Katharine Barker

The Changing Central Government of Science and Technology

This chapter examines the impact of administrative change in the 1980s and 1990s on the supply of science and technology services to British central government. Our concern is with the consequences of these changes for the operation of the supplying organisation, for its management for its customer department and for its relationship with its department. Hence, within our chosen policy domain, we explore the variety of organisational forms that have emerged during the late 1980s and 1990s. We seek to explain why they took the form that they did and we ask what effect these changes have had, in terms of the ostensible purposes of the reforms themselves.

New Public Management

The driving forces of the public sector reform processes to which GREs were subject from 1979 onwards are collectively and generically known as New Public Management (NPM). In Section 2 of this chapter we define, insofar as possible, NPM in general terms. In Section 3 we contextualise this general discussion by critically documenting and describing the manifestations of the NPM reform process in the UK generally. In Section 4, we detail how that process of reform was operationalised in the field of government funded scientific services.

The Organisation of Science

In Chapter 3 we explained the context of new public management within which UK government S&T service providers have been transformed. In this chapter we specifically address three issues related to the organisational reform consequent to these public management transformations.

The Changing Nature of Scientific Organisation

This book is about change and specifically, the wide-ranging changes experienced by Government Research Establishments (GREs) in the United Kingdom (UK). During the last two decades, the GREs in the UK have been subjected to a process of rapid policy initiated transformation, the dimensions and social consequences of which are still largely unclear. The concept of public administration driving this process of change has been New Public Management (NPM). The NPM underpinning this transformation reflects the fact that it is an integral part of a broader transformation process encompassing the nature and organisation of government, the institutions of science and their relationships with the state, and industry, the practices of scientists, the nature of scientific enquiry, and the concepts of what is science and what is deemed at particular points in time to be ‘good’ science.

Scientific Knowledge Production Processes

In this chapter we turn our attention to the third of the principal dimensions of scientific change that has been in evidence in recent years — change in scientific knowledge production processes. Knowledge production processes are defined here as how the vision and organisation(s) of science combine together to actually produce scientific knowledge via some socio-economic process. That is, who produces the knowledge, for what purpose, who (if anyone) owns it and how is it used? Implicit in our argument is that the mode of production has repercussions for how science and its knowledge product are perceived, where power lies and the use that is made of the product. Here we will also pick up on the themes of organic and policy-driven change discussed in Chapter 1.

Science and Markets

In Chapter 3 we discussed how privatisation to the maximum extent feasible and marketisation/commercialisation of the remaining public sector were themes central to NPM in the UK from 1979 to 1997. These themes have not been attenuated under subsequent Labour governments. In Chapter 4 we explored how NPM had prompted the development of new organisational forms for science and technology providers. But, as we explained in Chapter 1, change in science was characterised not just by organisational reform but also new visions of what ‘science’ was. In this chapter we will explicate what these new visions were and how they were synergistically related to and underpinning of policy-driven organisational change during this period. In Chapter 6, which follows, we demonstrate how new organisational forms and new visions of science have come together to generate new scientific knowledge production processes.

The Future of Science

During the past 20 years, some of the UK public sector’s oldest and most idiosyncratic institutions — the GREs — have experienced fundamental and purposive change. That change has occurred at three intertwined levels: organisational forms, vision and knowledge production processes. The scale, and at times ferocity, of this reform programme could scarcely have been envisaged 20 years ago. Change started when the Conservatives came into power in 1979 and has been continuing, albeit with a slightly different ideological emphasis, under successive Labour governments ever since.