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References
This is not to say that the interpretation of research results is not rational-or at least highly rationalised. We are concerned here with research as social action, rather than with the validity of what this action produces.
“There may at times be a plan in the foreground of my consciousness that is determined by a governing interest. However, it is always surrounded with a horizon of meaning to which I can again explicatively advert. If I do so, I will discover that the governing interest is connected with other interests, that a goal that is to be actualized is a partial step towards the actualization of higher goals, that decisions have resulted from previous decisions. In daily life, acts are components within a higher-order system of plans: for a specific province within the life-world, for the day, for the year, for work and leisure-which in turn have their place in a more or less determined life-plan.” Schütz, A. and Luckmann, T.,The Structures of the Life-World (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 19.
Polanyi, M.,Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); Ziman, J. M.,Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
This term was introduced by Chubin, D. E. and Connolly T., “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans” making up the biography of an individual research worker.
With the significant exception of Chubin, D. E. and Connolly, T.,op cit. “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans” making up the biography of an individual research worker. Recent studies of “theory choice and problem choice in science” are reviewed by Zuckerman, H.Sociological Inquiry, XLVIII (1979), pp. 67–95.
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science” (1980),Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1980), unpublished.
In the extreme case the perfectly instrumentalised scientist would be a slave. The prisoners of Alexander Solzhenitsyn'sThe First Circle (London: Collins, 1968) are successfully coered to do research by fear of worse alternatives; the large numbers of scientists who work in secret military research laboratories in the Soviet Union are much better treated, but not much more free in their individual research plans. See Medvedev, Zh. A.,Soviet Science (New York: Norton, 1978) and Popovsky, M.,Science in Chains (London: Collins, 1980).
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science”.Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
A characteristic expression of this viewpoint is the following: “Great men [such as Newton], no matter how notable their genius, in all spheres formulate and resolve those tasks which have been raised for accomplishment by the historical development of productive forces and production relationships”. Hessen, Boris, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia” in Bukharin, N. I.et al., Science at the Cross Roads (London: Kniga, 1931), p. 203.
In this I follow Hesse, M.,Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 49.
Szent-Gyorgyi, A., “Dionysians and Apollonians”,Science, CLXXVI (2 June, 1972),p. 966. Many experienced scientists would echo his remark: “When I go home from my laboratory in the late afternoon, I often do not know what I am going to do the next day. I expect to think that up during the night”-not reflecting, perhaps, on the actual invariance of their objectives under their own wider reserrch plans.
Barber, B. and Fox, R. C., “The Case of the Floppy-Eared Rabbits: An Instance of Serendipity Gained and Serendipity Lost”,American Journal of Sociology, XLIV (1956), pp. 128–136.
Hoffmann, B.,Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (London: Hart-Davis, 1973), p. 28.
Szent-Gyorgyi, A.,.
Lovelock, J., “The Independent Practice of Science”,New Scientist, LXXXII (6 September, 1979), pp. 714–717.
Chubin, D. E. and Connolly, T.,op. cit., “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans” making up the biography of an individual research worker.
Panofsky, W., “Needs versus Means in High-Energy Physics”,Physics Today, XXXIII (June 1980), p.29, makes this point for high-energy physics. As he shows from a table of examples, “rarely has a new accelerator or storage ring had its expected goal turn out to be the eventual area of its most important impact”.
Marshak, R., “Basic Research in the University and Industrial Laboratory”Science, CLIV (23 December, 1966), p. 1, 521.
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science”.
From this point, words such as “scientists”, “research”,etc. must be interpreted broadly to include much of what might be narrowly termed “technologist”, “technology”, “technological development”,etc., without explicit qualification.
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science”,.
. p. 86.
. p. 70.
I quote these from four consecutive papers in an issue of a physics journal opened at random.
As pointed out by P. B. Medawar inThe Listener, LXXI (12 September, 1963), this is one of the characteristically “fraudulent” features of most scientific papers.
Ziman, J. M.,Public Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 34.
See, for example, Popper, K. R.,Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 112.
Lakatos, I., “Falsification and the Methodology of scientific Research Programmes” in Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds.),Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91–195, does not suggest that such programmes are publicly adumbrated. On the contrary, by setting them up as “rational reconstructions”, he clearly classes them with the ahistorical,a posteriori rationalisations which scientific authors claim for their papers, to which we have already referred.
