatory policy,
and the unbinding of scientific authority from scientists.
Our analysis suggests that science and science-oriented regulatory policy in the
neoliberal order cannot be characterized by a simplistic formula that assumes the
hegemony of large multinational corporations. Although neoliberal globalization has
entailed the reformulation of policies and markets that favor new political economic
arrangements dominated by global capital, we believe such analyses must recognize
the relative autonomy of the scientific field. The new forms of asymmetric
convergence both increase and decrease the autonomy of the scientific field,
depending especially on what variable is chosen and whether one is looking more at
academic or industrial R&D. Likewise, the value placed on science entrepreneurship
creates both new opportunities and new restrictions for scientists. In the regulatory
field, the shift of regulatory policy to international organizations has entailed some
opening of those organizations to promote stakeholder forms of governance,
including civil society participation, but it has occurred within an order that tends
to construct trade liberalization as the paramount value. Likewise, at a national level,
regulatory policy for science-based industries has involved the use of scientism to
restrict social regulation, but a comparative perspective suggests that the relationship
between scientism and social regulation may reflect distinctive historical pathways.
Finally, in civil society we see new patterns of relationship with industry and the
scientific community that both elaborate on neoliberal practices and challenge them.
The new patterns include direct relations between social movement organizations
and industry, either via the traditional oppositional politics of protest or via the new
partnerships associated with certification movements and technology and product-
oriented movements. They also include participation in the new regimes of
stakeholder governance and scientistic regulation, which to some degree reinforce
those regimes while also challenging their content and premises.
A political sociology of the contemporary scientific field draws attention to
countervailing pressures, from industry and the “right hand” of the state on one side,
which is concerned with issues of technology transfer and industrial competitive-
ness, and from civil society and the “left hand” of the state on the other side, with its
goal of supporting science that serves a broad public interest. We do not naively
propose that the countervailing pressures are, by any means, balanced; nor do we
suggest that new forms of stakeholder governance in technology regulation and
science policy will ultimately prove more democratic than representative govern-
ment. Instead, we contend that attention to countervailing processes of historical
change should be at the center of a political sociology that explores the problem of
science in an era of neoliberal globalization. In turn, these conflicts are part of the
broader societal construction of neoliberal globalization in contested fields of
struggle. Future work must be attentive to the character of these struggles and the
tools that agents use when they engage in it. We have suggested a family of concepts
and empirical problem areas that may help guide future research, and we urge
scholars to search for concepts beyond the traditional STS arsenal—in other words,
to explore the value of concepts also drawn from organizational, economic, and
political sociology and the sociology of social movements. Thoroughly compre-
528 Theor Soc (2011) 40:505–532

hending the relationship between science and neoliberal globalization will, we

believe, require close attention to the dynamics and social organization of power and
resource allocation.
Although this essay is intended as a theoretical contribution to the literature, we
believe a political sociology of science can also address important policy
implications. By helping to clarify how neoliberal ideology and policies have
shaped the scientific and regulatory fields, and by outlining the specific forms of
oppositional politics that have emerged in response, we hope to contribute an
improved understanding of both the power and appeal of globalization as well as
strategies for challenging it.

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Kelly Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University-Chicago. She is the author of
Disrupting Science: Social Movements, Science and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 (Princeton
University Press, 2008) and co-editor, with Scott Frickel, of The New Political Sociology of Science:
Institutions, Networks, and Power (Wisconsin 2006). Her current research projects include a study of the
effects of neoliberalism on US nutrition programs and funding in the United States between 1970 and
2010, and an investigation of how people use expert knowledge in everyday life.

Daniel Lee Kleinman is Professor and chair of the Department of Community and Environmental
Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also the director of the Robert F. and Jean
E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. His book Science and Technology in Society:From
Biotechnology to the Internet (2005) was recently translated into Chinese. Among his current projects is
“Codes of Academia and Industry,” a study of the changing extent of the commercialization of university
culture and “academicization” of industrial science in the United States between 1960 and 2000. He is also
collaborating on a study of the social and biological causes of colony collapse disorder, the epidemic of
honey bee death.

David Hess is Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His most recent books are Alternative
Pathways in Science and Industry and Localist Movements in a Global Economy.

Scott Frickel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington State University where he studies the
intersections of environment, knowledge, and politics. In addition to numerous journal articles and book
chapters, he is the author of Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and
the Rise of Genetic Toxicology (Rutgers 2004), which was awarded the 2005 Robert K. Merton Book
Award, and with Kelly Moore is co-editor of The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions,
Networks, and Power (Wisconsin 2006). Current research projects include a study of the social production
of ignorance that focuses on the regulatory response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a study of expert
networks in environmental justice movements, and with James R. Elliott a comparative history of
ecological restructuring in four US cities (1955–2005).