Commercializing the CSIR and the death of Science reply

Abstract

Lutjeharms and Thompson decided that it was the opportune to assess critically what had been wrought by the “dramatic organisational and cultural changes” t o “the largest scientific organisation in Africa” the South African CSIR. This analysis by two former CSIR employees has a guise of scientific objectivity, and takes a brief look at the new philosophy, the new structure, management style, and some preliminary results of CSIR. It then concludes that “the present financial position of the new CSIR suggests only ambivalent attraction of funds from the private sectors and because this was the main rationale restructuring, the process was unsuccessful and achieved at the expense of the entire scientific enterprise within CSIR. While the authors welcome constructive criticism of CSIR, the authors will show that many of the facts presented by Lutjeharms and Thompson are either erroneous or open to different interpretation, that they selective quote from the literature to support a particular point of view, and that they ignore major factors in their analysis, and that if the authors use the Lutjeharms and Thompson measures, quoted above the restructuring of CSIR was in fact highly successful.