The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics

Homework: Toward a critical ethnography of the university

“…Nevertheless, responding to the magnetic pull of funding from the national‐security state, discipline after discipline shifted its priorities. Physics shifted from speculative theoretical concerns in favor of more practically useful experimental approaches; these were boom years for fields such as solid‐state physics and nuclear physics, which were of interest to the military (Kaiser , ). Cybernetics and artificial intelligence, both useful in weapons guidance, also experienced a meteoric rise (Edwards ).…”

Guest Editorial

“…And so the evidence regarding the contribution of purposely built campus-garden-suburbstyle science park developments and indeed individual research laboratory buildings designed explicitly to promote scientific interactions (Knowles and Leslie, 2001) and economic performance is ambiguous. Nevertheless, the often rather drab modernity produced for such office parks and the corporate suburbanisation of science was also predicated on relatively autonomous subjects (Kaiser, 2004;Rankin, 2010). Despite the recent reassertion of the primacy of the city proper to economic growth, and despite some suggestion of the city itself once again becoming the laboratory or campus (Haar, 2011) for scientific and universityrelated developments, the fact that so much of the 'preconditions for innovation'-an activity that has itself become big business (Harvey, 1985)-are by now suburban is a significant ingredient in patterns and processes of innovation in the suburban economy (Phelps, 2012).…”

2016 Hes Presidential Address: Statistical Inference in Economics, 1920–1965: Changes in Meaning and Practice

“… 27 Kaiser (2004) points to the postwar explosion of the student-teacher ratio in US physics graduate programs as a factor influencing research practices in physics. …”