On the industrialisation and commodification of science
“But science itself has been industrialized and commodified. It is increasingly organized into large research centers with intricate division of labor. Research operates with costly complex primary instruments, but secondary instruments (models and theories) seem to fall into a myriad of
disconnected micro-theories. The objects of science appear in the form of separate ‘problems’ or ‘tasks’ given from outside. Above all, science is tendentially reduced to its immediate products or results possessing exchange value in the ‘science market’ and being essentially known or fixed in advance (as ‘customer’s orders’ or promises from the researchers).”Yrjö Engeström (1987) in Learning by Expanding