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Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizational analysis of decision-making to compare how two university artificial intelligence labs manage ambiguities at the edge of scientific knowledge. One lab focuses on garnering funding through commercialization schemes, while the other is oriented to federal science agencies. The ethnographic comparison identifies the mechanisms through which an industry-oriented lab can be highly adventurous yet produce a research program that is thin and erratic due to a priority placed on commercialization. However, the comparison does not yield an implicit nostalgia for federalized science; it reveals the mechanisms through which agency-oriented labs can pursue a thick and consistent research portfolio but in a strikingly myopic fashion.

The sociology of knowledge that followed The Social Construction of Reality shifted from the study of rarified ideas to practical activity, focusing on the stabilization of a sense of shared reality. The opposite side of this shift in emphasis has received much less attention – activities that place reality into a state of play and, in so doing, call attention to its ephemerality. I discuss three empirical areas where the practical use of other realities is central to the sociology of knowledge. First, I document cases in which skilled practitioners, such as airline pilots, safety engineers, and athletes, use simulation to prepare for events that are understood as highly uncertain and risky. Next, I describe how other realities are mobilized epistemologically, such as through experimentation in technoscience and experimentalism in unrealized or 'unbuilt' art and architecture. Finally, I consider autotelic and transcendent social experiences through fantasy and technological mediations like augmented realities.

Some scholars dismiss the distinction between basic and applied science as passé, yet substantive assumptions about this boundary remain obdurate in research policy, popular rhetoric, the sociology and philosophy of science, and, indeed, at the level of bench practice. In this article, I draw on a multiple ontology framework to provide a more stable affirmation of a constructivist position in science and technology studies that cannot be reduced to a matter of competing perspectives on a single reality. The analysis is grounded in ethnographic research in the border zone of Artificial Intelligence science. I translate in-situ moments in which members of neighboring but differently situated labs engage in three distinct repertoires that render the reality of basic and applied science: partitioning, flipping, and collapsing. While the essences of scientific objects are nowhere to be found, the boundary between basic and applied is neither illusion nor mere propaganda. Instead, distinctions among scientific knowledge are made real as a matter of course.

Social scientists have been seeking conceptual terminology that captures how and why universities are engaging in direct and indirect market activity. Sociologist Steve G. Hoffman argues that, in the United States, several key trends have developed from the late 1970s to the present period that warrant the term "academic capitalism."

AbstractAn emergent research literature is starting to cohere on simulation as a sociological process within organizations. This paper shines a spotlight on this scholarship, and offers new ways to think about the dizzying array of simulation we encounter in our organizational, institutional, and everyday lives. I define simulation as an empirical social process and show how they vary in consequence by their experiential modality, their referential frame, and their perceived realism. I then document three conceptual trends in the literature: (i) treating simulation as an organizational technique for risk management; (ii) a focus on virtual reality, video games, and moral ambiguity; and (iii) studies of the impact of computer simulation on scientific knowledge production and the reorganization of some technical fields, such as weapons research, artificial intelligence, and meteorology. Organizational uncertainty tends to coalesce around disputes about the appropriate qualities and functions of a given simulation technique or technology. I conclude the paper by identifying how the sociology of simulation can connect with more established areas of contemporary research within organizations, work and occupations, and institutional sociology.

One way to study ontology is to assess how people differentiate real activities from others, and a good case is how groups organize simulation. However, social scientists have tended to discuss simulation in more limited ways, either as a symptom of postmodernism or as an instrumental artifact. Missing is how groups organize simulations to prepare for the future. First, I formulate a definition of simulation as a group-level technique, which includes the qualities of everyday ontology, playfulness, risk and consequence reduction, constrained innovation, and transportability. Next, I use ethnographic data collected at an amateur boxing gym to argue that simulations simplify the most risky, unpredictable, and interpersonal aspects of a consequential performance. The problem is that a simulation can rarely proceed exactly like the reality it is derived from. For example, boxers hold back in sparring but should not in competition. The effectiveness of a simulation therefore depends on how robust the model is and how well members translate the imperfect fit between the contextual norms of the simulation and its reality.

Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly "economic" interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an economic dimension, because these voters believe certain moral behaviors will help them prosper economically. Even the very word "conservative" is understood as referencing not respect for tradition generally, but avoidance of debt and excessive consumption specifically. For many respondents, the need to focus on morality and personal responsibility as a means of prospering economically—what we call "walking the line"—accords with the rhetoric they associate with Republicans. Deindustrialization may have heightened the appeal of this rhetoric.

This guide accompanies the following article: Daniel H. Nickolai, Steve G. Hoffman, and Mary Nell Trautner. 2012. 'Can a Knowledge Sanctuary also be an Economic Engine? The Marketing of Higher Education as Institutional Boundary Work', Sociology Compass 6(3):205–18.Authors' introductionThe marketing of higher education refers to a structural trend towards the adoption of market‐oriented practices by colleges and universities. These organizational practices blur the boundary between knowledge‐driven and profit‐driven institutions, and create tensions and contradictions among the three missions of the 21st‐century university: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. In this article, we highlight the historical contexts that nurtured the marketing of higher education in the US and Europe and explore the dilemmas that arise when market logics and business‐oriented practices contradict traditional academic values. We demonstrate that managing these dilemmas is a contested process of policing borders as institutional actors struggle to delineate the proper role of the university in a shifting organizational climate.Authors recommendArum, Richard and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.A book that asks a fundamental question in higher education: "How much are students actually learning?" The results do not reflect well on the institution. Arum and Roksa conduct longitudinal tests of critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills on a cohort of students at a variety of universities and colleges. They find that a majority of respondents demonstrate little to no improvement in learning outcomes. Even students who improve show modest gains. The authors' analysis of student surveys suggests that a major culprit is a combination of low rigor in the curriculum, a lack of effort among students, and the overly modest expectations of instructors.Barnett, Ronald. 2010. 'The Marketised University: Defending the Indefensible.' Pp. 39–51 in The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, edited by M. Molesworth, R. Scullion and E. Nixon. New York: Routledge.Barnett suggests that debates about the effects of marketization on higher education often reflect pre‐existing ideologies about the nature of markets in general. He presents numerous arguments in favor of the conception of students as consumers. For example, the increased power students receive in choosing where and from who to take classes may encourage accountability and actually improve the learning experience as students take a more active role in charting their own course through their education. Barnett also reminds readers that different institutions create different contexts and the extent to which market models of higher education are applicable are largely dependent on these different contexts.Berman, Elizabeth Popp. 2012. Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.An in‐depth historical sociology of the entrepreneurial university, this book explores when and why academic science become increasingly tethered to commercial interests over the last four decades. Berman focuses primarily on patenting trends and the political history of patenting law, as well as the development of biotech entrepreneurship and the emergence of university‐industry incubators. She argues that the trend toward an entrepreneurial model were largely driven by the ideals of government officials about the importance of translating scientific and technological innovation into economic growth, along the way creating the organizational environment necessary to enable market‐oriented research to flourish.Kleinman, Daniel Lee. 2003. Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Kleinman provides an in‐depth look into the daily work culture of a plant pathology lab at the University of Wisconsin. This participant observation study includes ambitious critiques of the dominant agency‐oriented approaches within science and technology studies by focusing on issues of structural constraint and institutional power. This study is especially good at demonstrating how university biologists are deeply, athough indirectly, constrained by commercial interests. The influence is not easily found in conflicts of interest or day‐by‐day decision making of scientists, who by and large conduct themselves ethically and in the fashion predicted by Mertonian norms of science. Instead, the culture of commerce impacts an array of daily lab practices, including the baseline epistemological assumptions around what is a "significant" finding. In the world of plant pathology, a successful trial is determined in relation to the metrics established by the field's resource dependency on the agro‐chemical industry.Leslie, Larry L. and Gary P. Johnson. 1974. 