Ziman, J. M.,Reliable Knowledge, Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). p. 128. Schrödinger, E,Science and the Human Temperament (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), p.76, slightly overstates the degree of consensus: “... it might be said that scientists all over the world are fairly well agreed as to what further investigations in their respective branches of study would be appreciated or not”. The prevalence of fashion in the choice of research projects, implying excessive influence towards social conformity, is discussed at length by Hagstrom, W. O.,The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 177–184.
Ginzburg, V. L.,Soviet Physics Uspekhi, XIV (1979), pp. 21–39. This is a most interesting document for metascientific analysis, not only as a survey of the contemporaryZeitgeist of fundamental physics but also for its sociological self-consciouness: “... it is in general difficult to define in some consist manner what is ‘unimportant’ and (or) ‘not interesting’ in science. Yet there is no doubt that a hierarchy of problems and tasks does exist. Its effects are felt in practice, it is reflected throughout scientific (and sometimes also in nonscientific) life, and it can even be discerned in the tables of contents of journals”. He emphasises, however, that he is expressing purely personal opinions and that “it is also essential to enaage in problems not included in this ‘list’rd because “many remarkable discoveries and scientific accomplishments are unpredicted and unexpected”.
These phrases are quoted from two volumes of conference proceedings that I happen to have at hand; equivalent phrases may be found in almost any similar publication in almost any field of science.
In a recent collection of peroonal reminiscences of “The Beginnings of Solid State Physics”,Proceedings of the Royal Society, A CCCLXXI (1980), pp. 1–177, by various authors I found anecdotal accounts of about 50 episodes (in the lives of almost as many different scientistis!) of “personal research planning”. In more than 30 per cent. of these episodes, the decision to work on a particular problem was made because “it was the thesis topic assigned to me by my professor”. Most of these episodes occurred 40 to 50 years ago, but this apprenticeship tradition dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and is still firmly entrenched in academic research in the natural sciences.
A further 25 per cent. of the episodes referred to in the previous note came under this general heading.
I speak from personal experience. The correct answer is too cruel to be given; by analogy with Cornelius Vanderbilt's reply, when asked about the cost of running a yacht, it should be “If you have to ask that question, then you are not yet competent to undertake that investigation.”
Kuhn, T. S.,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 37.
,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 82.
Kuhn pp. 18, 59 and 109), himself only draws attention to this feature. His supporters and critics (e. g., in Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A.,op. cit. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91–195 seem to ignore this aspect of science completely.
The clearest example would be the production of heat by friction, which was completely neglected, in theory and experiment, throughout the eighteenth century.
This point of view also resolves the ambivalence of serendipity in the Kuhnian scheme; see,e.g., Dean, C., “Are Serendipitous Dicoveries a Part of Normal Science? The Case of Pulsars”,The Sociological Review, XXV (1977), pp. 73–86.
Hagstrom enunciates the relevant “norms of independence”: “First, the scientist is expected to be able to select research problems freely. Second, he is expected to be able to select freely the methods and techniques to be applied to them.” Hagstrom, W. O.,, p. 105.
“Importance” and “difficulty” are exactly the words that scientists themselves use in this sense when talking about research plans;e.g., in a conversation with R. P. Feynman, reported to meverbatim by a friend. Although these terms are obviously correlated with “benefits” and “costs” respectively. I prefer not to follow the economic imagery too far towards the type of “coarse incremental cost-benefit model” postulated, for example, by Chubin, D. E. and Connolly, T.,op. cit. “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans” making up the biography of an individual research worker.
We thus deliberately evade the issue of what motivates scientists and whether they get their just deserts. This literature is reviewed by Fisch, R., in Spiegel-Rösing, I. and de Solla Price, D., (eds.),Science, Technology and Society, (London: Sage, 1977).
This schematisation is similar in general principle to that of M. Nowakowska in her pioneering paper on “Measurable Aspects of the Concept of Scientific Career” in Knorr, K. D., Strasser, J. and Zilian, H. G., (eds.),Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975), pp. 295–322.
Schütz, A. and Luckman, T.,, p. 92.
“A sense for ‘the right kind of question’ and for the character of its solution develops during the interaction between masters and apprentices and among the apprentices themselves as they pass judgement on the quality of scientific work, new and old, their own and that of others. It develops also as they speculate about the direction their field ‘should take’, identify gaps in basic knowledge, and argue about which problems are ‘ripe’ for solution at the time and which are not. These matters are of evident and prime interest to scientists who intend to help shape the fields in which they work; they might be of less interest to scientists who see themselves playing a more modest role”. Zuckerman, H.,Scientific Elites: Nobel Laureates in the United States (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 129.
