This paper will neither celebrate nor criticize knowledge economy but simply ask what it can do. What kinds of knowledge claims can be made in a research project where science, industry and government interests are closely
intertwined? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with scientists, the paper traces various representations of a research project on chalk. The ch
alk-project is situated in the interdisciplinary field of nano-geology and has gradually attracted more funding from the oil industry in spite of its basic
science profile. The paper argues that this is done by a specific type of frontier-thinking which works to create a promissory space for future value creation. When viewed from the nano scale, the North Sea oil fields seem half
full rather than half empty. There is plenty of oil at the
bottom of the ocean if one knows how to look and future oil recovery might become analogous to milking a cow if one knows how to manipulate crystal
formations. The paper demonstrates how the project manages to turn chalk crystals and calcite surfaces into a new frontier for oil
recovery, while simultaneously transforming nano-geology into a
frontier in itself - an untouched promissory space loaded with
potential value. In this context, frontiers are not to be understood
in terms of pre-existing territories or places awaiting discovery (Bush 1945). Inspired by the work of Anna Tsing, the frontier is neither a place nor a process but "an imaginative projects capable of molding both places and processes" (2005). Frontiers thus have to be created as wild untouched resources before they can be subjected to value-extraction. The paper uses this conception of the frontier along with ideas from the sociology of expectation to make an analogy between how scientists creates frontiers out of nature and how they themselves become frontiers in knowledge production; untouched resources awaiting extraction. The frontier is a "travelling theory" (Tsing 2005) whose logic seems to proliferate from the wilderness and into the heads of venturecapitalists and science policy makers. However, there are important ifferences between making frontiers out of nature and out of scientists. The reative recalcitrance of scientists subjected to frontier thinking by the hand th
at feeds seem to challenge the conception that science is merely being engulfed by capital and government interest. Successful scientists attempt to use frontier
thinking it in a way that allows them to receive resources without simultaneously becoming a resource for others. Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction - An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press, New Jersey Bush, V. (1945)"Science, the endless frontier", ACLS Humanities e-book