'The Market Model and Higher Education.'The Journal of Higher Education 45:1–20.This landmark article is among the first to interrogate the use of a market model as it applies to higher education. The authors trace several key legislative measures that altered federal funding practices and gave students discretion in choosing which schools would receive the most funding. While the authors draw similarities between market practices and the process of funding higher education through students, they also question the extent to which a market model of higher education is applicable. Drawing a contrast between higher education funding practices and a perfectly competitive market model, they provide an important critique of a funding system still in use today.McMillan, Jill J. and George Cheney. 1996. 'The Student as Consumer: The Implications and Limitations of a Metaphor.'Communication Education 45:1–15.This article warns of the dangers involved in recasting students as consumers. McMillan and Cheney synthesize arguments about the traditional goals of education and how treating students as consumers can threaten traditional classroom relations and alienate students from the learning process. Implicit in their discussion is an argument for more traditional classroom approaches to fostering democratic citizenship skills through critical analysis and communal sharing of ideas. They explicitly reject the notion of education as a product (rather than a process) and the demand for professors to deliver the product in the most entertaining and efficient manner.Owen‐Smith, Jason and Walter W. Powell. 2002. 'Standing on Shifting Terrain: Faculty Responses to the Transformation of Knowledge and Its Uses in the Life Sciences.'Science Studies 15:3–28.An interview‐based study of 80 scientists from two university campuses, this paper provides a typology of faculty identities and research strategies at the nexus of academic and commercial research within the life sciences. The typology includes "old" and "new school" orientations to commercial research as well as hybrid categories somewhere between these two extremes, such as "engaged traditionalists" and "reluctant entrepreneurs." Eschewing simplistic analyses that either condemn or glorify the commercial engagements of academics, Owen‐Smith and Powell point out that these various positions have created both novel fault lines and innovative research within the life sciences.Radder, Hans. 2010. The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.This book is an edited collection of essays on the history, extent, and contemporary impacts of commodification on academic research in the US and Europe. Most of the essays converge at the intersection of science studies and research policy, but are written by an impressively eclectic group of authors pulled from philosophy, sociology, government studies, epidemiology, genomics, and bioethics.Vallas, Steven Peter and Daniel Lee Kleinman. 2008. 'Contradiction, Convergence and the Knowledge Economy: The Confluence of Academic and Commercial Biotechnology.'Socio‐Economic Review 6:283–311.This is an interview‐based study of biotech science that develops a theory of the "asymmetrical convergence" that characterizes the two sides of the university‐industry relation. Vallas and Kleinman describe the work situations of university and commercial scientists to show that there has been a convergence of norms and practices across academic and corporate institutional domains. The authors show that the open discovery ideals of academic science have been increasingly integrated the entrepreneurial values and practices imported from the private sector. Simultaneously, commercial laboratories brought scientific practices and concepts into their workplaces. However, the convergence is asymmetrical, in the sense that both fields of practice are dominated by the profit motive and bottom‐line economic development rather than the communal norms of public science.Online materialsResearch Commercialization and SBIR Centerhttp://center.ncet2.org/This web‐based organization provides an online venue for faculty and students to take virtual workshops and webinars on how to engage in research capitalization and entrepreneurial training. The site includes a variety of resources for faculty and graduate students looking to transition into industry jobs. This site also provides researchers interested in the marketization of higher education a glimpse into a cottage industry that has emerged to provide training services for academics looking to capitalize their research and pedagogy.The Institute for Triple Helix Innovationhttp://www.triplehelixinstitute.org/thi/ithi_drupal/An organization focused on facilitating cross‐sector (academia, industry, and government) collaborations in the production and dissemination of scientific research aimed at economic growth. Another example of a cottage industry established to promote research capitalization and professional networks aimed at knowledge transfer and research capitalization.Documentary, "College Inc." (2010)http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/This 55‐minute video from PBS' Frontline series examines the emergence of, demand for, and debates surrounding the consequences of for‐profit universities such as the University of Phoenix. Available streaming online until October 19, 2012, thereafter only as DVD purchase. Supplemental materials on the College, Inc. webpage include: (1) a teaching guide with lesson plans, discussion questions, student handouts, and lesson extensions; (2) responses from the colleges and universities highlighted in the video; (3) articles, reports, and documents related to for‐profit education; (4) transcripts of interviews conducted with numerous investors, reporters, lobbyists, and college presidents; and (5) a transcript and