Renting Valuable Assets: Knowledge and Value Production in Academic Science

Abstract

This paper explores what it takes for research laboratories to produce valuable knowledge in academic institutions marked by the coexistence of multiple evaluative frameworks. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two UK-based epigenetics research laboratories, I examine the set of practices through which research groups intertwine knowledge production with the making of scientific, health, and wealth value. This includes building and maintaining a portfolio of valuable resources, such as expertise, scientific credibility, or data, and turning these resources into assets by carefully organizing and managing their value. Laboratories then put these assets to productive use within and outside their labs toward the creation or extraction of value. I identify two models for producing value within academic science: a commodity-based model whereby laboratories mobilize their assets to produce results, which can be converted into publications for the accumulation of credibility capital, and a rentier model of accumulation whereby laboratories own valuable assets, which they rent out to others outside their lab against revenue. Following recent developments in Science and Technology Studies on value production in the bioeconomy, I argue that the concepts of asset and rent are essential analytical tools for getting to grips with the origins of value within academic science.