This does not apply solely to scientists of limited ability with immodest ambitions. From personal observation I could refer to several cases of persons of high scientific ability who unwisely undertook research projects for which they had entirely misjudged their own intellectual or temperamental suitability. This is, of course an unavoidable feature of academic science, it is a part of the price that must be paid for the benefits of academic autonomy.
Warren, K. S. (ed.),Coping with the Biomedical Literature Explosion: A Qualitative Approach (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1978).
Garfield, E.,Citation Indexing (New York: Wiley, 1979).
Rescher, N.,Scientific Progress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p. 97 defines the λ-quality-level of research findings to be such that “when the total volume of (at least routine) findings is Q, the volume of findings of this category stands at Qλ (for 0<λ≤1)”. On this scale, “routine” findings are those for which λ=1 whilst for really first-rate findings λ approaches 0. This parametric representation of the relative distribution of “important” papers in the scientific literature seems reasonably consistent with impressionistic assessments of this indefinable quality.
This often happens in mathematical research, where the solution of certain problems becomes an end in itself, simply because they have long resisted attack.
On this point I would not follow Nowakowska, M.,. who considers cases where her parameter C is negative,i.e., where the “fear of failure” exceeds the “need of achievement”. In such circumstances, the only rational decision is to give up research altogether—which is what many people actually do, although usually for much more complicated personal reasons.
What Kuhn, T. S.,. describes as “normal science”,i.e., research under the sway of a welldefined and essentially unquestioned paradigm-obviously provides many such apparently easy questions of marginal scientific importance. For want of a better term, we refer to these as “puzzles”.
Szent-Gyorgyi A.,. Although his definition comes close to the customary denigration of “normal” science, it must be emphasised that the “convergent”, “classical” mode of research is as intellectually demanding and as essential to science as the more “divergent” and “romantic” Dionysian style.
Haraszthy, A. and Szanto, L., in Andrews, F. M. (ed.),Scientific Productivity, (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), p. 163, point out that although the average number of projectsper capita in research organisations is about unity, the mean number of projects per research unit is about five, implying that the members of research teams are normally working on several projects at once.
A very simple prosopographic analysis of the published work of about 100 recently deceased scientists (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (London: The Royal Society, 1974–79), vols. 20–25) suggested that about half of them had stayed entirely within the same subspeciality throughout their lives. That is to say, it was even money that a scientist whose Ph.D. thesis or first published paper had been on, say, marine worms, would die as the world's most eminent authority on marine worms.
Chubin, D. E. and Connolly, T.,op. cit. “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans”, making up the biography of an individual research worker. call this “tinkering”.
This point is well illustrated by a conversation reported in Judson, H. F.,The Eighth Day of Creation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 588: “‘... it seemed to me that people who claimed to be trying to isolate the repressor, and prove or disprove the theory, weren't really serious. Weren't really willing to take the kind of risks that were necessary’. What kind of risks were those? ‘Well’, (Mark) Ptashne said, ‘Psychic risks’. The risk of committing one's full effort to a difficult problem? ‘Well yeah! ... I mean the thing that was really tough about it was ... nothing to show for it and always worrying ...’”
Medawar, P. B., inThe Art of the Soluble (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 7, pithily formulates this norm: “Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve”.
Einstein spent the second half of his life in a fruitless attempt to solve one of the most important problems in physics—the relationship between gravitation and electromagnetism. But of course he was already so “well recognised” scientifically by then that he could afford to take this risk.
“... next to nothing is known in any systematically documented way about the effects of the Nobel prizes on problem choice in science”, Zuckerman, H.,, p. 246.
For example, by permitting speculative theories—often elaborately worked out—to proliferate uncritically.
About 25 per cent. of the relatively recently deceased fellows of the Royal Society whose careers were analysed seem to have followed some such policy. For such a scientist, an initial interest in marine worms might expand into significant contributions to various topics throughout the whole field of marine biology. Many of them evidently had “the kind of instinct which guides a scientist to the right problem at the right time before the rightness of either can be demonstrated ... a gift of high order never to be despised”. Sayre, A.,Rosalind Franklin and DNA (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 130.
See Chubin, D. E. and Connolly, T.op. cit., “Research Trails and Scientific Policies”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) to refer to the historical consequences of the ensemble of “research plans” making up the biography of an individual research worker.
This sort of change of course from one highly specialised field of research to quite a different one could be noted in the scientific careers of the remaining 25 per cent. of my little sample of recently deceased fellows of the Royal Society. Thus, it might be that, at the age of 40, having elucidated some unusual biochemical phenomenon in one of his worms, our expert drops out of marine zoology and becomes a leading authority in the equally narrow field of neurological enzymology.
