Cornelia Schendzielorz/Martin Reinhart: The role of research collaborations in the governance of science (Vortrag auf Deutsch)

Episode von RMZ Science Works von Robert K. Merton Zentrum für Wissenschaftsforschung · 19. März 2025 · 41 min

Our contribution is dedicated to the topic of large research collaborations. We frame the issue of large research collaborations in the context of their long history in the study of science, which is closely related to the notion of Big Science (De Solla Price 1963). Beyond the quantitative growth of science in various aspects such as publications, journals, personnel, funding, etc., we focus our attention on the fact that considering the big picture of science implies taking into account the social order of science (Merton 1938, Barber 1953). From the beginnings of the sociology of science (Bernal 1939, Merton 1942, Polanyi, 1962, Pielke 2014, Wray 2023) to the present day, this question has been linked to the much broader question of how science is embedded in society and how it relates to politics (Jasanoff 1990, Pielke 2007, Kitcher 2011). Consequently, we argue that large research collaborations are a suitable object of study for an empirical theory of science because these two central questions of the social order of science and the relationship between science and society coincide in this object.

Against this background, our contribution aims to empirically investigate how the production of scientific knowledge is organised in concrete working contexts of large research collaborations. Our paper is structured as follows: First, we draw on the research literature to explain why the internal organisation and governance of large research collaborations is an increasingly controversial issue. (Hallonsten 2016, Cramer and Hallonsten 2020, Baneke 2020). We then elaborate on routinely identified points of contention in research collaborations, which also represent necessary transition points in the process of developing internal social order and governance. We do so by drawing on theoretical literature, empirical case studies from the literature (Rüland 2023, Galison et al 2023, Jerabkova et al 2023, 2024), and two examples from our own ongoing research. In particular, we will look at governance issues such as membership, distribution of power and recognition in the cases of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Based on this cursory overview, we will explore the extent to which key challenges in the governance of large research collaborations recur to implicit or explicit normative presuppositions, and how these normative presuppositions relate to forms of political self-governance.

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