Abstract
The current themed issue came about by chance. A number of manuscripts examining academic lives and cultures came through Social Studies of Science’s review process at roughly the same time, and have been grouped together here. This introduction briefly describes some of their themes, and connects them with some other articles recently published in this journal, to broaden virtually the themed issue so as to represent some of the current work on the topic.
The current themed issue came about by chance. A number of manuscripts studying scientific, and especially academic, lives and cultures came through Social Studies of Science’s review process at roughly the same time, and I grouped them together here. Academic lives and cultures have been the subjects of many studies, and they play at least some role in most work in STS. This particular group of articles contains some interesting connections and potential conversations. I will very briefly introduce the group here, and will also refer to a few other recent articles in this journal that could have been part of the same conversations – expanding virtually this themed issue. By linking a number of this journal’s past three or so years of contributions to understanding scientific lives and cultures, I hope to spark some productive conversations.
On the basis of ethnographic work in an engineering laboratory, Wylie (2019) looks at the education and socialization of undergraduate engineering students. In particular, she is interested in how stories of failure – which she calls ‘disaster stories’ – can teach lessons or provide instruction while establishing laboratory solidarity by leveling hierarchies. Disaster stories may be particularly common in some laboratories, where there are other efforts to flatten hierarchies. There has been little attention to undergraduates in laboratories in STS, though in another recent article in this journal Kenny et al. (2019) turn a flashlight on undergraduates in STS laboratory.
In Jeon’s (2019) rich case, a research organization is dealing with dramatic changes in funding streams, a result of changing US political priorities with respect to renewable energy. Jeon looks at how, unable to continue with past projects, laboratory leaders justify abandoning them despite substantial investments. Meanwhile, research scientists develop an opportunistic attitude toward projects, in which funding and other imperatives legitimately drive scientific interest. The result is what Jeon calls a ‘habitus of ignorance’; an aspect of the local scientific culture developed in response to external and institutional forces. Recent years have seen a fair amount of work on interfaces and conflicts between academic and external institutions; some instances in this journal include articles by Vedel and Irwin (2017) on the tactical alignment and unalignment of academic and industrial goals, by Bychkova (2016) on how the Russian government’s attempts to encourage university-industry relations produce ritualistic collaborations and fake tokens of achievements, and in a very different way by Mirowski (2018), in a provocative analysis of the corporate leveraging and co-option of open access movements and ideals.
Kaltenbrunner and de Rijcke (2019) look at how curriculum vitae (CVs) are used in the evaluation of grant proposals. In particular, they study the diverse work of comparison involved in reading CVs: Peer reviewers compare applicants with each other, but also make comparisons to people outside the pool, in their efforts to make sense of and assess applicants. All comparisons are achievements, and in the context of granting committees they are primarily rhetorical achievements. This article is part of a growing interest in valuation, across many fields; in terms of the evaluation of academics and their work, some other studies include those by Philipps and Weißenborn (2019) and Hamann (2019) in this volume (in other issues of this journal, see Hirschauer, 2010; Huutoniemi, 2012; Roumbanis, 2017).
In a study of grant applications for a German program funding exceptional science, Philipps and Weißenborn (2019) look at how authors resolve tensions (see Hackett, 2005) between emphasizing novelty and grounding research in recognizable and established theories, methods and results. Strongly indicating that the form, in the context of its expected evaluation, of a grant application encourages conservatism, Philipps and Weißenborn observe that the balancing act tends to downplay radical ideas. However, Yair’s (2019) research in this issue would suggest a need for cross-cultural comparisons, because it may be that German science has a culture that encourages conservatism, and that shapes choices about how to present and make claims about innovative research.
Yair (2019) argues that there is a strong contrast between German and Israeli research cultures, along lines closely related to national stereotypes. German and Israeli informants, who are working alongside researchers from the other country, agree that, in comparison with Israeli ones, German research cultures value technical proficiency and incremental progress, features that tend to stifle bold innovation. Thus, it might be that programs to generously fund German science cannot by themselves produce large changes. Whereas Jeon, in this issue, provides an account of institutional and material forces creating cultural forms, Yair’s account privileges culture over institutions, at least in the dimensions he studies. We might look to some other recent case studies in this journal for more on this contrast: Ma (2019) sees an interplay between changing large-scale demands on the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the identities and norms of Academy members; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff (2017) describe strikingly divergent implementations of a model of university innovation in three very different countries, with three very different sets of institutional structures.
Hamann (2019) asks, ‘How do academics become professors?’ ‘Professor’, in his article, is treated as a subject position, a result of assessment, recognition and appointment. Hamann’s analysis is based on records of the appointment of 145 German professors between 1950 and 1985, and examines different forms of judgment, and of the legitimation of judgments, recorded in these files. Among other things, Hamann notes that the judgments are routinely legitimated in terms of committee processes, such as in terms of unanimity of decisions or the transparency of decision-making.
Finally, Andersen and Wray’s (2019) study of retractions in the journal Science leads to a taxonomy kinds of retractions. The taxonomy suggests some relatively concrete approaches to preventing and detecting errors, with different parties in different positions with respect to different kinds of errors. We can see a very different approach to a similar topic in Jacob’s (2019) treatment of publication ethics as an area under construction, involving developing expertise and practices of care around efforts to correct the literature.
As Harsh et al. (2019: 71) remind us in the context of the career trajectories and money-making opportunities of computer scientists in East Africa, scientific knowledge and technological objects are ‘co-constituted with social, institutional and economic worlds’. I think that the articles in this real and virtual thematic issue are provocative contributions to thinking about that co-constitution.