This migration is discussed in some detail for particular cases by Chubin, D. E.,Intellectual Mobility, Mentorship and Confluence: The Case of Reverse Transcriptase (Atlanta, Georgia: Georgia Institute of Technology, 1978) and by Fleck, J., “Development and Establishment in Artificial Intelligence”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980).
“The members of the first generation establishment [in the field of artificial intelligence] in fact were drawn from those who already had some standing or prestigious backing in another field and who could presumably, therefore, afford the risks of investing in a new approach, or the costs of moving field.” Fleck J.,op. cit. “Development and Establishment in Artificial Intelligence”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980). Allison, P. D., “Experimental Parapsychology as a Rejected Science”, in Wallis, R., (ed.),On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge (Keele: University of Keele, 1979), p. 284, notes that “40% of his respondents said they had decided to become involved in parapsychology after already completing their education and having entered another field”.
The research careers of the most influential members of the Australian scientific élite have followed this pattern. Bennett, D. J. and Glasner, P. E. “The Role of Scientific Establishments in the Promotion and Inhibition of Multidisciplinary Programmes”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980).
Cases are described in Wallis, R.,,
Ziman, J. M.,Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 1.
A traditionally “unscientific” enigma taken up, of course, by Alfred Wegener in 1910, and eventually resolved, some 50 years later, by the theory of plate tectonics. See Hallam, A.,A Revolution in the Earth Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
Ziman, J. M., “Some Pathologies of the Scientific Life”,Advancement of Science, XXVII (1971), pp. 1–10.
The pay-off may indeed, be negative: “So strong was the feeling against continental drift [in the United States] unitl quite recently that in some institutions an open adherence to this doctrine would have put at serious risk the attainment of tenure by junior faculty members while their more secure senior colleagues would have been all but drummed out of their invisible college.” Hallam, A.,. p. 105.
“Every scientist should from time to time ask himself the following question: ‘why has so-and-so contributed more to science than I have, although my understanding and mathematical skill are in no way inferior to his?’ The answer is usually the same in every case: ‘He has the courage to go through with unauthentic (i.e. novel) pieces of work, whereas I expend all my efforts on authentic ones’.” Migdal, A. B., “On the Psychology of Scientific Creativity”,Contemporary Physics, XX (1979), pp. 121–148.
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science”.
.
A deep analysis of the relationship between scientific progress and the exponentially growing effort needed to achieve it is made in Rescher, N.,. pp. 54–78.
In Soviet science “power is measured first and foremost in terms of laboratory apparatus. The modern researcher needs apparatus almost as much as he does ideas. Indeed, for immediate purposes, a good new piece of equipment is even more important than a new idea since with the equipment you can do some kind of work in any case, but ideas are of little, or no use on their own.” Popovsky, M.,. p. 62.
“Theoretical physics happens to be one of the few scientific disciplines which, together with mathematics, is ideally suited to development in a developing country. The reason is that no costly equipment is involved. It is inevitably one of the first sciences to be developed at the highest possible level; this was the case in Japan, in India, in Pakistan, in Brazil, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Korea, in Argentina.” Salam, Abdus, “The Isolation of the Scientist in Developing Countries”,Minerva, IV (Summer, 1966), p. 461.
For example, new apparatus for zone refining and crystal pulling, opened up the whole field of solid state electronics by providing much larger, purer and more perfect crystals of semiconductor materials than were previously available. See Braun, E. and MacDonald, S.,Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 64.
A quick glance through the confidential citations of candidates for election to the Royal Society suggests that about 7 per cent. are distinguished mainly for novel contributions to instrumental techniques rather than for direct contributions to scientific knowledge.
The fact that all the authors do not receive equal credit for a paper with multiple authors is another indication of the divergence of modern science from the traditional model of academic science. Meadows, A. J.,Communication in Science (London: Butterworth, 1974), p. 198.
The apparatus with which Ernest Rutherford “split the atom” in 1919 might have been worth a month of his time: the apparatus required for a modern experiment in high-energy physics would cost many hundreds of years of the lives of the experimenters. See Ziman, J. M.,The Force of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Rescher quotes Planck's “principle of increasing effort”: “To be sure,with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased; ever larger demands are made on the achievements of researchers, and the need for a suitable division of labor becomes more pressing.” Rescher, N.,, p. 80.
