ABSTRACT
Research contracts routinely specify that a final report must be submitted to the sponsoring or funding agency. This chapter focuses on distortions and misrepresentations in one final report of a contract research firm to the federal government. The core conceptualizations from the work of Karl Marx and G. H. Mead ground author's notion of reconstructive legitimacy, which he utilizes in the analysis of a final report of a contract research. Through a comparison of accounts of a private research organization in its final report to the government with what actually happened, it is evident that the report contains inaccurate claims and misrepresentations concerning important areas of research. The concept of reconstructive legitimacy, introduced earlier in the discussion of Marx and Mead, captures the structural and processual dimensions of the production of distortions in final reports. While contract research arrangements commit the research firm to politically and bureaucratically defined conditions, the contractors themselves also contribute to final report distortions.
