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This paper examines the operation of power and its consequences arising from the growth of new ethical bureaucracies in universities. We use the UK as a case study to illustrate more general points about the globalised nature and impact of such bureaucratisation. Our focus is on the social sciences as this is where, we argue, the impact is likely to be most marked. The paper is organised in five sections. The first introduces our concerns. Section 2 traces the genealogy of these new regimes of control in the UK. We then problematise the new ethical bureaucracies, making an analysis in terms of the shift in the locus of power away from researchers to becoming centralised in bureaucratic structures. In section 4 we explore some of the ways in which researchers might respond to the changing regimes of ethical control. Finally, we offer considerations of the ways in which ethical governance of research might be differently conducted so as to avoid the adverse consequences of new regimes of control on research practice. Our aim is to provoke debate and thereby contribute to a platform from which to reassert ways to ensure that research is ethical and that do not interfere with the production and consumption of critical social science.

This paper explores the development and maintenance of familiar gendered employment patterns and practices in UK universities, which are exemplars of new modes of knowledge production, commodification and marketisation. After discussing in detail the evidence of gender discrimination in UK higher education and the changes in the academic labour process consequent to the incorporation, at least at the policy level, of universities into the 'knowledge economy', institution-specific data is used to highlight the gendered aspects of the research economy from the three intermeshing perspectives of research culture, research capital and the research production process. This nexus is constructed in such a way as to systematically militate against women's full and equal involvement in research. Lack of transparency, increased competition and lower levels of collegiate activity coupled with networking based on homosociability are contributing to a research production process where women are marginalized.

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