Nevertheless the average productivity of scientists, in terms of papers published per author per year, has not changed greatly over several decades. See Ziman, J. M., “The Proliferation of the Scientific Literature”,Science, CCVIII (25 April, 1980), pp. 369–371.
Dr. J. Malos tells me that the normal length of an experiment in high-energy physics is now about five years.
Dr. David Baltimore's experimental verification of the reverse transcriptase hypothesis took only two days: but he was only able to do this serendipitous research because he had taken some trouble, over a period of months, to lay hands, “unofficially” on the essential “apparatus” — a large (and very valuable) stock of virus. Studer, K. F. and Chubin, D. E.,The Cancer Mission (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), p. 137.
Lovelock was peculiarly fortunate in having exactly the right instrument under his personal control. Lovelock, J.,.
By contrast, in 1951, Max Perutz spent only a weekend setting up X-ray diffraction apparatus to observe new phenomena predicted from Linus Pauling's model of the alpha helix. Judson, H. F.,The Search for Solutions (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1980), p. 136.
W. K. H. Panofsky illustrates this statement by detailed reference to four major instruments. Panofsky, W.,, pp. 24–30.
“...an apparatus that costs a million marks often can be used only in a way that was thought out years ago by other persons, as they were developing that apparatus. To justify its operation and the outlay in personnel and money that are part of the operation, it is necessary to feed the apparatus with plenty of work. And no failure can be afforded. So easy jobs are selected—mostly operations that are already familiar to others in the scientific world: in other words nothing especially new.” Maier-Leibnitz, H.,Report of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Bonn: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1979). R. E. Marshak emphasises that there is simply no point in attempting to start a university programme of research in some of the “frontier areas” of science without the prospect of an adequate budget for equipment and supporting services. Marshak, R. E.,, pp. 1,521–1,524.
In the more traditional humanistic and social science disciplines, it is still customary for doctoral candidates to propose the topics for their dissertations. Not only are such disciplines more individualistic than the natural sciences; they are also less dependent upon material apparatus.
Does this explain the extraordinary fact that the 14 students who took Ph.D.s under the supervision of C. G. Barkla at Edinburgh between 1924 and 1944 “seem to have had normal scientific careers”, despite the fact that the phenomena they investigated were publicly — and quite correctly — regarded as illusory by almost all other physicists of the day? The implications of this pathological state of affairs are worth serious analysis. Wynne, B., in Wallis, R., pp. 67–87.
Medawar, P. B.,Advice to a Young Scientist (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 14.
There is, of course, a wide variation in the terminology applied to the successive stages of advanced education in different countries. In Britain the Ph.D. degree is usually awarded three or four years after the three-year bachelor's degree —e.g., at the age of 24 or 25. In the United States — and probably in most other countries—six years of graduate study, up to the age of 27 or more, seem now to be the norm. See Pasachoff, J. M., “Six Years for a Ph.D.”,Nature, CCXXXIII (17 September, 1971), p. 217.
Compare the “anomalous” role of the post-doctoral fellow in 1969 reported by Walsh, J. “Postdoctoral Education: Report Emphasizes Recognition Problem,”,Science, CLXVI (28 November, 1969), pp. 1,129–1,130 with its description as a “career pattern”, 10 years later by Coggeshall, P. E., Norvell, J. C., Bogorad, L. and Bock, R. M., “Changing Postdoctoral Patterns for Biomedical Scientists”,Science, CCII (3 November, 1978), pp. 487–493.
The situation in most scientific departments in British universities is probably much as it is now in the physics department of Bristol University, where almost all the academic staff below the age of 35 are on short-term appointments associated with specific research projects.
Walsh, J., “‘Unfaculty’ a Growing Factor in Research”,Science, CCIV (20 April, 1979), p. 286.
Ziman, J. M., “Bounded Science: The Prospect of a Steady State”,Minerva, XVI (Summer 1978), pp. 327–339.
In a recent issue ofNature, for example, there were 30 advertisements for research assistantships in academic institutions. In each case, the job description was along the following lines: — “Research assistant with Ph.D. inneurobiology with experience ofelectrophysiological andneuroanatomical techniques preferably includingelectron microscopy, required to studyneuronal interaction in thecephalopod visual system.” If all the italicised technical terms in such a description are needed to differentiate significant categories of expertise then there must be hundreds of distinct scientific specialities which are not supposed to be interchangeable as components of a research team. In reality, there is usually considerable latitude in adjusting the research work to the capacities and interests of whoever is available to carry it out.
