ABSTRACT
In the past few decades, a rise in the in¤uence of managerialism on scienti€c research has been seen. Those entering the €eld must expect to come up against this reality. Brie¤y, this change concerns the application of business management principles to organizations with the aim of producing economic ef€ciency or, put another way, the pursuit of maximum output with minimum inputs. A central dogma of managerialism is the belief that organizations have more similarities than differences; thus, the performance of all organizations can be optimized by the application of generic management skills and theory. To those practicing this system, there is little difference in the skills required to run a research organization, an advertising agency, or a factory turning out machines. The experience and skills associated with the organization’s core business are considered to be unimportant or at least secondary. This management ideology has been applied to many organizations, but I would like to focus on the effects that it has had on scienti€c research and will take as an example the Commonwealth Scienti€c and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) of Australia.
