History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Jochen Glaser
Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University
The Changing Governance of Science
The aim of this paper is to sketch changes in the governance of science and to discuss their impact on the production of scientific knowledge. Both the internal and the external governance of science are currently undergoing changes, some of which are mutually reinforcing each other.
(A) The internal governance of science is adapting to the ever-increasing specialization. The relative narrowing of expertise is one of the major drivers of collaboration. Permanent collaborations (research groups and networks) and ad-hoc collaborations make groups supplant the individual scientist as the main creator of contributions to a scientific community’s knowledge. Another consequence of the growing specialization is scientists’ increasing reliance on second-order criteria of scientific quality. Scientists encounter more and more colleagues and publications whose quality they must judge without being able to form a scientific opinion on the content of the research in question. They resort to second order criteria which refer to the reputation of authors and publications, which is derived from informal communication, the reputation of journals and publishers, impact factors, citations, and indicators of esteem.
(B) In many countries, the external governance of science is currently driven by science policy’s adoption of the new public management approach, which is often accompanied by the hope to achieve more good science with les money. The strive for accountability and performance-based funding led to a proliferation of evaluations, which reinforces the application of second-order criteria. Performance-based funding of research organizations and the increasing emphasis on the commercialization of research results strengthens the management of these organizations and limits academic self-governance.
The interaction of these trends leads to a general loss of autonomy of scientists in the relations to both their scientific communities and their organizations. At the same time, inequality in science increases, with the scientific elites assuming more power both within the scientific communities and in the relations to science policy. The major impact on knowledge production that is to be expected from these changes is a reduction of unorthodox research, which will become a privilege of few well established and well equipped researchers.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006