It is true that “open” research fellowships—e.g., “to enable oustanding young scientists... to devote their full time to original and independent research” — are offered by quite a number of institutions and agencies (U.K. Science Research Council, 1980). Without a careful investigation of the careers of scientists who have won such fellowships, often against fierce competition, it is impossible to say whether this policy has any significant effect in countering the general trend we are here discussing.
The consequences of this tradition in France are discussed by Cahn, R. W., “How French ‘Postdocs’ are left out in the Cold”,Nature, CCLXXIX (14 June, 1979), p. 972.
See Schwarz, J., “U.K. Researchers claim Rights over Short-term Contracts”,Nature, CCLXXVI (21/28 December, 1978), p. 745.
See Schwarz, J., “Portrait of the out-of-work scientist”,Nature, CCLXXXII (1 November, 1979), pp. 7–8.
Brode, W. R., “Manpower in Science and Engineering: Based on a Saturation Model”,Science, CLXXIII (16 July, 1971), pp. 206–213.
See Knorr, K. D., “Contextuality and Indexicality of Organizational Action: Toward a Transorganizational Theory of Organizations”,Social Science Information, XVIII (1979), pp. 79–101.
See Orth, C. D., Bailey, J. C. and Wolek, F. W.,Administering Research and Development: The Behaviour of Scientists and Engineers in Organisations (London: Tavistock, 1965), pp. 107, 364, 489, 532; and Cotgrove, S. and Box, S.,Science, Industry and Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp. 93–96.
Orth, C. D., et al.,, p. 30; Cotgrove, S. and Box, S.,op. cit. Science, Industry and Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp. 27–28.
Orth, C. D., et al., (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp. 147 338. S. Marcson notes however, that “hedging”,i.e., permitting a research scientist to spend a very small part of his time on a “risky” personal venture-may be no more than a management ploy to discourage the project without actually vetoing it. Marcson, S.,The Scientist in American Industry (New York: Harper's, 1960), p. 112. This sort of psychological double bluffing is only one of the sources of indeterminacy of social action generated in organisational contexts, as discussed by Knorr, K. D.,op. cit. “Contextuality and indexicality of Organizational Action: Toward a Transorganizatonal Theory of Organizations”,Social Science Information, XVIII (1979), pp. 79–101.
“‘Bootlegging’ — the diversion of small unacounted amounts of time and resources to unofficial goals — is somewhat traditional in research institutions. Moreover, most research direactors known that such work can be quite rewarding, perhaps because it is only the individual highly deidcated to a deviant or unorthodox idea who does it.” Schmitt, R. W., “By Choice or by Chance, Human Values in Applied Science”, unpublished paper. Cotgrove, S. and Box, S.,op. cit. Science, Industry and Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), p. 118, note that “bootlegging” is only on of several strategies by which research scientists can get to do the work that they personally prefer.
Ellis, N. D. “The Occupation of Science”,Technology and Society, V (1969), pp. 33–41.
Hagstrom, W. O.,, pp. 105–112.
Cotgrove, S. and Box, S., p. 26.
K. D. Knorr points out that this notion is “by and for an agent at a particulartime and place, and carried by local interpretations”, and would make it the driving force of all research. Knorr, K. D., “Producing and Reproducing Knowledge: Descriptive or constructive”,Social Science Information, XVI (1977), pp. 669–696. Although the whole trend of the present paper is towards recognising the significance of such intermediate concepts in the calculus of personal motives, I would be more cautious in demythologising the conventional scientific belief in the ultimate superiority of “objective” public knowledge.
E. C. Bullard remarks that “The preference of most scientists for working on what they wish to work on ... [is a problem] that usually arises in establishments that are otherwise unsatisfactory. Most people's interests are not as firmly fixed as they believe...”. Bullard, E. C., In Cockcroft, J. (ed.),The Organization of Research Establishments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 265. A research organisation that is obviously “satisfactory” in this respect is described by Orth, C. D.,et al., op. cit. Administering Research and Development: The Behaviour of Scientists and Engineers in Organisations (London: Tavistock 1965), p. 532.
“The research staff member now begins to accept the laboratory's definition of broadened interests. What is more, the laboratory attempts to convince him that what he is now doing is what he really wants to do. For his own ability to function effectively it is important that he internalizes an approximation of the view that he is working on what he really wants to. The change in definition of desirable research areas does not of itself lessen the individual's devotion to research”. Marcson, S.,, p. 66.
Lighthill, M. J., in Cockcroft, J. (ed.),, p. 32 Hammond, D. L., “Physicists in Industry”,Physics Today, XXV (1972), pp. 42–45, emphasises flexibility as a prime quality.
