Assignment 5 – Politics of research

The reading, “The Politics of Research” by “Brian Martin” is very compact, covers vast variety of knowledge and its use in research. But the word, “research” is never alone; it comes with money, power, competition, status and politics too. Large organizations contribute large amount of money towards research but on biased basis because they want the research to be beneficiary to themselves only. They want to make more money than they invested in the research or sometimes they want to be in competition. One good and simple example could be a software developing company like Apple or Microsoft, which have their own software developers working for them. Since, I already mentioned the word, “politics” before; I can also say that when it comes to selecting a team of researchers, politics also exist. Sometimes they want to hire people from different competitive companies by paying more money. Organizations who are funding a research want king of one specific field or in other words, they want people who are professionals with vast knowledge in the field of research because most of the researches are narrow and highly distinguished.