Abstract
Contemporary science is typically conceived as an international endeavor. Especially the natural and technical sciences are seen as internationally constituted with their adoption of English as a lingua franca as well as widespread cooperation and mobility of researchers across national borders and continents. Such an international perspective on science, however, should not neglect that the configuration of individual research fields may vary considerably between locations, regions, and national contexts. Variation is particularly noticeable in the case of research fields in their nascent and early stages such as current nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and the neurosciences. It is this locally specific character of new research fields and how they come into being that this chapter and the present volume move into the spotlight.
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Notes
- 1.
In an introductory text, Shinn and Ragouet observe that the sociology of the sciences has perpetuated a largely “productivist and ‘economicist’ understanding of science” (2005: 48, our translation from the original French). The same holds true, or so it seems, for current research policy, based on performance measurement, including biblio- and scientometrics of all kinds (see Weingart 2005 for a programmatic critique).
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The still “contentious” character of Laboratory Life may be tied to its constructivist outlook, as we briefly elaborate below.
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- 7.
For space considerations, we have not given a detailed account of the empirical interest in scientific practices in the history and philosophy of science. For a recent collection of historical studies that investigate pedagogical practices, rather than scientific theories, see Kaiser (2005). For a recent appraisal of neo-experimentalist approaches in the philosophy of science, see Soler et al. (2014b).
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On the tension between “global nanotechnology promises and local cluster dynamics”, for example, see Robinson et al. (Chap. 7). On umbrella terms as mediators in the governance of emerging science and technology, including invoked processes of “nationalization and denationalization” (Crawford et al. 1993a, b), see Rip and Voss (2013). On the role of “buzzwords” in agenda-setting and the attempt to create consensus, see Bensaude Vincent (2014).
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Framed competition, rather than topical imposition, is the distinctive hallmark of an “ordoliberal” position. For a historical study on the politics of research policy of related interest, see Nye (2011).
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This second interest marks our empirical interest in the mediated character of any situated mutual construction of research “contexts” and scientific “trends” – that is, mediated by participants’ manifest understandings of their unfolding situations, whichever temporal and spatial extension these situations may turn out to have (see also Knorr-Cetina 1983).
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Another “fundamental tension” of science is associated with the “fact that the objects originate in, and continue to inhabit, different [social] worlds”, raising the issue of “how (…) findings which incorporate radically different meanings [can] become coherent” (Star and Griesemer 1989: 392, emphasis deleted).
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For an exploration of the circumstances under which facts travel “well”, cf. Howlett and Morgan (2011).
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Acknowledgements
Most of the contributions to this volume were first presented at an international workshop, entitled The Local Configuration of New Research Fields: On Regional and National Diversity, which was held at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland, from June 14 to 16, 2012. We would like to thank all workshop participants and subsequent contributors to the volume for their respective contributions, as well as their patience regarding the editorial process. The initial workshop was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Research Committee of the University of Lucerne, and the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology, and Society (STS-CH). Acknowledgments are thus also due to these institutions.
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Merz, M., Sormani, P. (2016). Configuring New Research Fields: How Policy, Place, and Organization Are Made to Matter. In: Merz, M., Sormani, P. (eds) The Local Configuration of New Research Fields. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22683-5_1
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