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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including critical physical geography (CPG), political economic origins of science perception of fencing, transition models for social science data collection, and mycology.

Whether (and how) physical and human geography should be integrated is a longstanding debate in our field. I return here to two entries in this debate from the early years of Progress in Physical Geography. While John Thornes’ 1981 progress report on atmospheric science reads like an early call for critical physical geography, the focus of this special issue, Ron Johnston’s 1983 article emphatically asserts that no such synthesis is intellectually or practically necessary. I argue, however, that Johnston’s article, perhaps inadvertently, lays the groundwork for integrated research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a case study of the stream restoration field to demonstrate how the particular state and market logics of neoliberalism are shifting both the practice of restoration scientists and the relations between public and private sector science. In particular, the embrace of neoliberal environmental management regimes has intensified the demand for environmental scientists to produce applied science that can: (1) be taught as a standardized package; (2) be used by agencies to justify decisions; and (3) form the basis for new markets in ecosystems services. At this point, private sector science produces the most influential knowledge claims, the most widely used applications, and the primary educational system for stream restoration in the US. We argue that the needs of markets and regulatory agencies are heavily implicated in this privatization process, and that the resulting impacts on restoration science and the dynamics of the stream restoration field in the US thus cannot be described without attention to political-economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we focus on the particular impacts of neoliberalism as a regime of scientific management. Drawing on a wide range of studies from other fields, as well as the four cases in this issue, we argue that while there are important differences in how neoliberalism has been implemented across nations and disciplines, there are a set of key principles and common outcomes that can serve a heuristic function for STS scholars attempting a more careful examination of neoliberalism. These common outcomes include: the rollback of public funding for universities; the separation of research and teaching missions, leading to rising numbers of temporary faculty; the dissolution of the scientific author; the narrowing of research agendas to focus on the needs of commercial actors; an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate intellectual disputes; and the intense fortification of intellectual property in an attempt to commercialize knowledge, impeding the production and dissemination of science. Taken together, these shifts suggest that the impact of neoliberal science policy and management extends far beyond the patent system into the methods, organization, and content of science. We thus urge STS scholars to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political-economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]