The bureaucratization of science

Walsh, John P.; Lee, You-Na

doi:10.1016/j.respol.2015.04.010

Cited by 88 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 81 publications

(182 reference statements)

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“…Our results thus suggest caution in encouraging larger teams (especially if the larger teams do not increase variety or do not integrate well). A related concern is that too much detailed division of labor (task variety) in large teams may result in overly specialized researchers that may not be able to contribute to the elaboration of knowledge needed to generate novel results (Hackett, 1990;Walsh and Lee, 2013). The negative second-order effect of task variety highlights this concern.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This will be also the case for field variety. In addition, increasing specialization raises concerns about the creation of overly specialized "sub-scientists" who are not able to integrate diverse information across roles (Hackett, 1990;Walsh and Lee, 2013). Moreover, task variety creates within-group boundaries between different functions, which is an obstacle for a more integrated and iterative idea generation and evaluation process, which may be needed to nurture creativity (Harvey and Kou, 2013;Van Knippenberg et al, 2004).…”

Section: Variety and Noveltymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact

2015

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a b s t r a c tThe increasing dominance of team science highlights the importance of understanding the effects of team composition on the creativity of research results. In this paper, we analyze the effect of team size, and field and task variety on creativity. Furthermore, we unpack two facets of creativity in science: novelty and impact. We find that increasing team size has an inverted-U shaped relation with novelty. We also find that the size-novelty relationship is largely due to the relation between size and team field or task variety, consistent with the information processing perspective. On the other hand, team size has a continually increasing relation with the likelihood of a high-impact paper. Furthermore, variety does not have a direct effect on impact, net of novelty. This study develops our understanding of team science and highlights the need for a governance approach to scientific work. We also advance the creativity literature by providing an ex ante objective bibliometric measure that distinguishes novelty from impact, and illustrate the distinct team-level drivers of each. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Variety and Noveltymentioning

confidence: 99%

Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact

2015

Self Cite

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“…Individual academic careers unfold in the context of a vast market for knowledge production and consumption (28). Consequently, scientific careers have been examined not only in terms of individual incentives and marginal productivity (i.e., relative gain versus effort) (29), but also institutional incentives (30, 31) and competition (32).…”

Section: Career Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Science of science

Fortunato

Bergstrom

Börner

et al. 2018

Science

973

709

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BACKGROUND The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly inputs and outputs—from research funding, productivity, and collaboration to paper citations and scientist mobility—offers unprecedented opportunities to explore the structure and evolution of science. The science of science (SciSci) offers a quantitative understanding of the interactions among scientific agents across diverse geographic and temporal scales: It provides insights into the conditions underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific discovery, with the ultimate goal of developing tools and policies that have the potential to accelerate science. In the past decade, SciSci has benefited from an influx of natural, computational, and social scientists who together have developed big data–based capabilities for empirical analysis and generative modeling that capture the unfolding of science, its institutions, and its workforce. The value proposition of SciSci is that with a deeper understanding of the factors that drive successful science, we can more effectively address environmental, societal, and technological problems. ADVANCES Science can be described as a complex, self-organizing, and evolving network of scholars, projects, papers, and ideas. This representation has unveiled patterns characterizing the emergence of new scientific fields through the study of collaboration networks and the path of impactful discoveries through the study of citation networks. Microscopic models have traced the dynamics of citation accumulation, allowing us to predict the future impact of individual papers. SciSci has revealed choices and trade-offs that scientists face as they advance both their own careers and the scientific horizon. For example, measurements indicate that scholars are risk-averse, preferring to study topics related to their current expertise, which constrains the potential of future discoveries. Those willing to break this pattern engage in riskier careers but become more likely to make major breakthroughs. Overall, the highest-impact science is grounded in conventional combinations of prior work but features unusual combinations. Last, as the locus of research is shifting into teams, SciSci is increasingly focused on the impact of team research, finding that small teams tend to disrupt science and technology with new ideas drawing on older and less prevalent ones. In contrast, large teams tend to develop recent, popular ideas, obtaining high, but often short-lived, impact. OUTLOOK SciSci offers a deep quantitative understanding of the relational structure between scientists, institutions, and ideas because it facilitates the identification of fundamental mechanisms responsible for scientific discovery. These interdisciplinary data-driven efforts complement contributions from related fields such as sciento-metrics and the economics and sociology of science. Although SciSci seeks long-standing universal laws and mechanisms that apply across various fields of science, a fundamental challenge going forward is accounting for un...

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“…The growth of organised science (Adams et al, 2005;Wuchty et al, 2007) and its increasing massification is likely to also result in its greater bureaucratisation. Indeed, as it has been conclusively shown (Walsh & Lee, 2015;Coccia, 2009), science as a human activity is becoming more: (a) hierarchical, with multiple levels of supervision appearing (growth of administrative structures, such as FANO and VAK in Russia); (b) decentralised, which means that those lower in the hierarchy can make independent decisions though formally approved by those higher in the organisation (which is demonstrated in Russia by reduced governmental budgetary funding for research); (c) highly labour-divided (Popov et al, 2017), with every researcher in a research team performing her narrow circle of responsibilities (e.g. some researchers in the natural sciences); and (d) standardised, meaning that all the work is governed by strictly specified rules and fixed procedures (IMRAD, reports, requirements for applicants for scientific degrees, scientometric indicators measuring research performance, etc.…”

Section: Conformist Behaviour In Modern Sciencementioning

confidence: 82%

Conformity in Modern Science: An Engine of Societal Transformation?

Popova¹,

Moiseenko²,

Beavitt³

2017

CS&P

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The penetration of science into all spheres of life has self-evidently become a contemporary "megatrend". In turn, science itself is also undergoing distinct transformations, e.g., as a result of such processes as increasing regulation and bureaucratisation within academia. In this context, researchers as active producers of scientific knowledge face multiple challenges, including the need to cope with increasing regulation of their everyday practices. Therefore, our research purpose was to investigate the phenomenon of conformity, which, although always having been inseparable from social life, is acquiring a new significance today. Various representations of conformity (e.g. conformist behaviour) have received a great deal of attention from sociologists, biologists and psychologists; however, to our knowledge, there is no generally accepted philosophical understanding of its nature. In this paper, we provide a phenomenological study of conformity on the basis of a comprehensive literature analysis and evaluate its role as a mode of existence in modern science. For the sake of clarity, some illustrations from the everyday lives of researchers are given, including the distribution of the IMRAD format of research articles. Conformity in science is predicted to involve consequences at three distinct levels: (1) within a scientific community, when scientists follow prescribed patterns of conduct; (2) within a particular society when people from all walks of life conform to the standards set by the scientised world-view; and (3) at the global level when non-western communities conform to western standards of life through borrowing western scientific world picture.

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The bureaucratization of science

Cited by 88 publications

References 81 publications

Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact

Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact

Science of science

Conformity in Modern Science: An Engine of Societal Transformation?

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