The Economics of Science: a Critical Realist Overview

Dramatic and controversial changes in the funding of science over the past two decades 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?"

This book argues that the fundamental underlying problem in all cases is the...
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Dramatic and controversial changes in the funding of science over the past two decades 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?"

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. Accordingly, Tyfield 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 ways that also develop critical realism as a philosophical project. The second of two volumes, this book explores how a critical realist approach affords some common ground upon which a productive synthesis of heterodox political economy and constructionist science & technology studies may be pursued towards the formulation of a critical and explanatory 'economics of science'.