audiocast of the full program.Documentary, "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk" (2005)http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/This 120‐minute video from PBS examines the impact of market forces in higher education, specifically discussing factors such as declining government support for public education, changes to student loan programs, the pressure to attract students, college rankings, and college sports. The documentary shows viewpoints from administrators, students, and faculty. A companion book is available for purchase through the program's webpage.Sample syllabusThe "Marketization of Higher Education" article can be successfully incorporated in several types of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Introductory Sociology, Sociology of Education, Organizations and Institutional Change, and Science and Technology.For introductory or education‐focused courses, the article provides a succinct history of the relationship between higher education and the broader society while demonstrating how social institutions respond to social and cultural expectations/needs in different historical and national contexts. The article includes a short summary of the historical and contextual differences in the European and American models of higher education.For more advanced students of organizations, the article provides a case study demonstrating how macro level institutional changes influence organizational climate and social actors' perceptions of their own work. Further, advanced or graduate seminars in education may choose to highlight the various debates about the role of (higher) education in an increasingly knowledge‐based economy.Focus questions
 Discuss examples of how market logics may have influenced your coursework, choice of classes, or commitment to a class.
 What do you think about the informal economy and buying and selling course notes and study materials?
 Discuss examples in which you put more or less effort into a class based on your perception of the course's bottom‐line benefit to your post‐graduation career and/or income.
 How might the pressures faced by professors to bring in research funds from industry or venture capital influence their work and commitment to the classroom? In your experience, does this seem to be more common within those subject areas where knowledge capitalization is fairly common, such as biotech or computer science? Or, can we see the influence of knowledge capitalization in humanities or social sciences too?
 To the extent that students have adopted an understanding of higher education as a commercial exchange, in which they are customers who pay for grades, etc., what might be some ways in which we could change that perception? What changes would faculty need to make in order to change student attitudes? Administrators? Students themselves?
Seminar/Project ideasExploring Institutional BoundariesInterview a few other undergraduate students plus at least one faculty. Ask students questions such as why they decided to come to college, how they decided which college to attend, what they like and do not like about their college education, and what they hope to get out of their college experience. Ask faculty to provide their perspective on why they became a professor, what they like about their job and what they dislike, and what they see as the purpose of college and what students should get out of the college experience. In what ways do faculty and student perspectives converge, and how do they differ? Do any of the differences suggest blurring boundaries between missions of the university (knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter)?Marketization in Your College/UniversityDo a content analysis of official university admissions brochures, websites, and videos. What messages does the college want you to get from these materials? In what ways might the marketization of higher education be evident in such materials? If the university makes historical materials available, ask students to compare such materials over time to discern an increase in marketization, and how such processes are manifested. Do admissions materials for undergraduates and graduate students emphasize the same things? What differences do you note? Why do you think such differences do or do not exist?

AbstractUniversities, particularly research‐intensive ones, have responded to a variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions, culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education: organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge‐driven and profit‐driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market logics and business‐oriented practices contradict academic values. Within knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning, the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies.

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of "challenge interviews" on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.

This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other disciplines' approaches to the social dimensions of AI, which often have a thin understanding of the social and emphasize individual-level interventions. This scoping article invites sociologists to use the discipline's theoretical and methodological tools to analyze when and how inequalities are made more durable by AI systems. Sociologists have an ability to identify how inequalities are embedded in all aspects of society and to point toward avenues for structural social change. Therefore, sociologists should play a leading role in the imagining and shaping of AI futures.