This article examines strands of an intellectual history in Media and Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies in both of which researchers were prompted to take up ethnography. Three historical phases of this process are identified. The move between phases was the result of particular displacements and contestations of perspective in the research procedures within each discipline. Thus concerns about appropriate contextualization led to the eventual embrace of anthropological ethnographic methods. The article traces the subsequent emergence of a ‘crisis (...) of context’ in the deployment of ethnography within these disciplines. The analysis of these historical changes is informed by a particular depiction of Euro-American knowledge conventions. The article suggests that the limits currently perceived for ethnography are a specific instance of the more general limits now recognized for these knowledge conventions. (shrink)

Excellence is a salient category of quality assessment across a vast range of applications. It invariably involves a complex criteriology that cannot be uniformly formalized, although it always pivots on a dialectical interaction between quantity and quality. In the end, however, the purpose of excellence-assessment is invariably functional, the evaluation at issue being made with a view to some purposive objective with respect to which quality matters.

L'étude de la collaboration scientifique à partir de la publication se développe depuis une quarantaine d'années. Souvent considérée comme un indicateur (notamment de productivité), elle est ici saisie en se focalisant sur les pratiques de signature et ce qu'elles révèlent. Considérant un corpus d'articles dans trois disciplines, l'analyse se déploie à un double niveau : interdisciplinaire, et international pour une même discipline. Ce travail, inscrit dans une perspective diachronique, tente de cerner les multiples dimensions qui lient les textes à leurs (...) contextes historique et disciplinaire. Dans ce façonnage complexe, l'entrée par les diverses pratiques de signature permet de reconsidérer le statut analytique de la publication scientifique, et de poser la question des frontières entre disciplines en d'autres termes. (shrink)

Studies of scientific authorship have been developing for forty years. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly well documented. However, most of these studies deal with fields considered in only one national context. This article tries to understand the specific modalities of sociological authorship within two national contexts: the United States and France. The analysis yields an understanding of the logic intimately linking texts and contexts, throwing light not only on the way research and authorship practices are partly shaped by their particular (...) institutional and historical contexts but also on the interactions between cognitive content and patterns of publication. (shrink)

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

Aristotle launched Western knowledge on a trajectory toward disciplinarity that continues to this day. But is the knowledge management project that began with Aristotle adequate for the age of Google? Perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant inter- and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge. This article explores the history of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, arguing for a new, critical form of interdisciplinarity that moves beyond the academy into dialogue with the public and private sectors. (...) Contemporary knowledge production should involve not only a horizontal axis stretching across academia but also a vertical axis where academic research is integrated into contemporary life. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a macro level analysis of the visibility of philosophy of science in the sciences over the last four decades. Our quantitative analysis of publications and citations of philosophy of science papers, published in 17 main journals representing the discipline, contributes to the longstanding debate on the influence of philosophy of science on the sciences. It reveals the global structure of relationships that philosophy of science maintains with science, technology, engineering and mathematics and social sciences and (...) humanities fields. Explored at the level of disciplines, journals and authors, this analysis of the relations between philosophy of science and a large and diversified array of disciplines allows us to answer several questions: what is the degree of openness of various disciplines to the specialized knowledge produced in philosophy of science? Which STEM and SSH fields and journals have privileged ties with philosophy of science? What are the characteristics, in terms of citation and publication patterns, of authors who get their philosophy of science papers cited outside their field? Complementing existing qualitative inquiries on the influence of specific authors, concepts or topics of philosophy of science, the bibliometric approach proposed in this paper offers a comprehensive portrait of the multiple relationships that links philosophy of science to the sciences. (shrink)

This paper analyses how the Cold War influenced the discourses on basic research and on Science and Technology Policies of some leaders of the Argentine research community. It explores two key intersections to study the Cold War: the first between politics and policies; the second between the global and the regional/national. The basic assumption is that, just as there was no one Cold War, specific regional and national traits lent specific meanings to basic research. In dialogue with the literature on (...) Latin American history of STPs, on Cold War and on the conceptual history of science, the paper identifies three discursive configurations around S&T: the first refers to the semi-peripheral scientific context; the second is associated with the ‘democracy-totalitarianism’ dichotomy, and the third is linked to the ‘development-dependence’ dichotomy. Finally, the paper also traces some connections between these discourses and the institutional models proposed by different key actors of the research community to implement STPs. (shrink)

