Reconfiguring Knowledge Production: Changing Authority Relationships in the Sciences and their Consequences for Intellectual Innovation

Richard Whitley · Jochen Gläser · Lars Engwall

Jul 2010 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies a novel approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation. Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations - the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science - and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an important innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches. By demonstrating that changes in authority relations are field-specific and have field-specific effects on knowledge production , and that these field-specific authority relations do indeed affect the conditions for intellectual innovation, the perspective explored in this book challenges science policy studies to 'bring work back in' to the study of the organisation and governance of the sciences.

About the author

Richard Whitley is Professor of Organisational Sociology at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Recent authored and edited books include: Business Systems and Organizational Capabilities (OUP, 2007), Changing Capitalisms? (OUP, 2005), The Multinational Firm (OUP, 2001), Divergent Capitalisms (OUP, 1999), and Competing Capitalisms (Edward Elgar, 2002). He has recently edited two special issues of Organization Studies, one on The Dynamics of Innovation Systems (2000) and one on Institutions, Markets and Organisations (2005). In 1998-99 he served as the Chair of the European Group for Organizational Studies and in 1999-2000 was the President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics. In 2007 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities. Jochen Gläser is a senior researcher at the Center for Technology and Society of the Technical University Berlin. His major research interest is the interaction of epistemic and institutional factors in the shaping of conduct and content of research at the micro-level of individuals and groups and at the meso-level of scientific communities. Current empirical projects concern national systems of research evaluation and funding in an internationally comparative perspective, the responses of German universities to evaluations, and the impact of changing authority relations on conditions for scientific innovation. Key publications include: Wissenschaftliche Produktionsgemeinschaften: Die Soziale Ordnung der Forschung, (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006) and The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems, co-edited with Richard Whitley (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). Lars Engwall is professor of Business Administration at Uppsala University, Sweden. Recent publications include The University in the Market, coedited with Denis Weaire, (2008), Management Consulting, co-edited with Matthias Kipping, (OUP, 2002) and The Expansions of Management Knowledge, co-edited with Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, (2002), as well as special issues of Management Learning (2004, with Matthias Kipping) on the dissemination of management knowledge and of International Studies of Management and Organization (2008. with Matthias Kipping and Behlül Üsdiken) on the transfer of management knowledge to peripheral countries. He is an elected member of a number of learned societies, among them the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities, and Academia Europea.