Göran Streiffert: Om akademins frihet och nytta: en studie av tjugo års forskningspolitik. Uppsala universitet: Institutionen för idéhistoria, masteruppsats, vårterminen 2024. This thesis is a study of the research and innovation policies of three Swedish governments at the beginning of the 21st century. I examine five of the research propositions the governments presented during the first two decades of the century with the aim to chart and analyse the governments ambitions to transform the universities in accordance with the concept of knowledge society. Each research proposition presents the overall direction and orientation for the ensuing four years.  Allocations of resources and changes of laws are generally proposed in separate propositions. My focus is to describe how the transformation has affected the liberties and the productive outcomes of the universities. My starting point is two separate and conflicting norm systems which I explain in the thesis. My account demonstrates how the governments try to balance between two conflicting interests: to maintain the liberty of the university and gain the commercial and welfare benefits created by the researchers and teachers at the universities.  One conflict of interest that is constantly neglected in the propositions is that the normative structure for science, described by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, is not compatible with cooperation between scientists and commercial or political interests as research design and results could be affected. In what looks like concerted efforts by the three governments, they identify some issues, i.e. that basic research is regarded to differ from applied research, with the latter having more immediate applications for markets. The governments argue that the discrepancy between basic and applied research is small and should be neglected.  I argue that profound conflicts of interests and competing targets regarding the transformation of the universities to fit commercial and political standards of the knowledge society neither have been identified nor problematised in the propositions.

Le droit de la recherche, entendu en tant que discipline juridique, concerne la régulation de la recherche scientifique entre les impératifs opposés de la science et du droit. Il est donc question, à travers cette construction juridique de l'objet « science » par le « droit de la recherche », de comprendre les modes d'émergence et les fonctions - l'élaboration et la régulation - d'un tel droit à la fois gardien et contradicteur des institutions savantes. L'intérêt et l'utilité du droit de la recherche pourrait bien être de montrer, à travers une analyse juridique des comportements scientifiques, comment fonctionne le droit entendu en tant que technique. Est-ce que la théorie juridique peut saisir un objet sociologique ? Pour répondre, le concept de « communauté scientifique », bien connue en sociologie des sciences (voir notamment Robert K. Merton et la « structure normative » de la science), va être analysée suivant la théorie de l'ordre juridique du constitutionnaliste italien Santi Romano, afin de mieux comprendre la définition du concept d'ordre juridique. Finalement, il apparaît que la régulation opérée par l'ordre juridique étatique contrarie l'indépendance de la science, notamment la sphère universitaire, et ne parvient pas toujours à en assurer la protection là où l'État devrait justement sauvegarder et promouvoir la quête de savoir. Serait-il possible, dès lors, de consacrer une science libérée de son hétéronomie par rapport à l'Etat ? C'est toute la proposition finale de la création d'un statut juridique authentique pour le chercheur et, notamment, de la résolution des conflits scientifiques par des Cours scientifiques de nature prud'homale / Understood as a legal discipline, the right of research, relates to the regulation of scientific research between the opposite requirements of science and law. So we're talking through this legal construction of the object : "science", through the "law of research" to understand the patterns of emergence and functions - the development and regulation - of such a right being both caretaker and opponent to the learned institutions.The value and usefulness of the right of the research might be to show, through a legal analysis of scientific behavior, how does the right being understood as a technique works. Does the legal theory can understand a sociological object ? To answer to this, the concept of "scientific community", well known in sociology of science (see especially Robert K. Merton and the "normative structure" of science), will be analyzed according to the theory of the legal system of the Italian constitutional lawyer Santi Romano, in order to better understand the definition of the concept of the legal order.Eventually, it appears that the regulation operated by the state legal order upsets the independence of science, especially the academia sphere and is not always being able to ensure protection where the state should precisely safeguard and promote the quest for knowing. Is it therefore possible to devote a science released from his heteronomy versus the state ? This is the whole final proposal for the establishment of an authentic legal status for the Researcher and, especially, the resolution of scientific disputes by some sort of scientific Labour Court lessons