Recent reinterpretations of Mendel's 1865 paper on Pisum as normal nineteenth-century science do not automatically solve the neglect issue. Those who argue that there were cognitive grounds for its neglect have only created a greater paradox, for if Mendel's work was not ahead of its time but was simply excellent normal science, then it should have been used by his contemporaries, as indeed was his work on Hieracium, which was average work. An examination of the nineteenth-century data in terms of (...) recent knowledge about scientific communication suggests that knowledge of Mendel's Pisum work never entered the informal communication network of nineteenth-century botany, and that very few individuals, either by chance or referral, located the Brünn Verhandlungen and read the paper. By this interpretation, Mendel's work was not neglected, it was not known. (shrink)

With the growth of research collaborations, the average number of authors per article and the phenomenon of equally important authorships have increased. The essence of the phenomenon of equally important authorships is the approximately equal importance of authors, both because of the difficulties in comparing authors’ contributions to a paper and some actual research evaluation practices, which give full paper credit only to the most important authors. A mechanism for indicating that various authors contributed equally is required to maintain and (...) strengthen collaboration. However, the phenomenon of multiple important authors can cause unfair comparisons among the research contributions and abilities of authors of different papers. This loophole may be exploited. Normalizing the credit assigned to a given paper’s authors is an easy way to solve this ethical dilemma. This approach enables fair comparisons of the contributions by the authors of different articles and suppresses unethical behaviour in author listings. Bibliometric researchers have proposed mature methods of normalized paper credit assignment that would be easy to use given the current level of computer adoption. (shrink)

This article improves our understanding of the reasons underlying the intellectual migration of scientists from existing cognitive domains to nascent scientific fields. To that purpose we present, first, a number of findings from the sociology of science that give different insights about scientific migration. We then attempt to bring some of these insights together under the conceptual roof of an actor-based approach linking expected utility and diffusion theory. Intellectual migration is seen as the choice of scientists who decide under uncertainty (...) and on the base of estimations about probabilities, costs, and benefits of the migration. The resulting choice model can be used as a heuristic base for further exploration of the subject. (shrink)

The common view of science is a misunderstanding of today's science that does not recognize how "modern" science has changed since its inception in the 16th to 17th centuries. Science is generally taken to be objectively reliable because it uses "the scientific method" and because scientists work disinterestedly, publish openly, and keep one another honest through peer review. That common view was not too unrealistic in the early days and the glory days of modern science, but it is quite wrong (...) about contemporary science, which has ceased to be trustworthy because it is subject to commercial and bureaucratic influences that have spawned highly damaging conflicts of interest, institutional as well as personal. The birth of "modern" science is credited uncontroversially to "The" Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, but it has not been widely under-stood that there have been three distinctly different stages of scientific activity since then. In the first stage, amateurs were seeking to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. There were essentially no controlling interests other than truth-seeking. Missteps taken resulted chiefly from the inherent difficulty of making discoveries and from such inherent human flaws as pride and avarice. The second stage, roughly the 19th century, saw science becoming a career, a plausible way to make a living, not unlike other careers in academe or professions like engineering: respectable and potentially satisfying but not any obvious path to great influence or wealth. Inevitably there were conflicts of interest between furthering a career and following objectively where evidence pointed, but competition and collegiality served well enough to keep the progress of science little affected by that conflicting career interest. The way to get ahead was by doing good science. In the third and present stage, which began at about the middle of the 20th century, science faces a necessary change in ethos as its centuries-long expansion at an exponential rate has changed to a zero-sum, steady-state situation that has fostered intensely cutthroat competition. At the same time, the record of science's remarkable previous successes has led industry and government to co-opt and exploit science and scientists. Those interactions offer the possibility for individuals to gain considerable public influence and wealth. That possibility tempts to corruption. Outright fraud in research has become noticeably more frequent, and public pronouncements about matters of science are made for self-interested bureaucratic and commercial motives. The public cannot now rely safely on the soundness of advice from the scientific community. Keywords: historical changes in science, science become untrustworthy. (shrink)