Project: Governance and Epistemic Change

Aim

The project addresses a long-standing question in Science Studies: How do the conditions under which researchers in three countries and three scientific communities work make it possible for them to change the directions of their research?

Approach

In response to the previous failure of many studies to answer this question, we will apply a new strategy of causal analysis. We adopt from political science the strategy of “causal reconstruction” (Mayntz). This approach starts from observable change – in our case: changes in the content of research – and traces the process leading to this change backwards to its causes. We ask if state and university governance are partial causes of changes in research content and look for other partial causes, most importantly the internal evaluation systems of scientific communities.

Establishing causality requires a comparative approach that reconstructs processes leading to different effects under different conditions. Specifically, we compare:

the development of three innovations
three different fields
three countries with different national governance systems

Data and methods

The empirical investigation combines:

the analysis of documents like researchers’ publications, websites of research groups, and university websites
bibliometric methods for the analysis of publication networks and their development
interviews with researchers and university managers
observations of events (e.g. conferences and seminars)