History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Katarina Prpic
Institute for Social Research of Zagreb, Croatia
The Changes of Scientific Knowledge Production and Research Productivity in a Transitional Society
This paper analyses the most important changes of Croatian scientific knowledge production, research productivity trends, and also the impact of knowledge production on research productivity in transitional period. These changes are observed within the transformations of research system and policy from the very beginning of the nineties till recently (1990-2004). The socio-economic and political transition of Croatian society forms the broadest social context of these observations. The analysis is based on two comaparble data sets: data collected with a mail survey of 921 researchers carried out in 1990, and data gathered among 915 researchers in 2004 (also a mail questionnaire study). Both samples included respondents from all scientific fields and all types of research organisations.
The changes of several important features of scientific knowledge production will be presented: some changes of the patterns of research tasks and influence distribution, of the commercialization of research, and of researchers' social capital. Some of these changes are in accordance with global trends, while the others are specific for transitional societies, at least for Croatian socio-economic and research system. An analysis of the publication productivity shows that average scientific productivity remained practically the same in fourteen-year period, but it went through a deep structural metamorphosis. Mode of scientific knowledge production manifests a significant impact on researchers' scientific productivity, especially factors as distribution of research tasks and influence and researchers' greater social capital (international networking).
The results corroborate author's thesis that some of the changes of knowledge production and research productivity were policy-driven, since transformation of Croatian research system was intentional and aimed at making it competitive and comaptible with the systems of scientifically and technologically most developed societies. On the other hand, some of these changes were neither planned nor desirable. They originate in the inherited features of wider society and research system from pretransitional period, but they have been also induced by the changes of social and research system during the transitional period.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006