Bullard, E. C.,, p. 266, refers to the difficulty of persuading a man to stop work on a project that is no longer important—with all the psychological factors that this entails. See also Davies, D., “Peculiar Problems of the British Civil Service”,Nature, CCLV (22 May, 1975), pp. 293–296.
Marcson, S.,, p. 142; Cotgrove, S. and Box, S.,op. cit., Science, Industry and Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), p. 159.
Ravetz, J. R.,Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 31 ff.
It must not be thought, however, that all research organisations are now identical. This seems to have been an assumption of the UNESCO project reported in Andrews, F. M.,op. cit. But the results reported by G. A. Cole in the same volume show that there are “striking differences in performance and influence patterns for research units in academic, government/cooperative, and industrial settings”, with further distinctions, within the academic world, between “clusters comprised of the exact and natural sciences, the medical and social sciences, and the applied sciences and technology”.
See Hagstrom, W. O., pp. 112–124, regarding “free collaboration”, especially among mathematicians.
Ziman, J. M.,Public Knowledge, pp. 94–101.
The dialectical relationship between co-operation and competition between major research groups is discussed by Edge, D. and Mulkay, M. J.,Astronomy Transformed: The Emergence of Radio-Astronomy in Britain (New York: Wiley, 1976). In so far as the research programmes of these groups may be personally ascribed to the intentions of their leaders, these considerations are also relevant to our present theme.
Meadows, A. J.,, pp. 199–206. The proportion of papers with plural authorship in the past—of the order of 20 per cent. in the natural sciences—greatly overstates the degree of voluntary collaboration, since it includes many cases of unequal co-authorship by teacher and student.
See Morrison, D. R. O., “The Sociology of International Scientific Collaborations”, in Armenteros, R.,et al., Physics from Friends (Geneva: CERN, 1968).
.
Ben-David, J.,The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 130–132.
In this way, as J. Fleck points out, the foundation of the new universities of Sussex and Essex in the 1960s was a major factor in the development of research in artificial intelligence. Fleck, J.,op. cit. “Development and Establishment in Artificial Intelligence”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980).
See, for example, Ziman, J. M.,Reliable Knowledge. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967)
The first comprehensive account of this process was probably by Kidd, C. V.,American Universities and Federal Research (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959). An elementary description is given by Ziman, J. M.,The Force of Knowledge.
Just occasionally, however, a contrary decision may accidentally have very positive consequences. Among the 50 episodes reported in “The Beginnings of Solid State Physics”,Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1980, there were four cases where what proved to be very fruitful new lines of research had to be taken up in place of other, apparently more favourable projects for which resources simply could not be obtained.
Merton, R. K.,The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 267.
See Cole, S., Rubin, L., and Cole, J. R., “Peer Review and the Support of Science”,Scientific American, CCXXXVII (1977), pp. 34–41.
Muller, R. A., “Innovation and Scientific Funding”,Science, CCIX (1980), pp. 880–883.
As in the case of Lovelock, J.,.
Research on quantum electronics, which brought good fortune to C. H. Townes did not apparently seem such a bright idea to four major industrial research laboratories (Westinghouse, Radio Corporation of America, General Electric and Bell), who must have been disagreeably surprised at their failure to anticipate the discovery of the laser only a few years after they had stopped research in this field. Townes, C. H., “Quantum Electronics and Surprise in Development of Technology”,Science, CLIX (16 February, 1968), pp. 699–703.
This is the official terminology of the UK Science Research Council in its handbook of information on research-grants (1979).
Ibid. This is the official terminology of the UK Science Research council in its handbook of information on research-grants (1979).
L. Cranberg quotes advertisements for senior faculty appointments requiring “Proven ability to generate grant support”. He goes on to remark that “this closes the door to anyone whose research requires little or no grant support. Conversely, it tends to put a premium on research that is costly and requires, or has obtained, large support in the past... it tends to bar the innovative, the unconventional in favour of the familiar, the sure-fire, in the name of research!” Cranberg, L., “Grantsmanship in Advertising”,Physics Today, XXXIII (1980), p. 15.
McCrone, J. D. and Hoppin, M. E., “Request for Proposals and Universities”,Science, CLXXIX (9 March, 1973), pp. 975–977.
See Crosland, M., “From Prizes to Grants in the Support of Scientific Research in France in the Nineteenth Century: The Montyon Legacy”,Minerva, XVII (Autumn 1979), pp. 355–380.
