There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of “regimes of valuation” we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields.

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The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it slightly provocatively, often we cannot avoid playing the very same game that we scrutinize. This creates tensions that many of us reflect on, and it certainly has created many implicit and explicit normative stances on how to deal with them. Yet it seems that so far there has been little room in our field to reflect on and exchange this particular kind of experience-based knowledge. There are many different ways to engage with the dynamics of evaluation, measurement and competition in contemporary academia, or to play what we refer to colloquially here as the "indicator game." With this debate, we would like to give room to the expression and discussion of some of these ways. This text is the introduction and prompt to an experimental debate. We discuss the state of the academic discussion on the impact of indicator-based evaluation on academic organization, epistemic work and identities. We use insights from these debates to raise questions for how STS and STSers themselves deal with the indicator game. In conclusion, we summarize our contributors' arguments and propose the concept of "evaluative inquiry" as a new way of representing the quality of STS work in evaluative contexts.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a new buzzword in science policy, pointing to a shift in the role of research in contemporary societies. While on a discursive level responsibility is easily welcomed, implementing RRI in research practice appears challenging. RRI as an agent for change must compete with other forces shaping the current research system and its institutions, such as innovation orientation, competition and indicator-driven evaluation cultures.To address these challenges, we created a new format for engaging life science researchers in reflections on the meaning of responsibility in their own research practices. In this conceptual paper, we present and discuss a card-based method: IMAGINE RRI. The method's aim is twofold. First, it is meant to empower researchers to appropriate RRI through shared reflection while connecting it to their practices. Second, it aims to enable researchers to reflect on how the institutional context of their work and the embedded values fosters or hinders responsible research practices.Supplementary material (including card design and discussion map) is available under a creative commons license at the following link: https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/view/o:690945. ARTICLE HISTORY

The institutional contexts of research increasingly require researchers to anticipate their productivity and the uncertainties inherent in their research. This applies to both academic researchers and to researchers in start-up companies. This creates a specific kind of uncertainty, anticipatory uncertainty, that we define as the state of being uncertain as to whether research processes will be productive in a specific time frame and along situated definitions of good performance. In the life sciences, this anticipatory uncertainty is experienced and managed differently, depending on how research is organized and the cultural resources available in specific institutional contexts. In biotechnology companies, there is a readiness to embrace dynamic changes in both research strategies and the organization of work in response to new developments in the progress of the overall research agenda. In academia, the ability of research groups to react with similar flexibility seems significantly constrained by the individual attribution of research work and credit, and the correspondingly high level of individual anticipatory uncertainty. This raises questions about how far the current organization of academic research allows epistemic uncertainty to be embraced and corresponding risks to be taken, rather than safe questions to be pursued.

Capitalist dynamics in knowledge production are not limited to situations in which economic interests influence researchers’ practices. Building on laboratory studies and the French “pragmatic” tradition in sociology, this article proposes an approach to tackle more pervasive capitalist logics at work in contemporary research and their consequences. It uses the term epistemic capitalism to denote the accumulation of capital, as worth made durable, through the act of doing research, in and beyond academia. In doing so, it conceptualizes capitalism primarily not as a system of circulation and accumulation of monetary value but rather as a cultural way of producing, attributing, and accumulating specific forms of worth, which need not be monetary. Empirically, the article studies variants in epistemic capitalism by addressing the differing role of the accumulation of different forms of capital and the regimes connected to it in two institutional settings in Austria, academic life science laboratories and biotechnology start-up companies. Concluding, it argues that analytically dissociating the concept of capitalism from its link to economic value allows a finer-grained cultural analysis of the importance and effects of processes of accumulation in contemporary research. It ends with discussing the normative implications of these findings for debates about the commercialization of academia.

In this comparative analysis of twelve focus groups conducted in Austria, France, and the Netherlands, we investigate how lay people come to terms with two biomedical technologies. Using the term ‘‘technopolitical culture,’’ we aim to show that the ways in which technosciences are interwoven with a specific society frame how citizens build their individual and collective positions toward them. We investigate how the focus group participants conceptualized organ transplantation (OT) and genetic testing (GT), their perceptions of individual agency in relation to the two technologies and to more collective forms of acting and governing, and also their understanding of the two technologies’ relationship to broader societal value systems. Against the background of the sustained political effort to build common European values, we suggest that more fine-grained attention toward the culturally embedded differences in coming to terms with biomedical technologies is needed.