News and Current Activities
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News and Current Activities |
Workshop: Science and Change
The Manchester Workshop, 6th-7th April 2006
There is sufficient empirical evidence to claim that during the last two decades or so science, its practices and institutions have undergone radical, rapid and profound change – ‘new’ sciences have emerged, the relationship between ‘government’ and science has been transformed (Henkel, 1999; Simpson, 2004), different mechanisms for evaluating research and research performance have been developed (Bence & Oppenheim, 2004; McNay, 2003), research institutes have been privatised (Boden, Cox, Nedeva & Barker, 2004), the universities have developed a ‘third mission’ (Jacob at al., 2003), industry has been outsourcing research etc. This change has resulted more from exogenous imperatives rather than endogenous developments and has frequently met with resistance and challenge (see Boden at al, 2004).
While, fragmented accounts describing the transformations that have occurred exist there have been very few (if any) attempts to understand the sources, the nature and mechanisms of the latest change that science has been/is undergoing. Some of the concepts currently dominating the area of science and technology studies, most notably the ‘Mode1-Mode2’ concept (Gibbons at al., 1994) and the ‘Triple Helix’ concept (Leydesdorf & Etzkowitz, 1996) have attempted to interpret the dynamics of science. At closer examination, however, the former argues the existence of a ‘new’ mode of knowledge production but fails to explain the process of change (Shinn, 2002; Boden at al. 2004) and the latter failed to fulfil its methodological promises due to its broad nature and excessively complex language (Shinn, 2002). Hence, the issues around the latest changes affecting science, their source, drivers and mechanisms are still under-conceptualised and (quite possibly) under-studied. This is particularly surprising given the (potentially) serious consequences and irreversibility of the transformations of science.
It is both analytically valuable and practically important to distinguish between social change that that does not include clear intentionality and usually occurs as the aggregate effect of a large number of social actions (‘organic’ change) and social change that comprises intentionality and can be traced to/attributed to particular social actions/policy decisions (‘policy-driven’ change). These two types of change are also in complex interdependencies and in practice can and do usually converge. In other words, one can argue the dominance of one of these types of change but never its exclusivity (Boden at al., 2004). One possible feature of the latest change of science worth exploring is that the emphasis has shifted from predominantly ‘organic’ to predominantly ‘policy-driven’ change.
This Workshop l contributed to the understanding of the latest change of science in different contexts by encouraging more systematic comparative research and bringing together analyses of:
- The types, direction and driving forces of change;
- How does this change affect the different institutions involved in it (primarily research intermediaries and publicly funded research performers);
- How does this change affect the knowledge structure and the practices of science?
More specifically we encourage contributions on the following issues:
1) Discussions and analyses of the interdependency between organic and policy driven change based on particular science or institution;
2) Can we argue that there has been a shift from organic to policy-driven change?
3) Accounts of change of the institutions of science: universities, research institutes, government labs, industrial research;
4) Researchers’ strategies to cope with and affect institutional change;
5) Change of the functions and structural positions of research intermediaries (Research Councils and equivalent) the effect on publicly funded research performers;
6) Interdependency between change of institutional structures and knowledge structures;
7) Change of the relationship between ‘government’ and science; factors and effects;
8) Evaluation practices and the change of institutions and knowledge;
9) Ideological beliefs and the change of science;
References
Bence, V. and Oppenheim C. (2004), ‘The role of academic journal publications in the UK Research Assessment Exercise’, Learned Publishing, Vol.17, No 1, 53-68.
Boden, R., Cox, D., Nedeva, M. and Barker, K. (2004), Scrutinising Science: The Changing Government of Science, Palgrave/Macmillan.
Gibbons, M., Nowotny, H., Limoges, C., Trow, M., Schwartzman, S. and Scott, P. (1994), The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: SAGE Publications.
Henkel, M. and Little B. (1999), Changing Relationships between Higher Education and the State, London; Philadelphia: J. Kingsley Publishers.
Jacob, M., Lundqvist, M. and Hellsmark, H. (2003), ‘Entrepreneurial transformations in the Swedish University system: the case of Chalmers University of Technology’, Research Policy, 32: 1555-1568.
Leydesdorff, L. and Etzkowitz, H. (1996), ‘Emergence of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations’, Science and Public Policy, 23(5).
McNay, I. (2003), ‘Assessing the assessment: an analysis of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, 2001, and its outcomes, with special reference to research in education’, Science and Public Policy, 30(1), 47-54.
Shinn, T. (2002), ‘The Triple Helix and new production of knowledge: pre-packaged thinking on science and technology’, Social Studies of Science, 32(4): 599-614.
Simpson, A. (2004), Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century, London: John Murray (Publishers).
Workshop Organizing Committee
Maria Nedeva - Maria.Nedeva@mbs.ac.uk
Luisa Oliveira - luisa.oliveira@iscte.pt
Sven Hemlin - sven.hemlin@sahlgrenska.gu.se
Franc Mali - Franc.Mali@fdv.uni-lj.si
Timetable and Agenda
Thursday, 6 th April
13:00-13:15 Opening Session (Welcome, Dr. maria Nedeva on behalf of the organising committee)
Session 1, Thursday 6th April (13:15-15:15)
Chair: Maria Nedeva
1. Jochen Glaser, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University:
The Changing Governance of Science
2. Priska Gisler, BIOS Centre, London School of Economics, London:
Stomping the ground, touching the core – How can institutional changes influence scientific practices
3. Otto Auranen, University of Tampere, Finland:
Changes in Forms of Academic Productivity
Session 2, Thursday 6th April (15:45-17:45)
Chair: Luísa Oliveira
4. Mercy Kamara et al, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University:
COPING WITH THE CURRENT SCIENCE POLICIES: Scientists perspectives and experiences; and its implication to our understanding of scientific knowledge and the new regimes of knowledge production.
5. Katarina Prpic, Institute for Social Research of Zagreb, Croatia:
The Changes of Scientific Knowledge Production and Research Productivity in a Transitional Society
6. Miriam Ricci et al, Institute for Social, Cultural and Policy Research, University of Salford:
Changing the dialogue between science and its publics: the case of the ‘Hydrogen Economy’
Session 3, Friday 6th April (9:30-13:00)
Chair: Sven Hemlin
7. Frank van der Most, University of Twente, Netherlands:
Intermediary organizations and emerging fields of science: the case of nanotechnology (A comparative pilot study of Germany, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Norway)
8. Ismael Rafols and Martin Mayer, SPRU, University of Sussex:
Cross-disciplinary practices and the role of instrumentalities in a specialty of bionanotechnology
9. Holger Braun-Thürmann, Andreas Knie, Jörg Potthast, Dagmar Simon, Social Science Research Center Berlin:
Scientists' Spin-offs – The Continuation of Research by Other Means?
10. Cristina Palma Conceição, Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-ISCTE):
Promotion of public understanding of science initiatives: a space for change in R&D institutions
11. Göran Melin, Swedish Institute for Studies in Education and Research (SISTER), Sweden:
Considerations on University Alliances - motives, risks and characteristics
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006