ON CUSTOMERS AND COSTS - A STORY FROM PUBLIC-SECTOR SCIENCE

In this paper we explore some of the ways in which a state scientific laboratory (Daresbury SERC) reacted to the rhetoric and forces of the marketplace in the 1980s. We describe laboratory attempts to create what we call ''good customers'' while converting itself into a ''good seller'' by developing a particular set of costing practices that were closely related to the implementation of a management accounting system. Finally, we consider how Daresbury's response to ''market forces'' influenced scientific and organizational practice, and argue that the social technologies of governmentality performed by accountancy - but also by scientific and bureaucratic practice - are complex, discursively heterogeneous, and used in context-sensitive ways. This means, or so we suggest, that it is difficult to mount general arguments about ''science'' and ''the market,'' and that the use of such large-scale institutional oppositions impedes analysis.