Abstract
This article attempts to explore an analytic framework on micro-strategies of researchers in basic science. Scientific research is a difficult and complex series of process of exploration for new facts in a particular field of research, which I call research path. Using materials from the ethnographic research in a laboratory of chemical biology, I try to retrame basic concepts like goal of research, competition, micro and macro path, organizational styles of laboratory and so on to make workable criterions to describe the everyday practices of scientific research activities. These criterions are meant to make clear why managerial model, based on the analogy with market-based economic activities, does not work in describing scientists' everyday practice, to justify the need to analyze them in a different perspective proper to their own peculiarities.
