THE POLITICAL PROPORTIONS OF PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

The article offers a critique of the proportional epistemology shaping political and economic theory about the public value of knowledge and opens up the potential for alternative descriptions afforded by ethnography. It does so by exploring one particular exemplification of the new public value of knowledge found in political calls for making Science and Society converge. Such convergence takes at least three forms: the public value of research; the economic public goodness of commercial science; and the public accountability of science as a trustworthy enterprise. I pursue this interest through an ethnography of the production of research among historians of science and philologists at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). My concern here is to describe the epistemological economy of research at CSIC and provide an account of the terms of engagement through which researchers make sense of and relate to the social conditions of their own work.