New rules of research? – Report from the post-modern university

When the university Marxists in the 1970s wanted to have ‘research for the people’ as an alternative to research for research (art for art’s sake), they could hardly imagine that this claim would, in the future, be changed to ‘research for profit’. This change from ‘research’ to ‘research for profit’ has had severe consequences for the research community, for the universities and, most importantly, for research in general – for the research process and for the criteria for legitimising and evaluating what is, or is not, good research. In this paper I investigate the present conditions for conducting university research through a case study of external partners buying research at the university – ‘The Beef Report’. I do this through investigating different conceptions of science and research – romantic, modern and postmodern – in arguing that today’s university is a post-modern university (Lyotard, 1979), and that this post-modern university poses very significant new problems for both research and researchers.