Government still exerts influence in American social and behavioral sciences. But private industry controls critical data sets for the most glamorous, data-driven research. In the Cold War era, “grant getting” may have been the key to economic security, and to securing one’s voice in the university. Today, “exit” options are more important than voice, and what better place to exit to than an internet platform? Thus academic/corporate “flexians” shuttle between the two worlds. Their research cannot be too venal, lest the academy disdain it. But neither can it indulge in, say, critical theory (what would nonprofit social networks look like), just as Cold War social scientists were ill-advised to, say, develop Myrdal’s or Leontief’s theories. There was a lot more money available for the Friedmanite direction economics would, eventually, take.
Intensifying academic precarity also makes the blandishments of corporate data science an “offer one can’t refuse.” Tenured jobs are growing scarcer. As MOOCmongers aspire to deskill and commoditize the academy, industry’s benefits and flexibility grow ever more alluring. Academic IRBs can impose a heavy bureaucratic burden; the corporate world is far more flexible. (Consider all the defenses of the Facebook authored last week which emphasized how little review corporate research has to go through: satisfy the boss, and you’re basically done, no matter how troubling your aims or methods may be in a purely academic context.)