Mar 03, 2012

Taylorist Science

A comment by Mark on an old post is particularly applicable to my last post:

I think there’s a good argument that a large portion of modern science is Taylorist. The myth of the lone genius with a “eureka” moment doesn’t describe the vast majority of science that actually takes place, especially in the more costly areas like physics and biology (mathematics might be different). Labs and universities are run on a quite industrialized basis, with professors typically supervising a whole stable of researchers, agendas driven by grants and metrics such as publication impact factors, and so on. It’s not 100% a factory, but I would say that 90% of it is at least 80% factory-like. Grad students are certainly cogs in a large number of cases.