Money-Work: Science Funding as Relational Socioeconomics

Accounts of scientific work at the lab bench largely overlook or sideline the considerable time and effort that scientists devote to the acquisition, management, and dispersal of funding. While multiple studies explore the subject of scientific funding from the political economic, historical, and comparative policy perspectives, we develop an approach premised upon relational socioeconomics and grounded in ethnographic study at the bench. We focus our attention upon what we call 'money-work'-scientists' everyday practical work, action, and interaction about funding. To illuminate how scientists regularly engage in mundane activity that is simultaneously scientific and economic we apply Zelizerian concepts of earmarking, making good matches, and the development of valuation criteria. Our framework for contemporary laboratory ethnography investigates a political economy of science funding in which science and money do not occupy 'separate spheres' or 'hostile worlds', but rather lead intimately connected lives. Given the current crisis in science funding, such a perspective on relational work, currency fluctuation, and valuation in exchange is essential for the next generation of science studies scholarship.