Reconstructive Legitimacy in Final Reports of Contract Research

Abstract

It is argued that final reports of contract research firms are best understood as documents embedded in a political economy rather than as objective depictions of reality. That political economy gives rise to distortions of the research process in such reports we conceptualize as ‘reconstructive legitimacy’. That concept points to a set of structural conditions which induce contractors to gloss over problems and misrepresent research events. Reconstructive legitimacy functions to convey the image of these for-profit organizations as capable of delivering a viable and useful product to their sponsors. Implications of this manifestly political and economic process for policy research and formulation are discussed.