Presentation: the Enterprise of investigation

Abstract

Currently, the meaning of the word company tends to be reduced to refer to an economic institution that seeks profit through the production of goods or services. This reduction of the meaning makes us forget that a more general sense of the word designates the joint effort, the organized human effort. Expressions that are rarely used today, such as the 'enterprise to explore', more or less synonymous with the 'adventure to explore', point to this broad but original and correct use of the term.

By starting this presentation with the expression 'the research company', we want to place a fundamental emphasis on the social nature of the act of research and the production of scientific knowledge. This is not intended to diminish or ignore the effort, talent, knowledge, responsibility, and commitment of the researchers who design, execute, and disseminate the results of their studies, but rather to recall the social nature of research practice, which usually occurs through starting from training processes that, by their nature, are social activities, with values and norms that are the product of the consensus (or imposition) of interests, within institutional frameworks that provide them with resources and as part of the effort to understand and intervene in human reality.