Studer, K. F. and Chubin, D. E., p. 95, plot this trend and quote L.D. Longo: “Contract research, which is largely for product delivery of procurement purposes, has the potential of undermining a scientist's commitment to patient, systematic and often frustrating discovery-oriented basic research”. Longo, L. D.,Federation Proceedings, XXXII (1973) pp. 2,078–2,085.
This applies in other professions. P. Elliott notes that “in spite of the apparent bureaucratisation of [large] law firms, the so-called independent solo lawyers [in New York] were more constricted in several senses by their practice situation.” Elliott, P.,The Sociology of the Professions (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 119.
The rhetorical function of scientific papers is discussed in Ziman, J. M.,Public Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) andReliable Knowledge.
R. A. Muller was told by the National Science Foundation that “a proposal should be as ‘polished’ as a paper published in a major journal” and remarks that “Referees frequently expect all potential problems to be identified and their solutions outlined. Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration to say that agencies expect a proposal to outline the anticipated discoveries.” Muller, R. A.,.
Garfinkel, H.,Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967) pp. 172–173.
This point is made in relation to science policy in general in Salomon, J. J.,Science and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 95 ff.
Garfinkel, H.,, pp. 262–283.
Szent-Györgyi, A.,. This has usually been the initial response of my own scientific colleagues and acquaintances to the theme of this paper.
Ziman, J. M., “Conceptions of Science”:Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
This complementarity is more or less taken for granted by most scientists nowadays. For example, H. D. Daniel and R. Fisch questioned 3,000 German academic scientists about the motives and goals of research; in 75 per cent. of the answers, both “internalist” and “externalist” factors were given equivalent weight. Daniel, H. D. and Fisch, R., (1980), private communication.
This was precisely the issue in the debate of the late 1930s. See McGucken, W., “On Freedom and Planning in Science: The Society for Freedom in Science 1940–1946”,Minerva, XVI (Spring 1978), pp. 42–72.
W. T. Hanson Jr. describes the management philosophy needed to “design, develop and manufacture a completely new instant photographic film with its special camera, in just a few years”, starting from basic chemical principles. From concept to practice this involved contributions from more than 2,000 scientists and engineers, from a wide range of disciplines. Hanson, W. T., Jr “The Interdisciplinary Approach: A New Photographic Film”,Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, IV (1979), pp. 290–297.
Marcson, S.,, p. 115.
This is a grave issue of the politics of science. The physics community suffered a major crisis of morale after Hiroshima, when it was realised that it could be used collectively as an instrument for the most evil purposes without losing the peculiar “sweetness” of scientific discovery as an individual occupation. One may speculate that the fear of a similar trauma of “knowing sin” precipitated the recent debate among molecular biologists about the dangers of “genetic engineering”. Until then, the possible instrumentality of their remarkable and beautiful science had seemed too hypothetical and remote for serious concern.
This attitude is revealed by the cliché metaphor: “In the present financial climate, we can hardly expect to get funds for...”
For example, K. F. Studer and D. E. Chubin point to the failure of biologists “with much responsiblity, eminence, and clout within their respective research communities” to prevent the implementation of scientifically inept federal funding policies—chiefly because they took their stand on a “discovery” conception of the research process without allowing sufficiently for the overwhelming political instrumentality of the “Cancer Mission”. Studer, K. F. and Chubin, D. E.,, p. 226.
For some examples, see Greenberg, D. S.,The Politics of American Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
See Weinberg, A. M.,Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).
A clear example of this trend towards “positive instrumentalism” in the support of research was the decision to introduce the Rothschild “customer-contractor” principle into government science in Britain. See Gummett, Philip,Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). It is relevant to our present theme that, even after this reform, most research sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Security “began with a proposal from researchers rather than customer initiative”; see Kogan, M., Korman, N. and Henkel, M.,Government's Commissioning of Research (Uxbridge: Department of Government, Brunel University, 1980), p. 25.
This relationship of science to power is the central theme of Salomon, J. J., ff.
See Marcson, S.,, and Studer, K. E. and Chubin, D. E.,op. cit., Intellectual Mobility, Mentorship and Confluence: The Case of Reverse Transcriptase (Atlanta, Georgia: Georgia Institute of Technology, 1978) p. 100. The latter point out that “through shifts in policy such as that embodied in the war on cancer [the National Institute of Health] can exert tremendous pressures on the selection of research topics. And scientists will pursue the opportunities which increased funding makes possible.”
That is, it does not justify the policy described by Popovsky, M., p. 182: “For the past half century, the chief principle [of the million scientists of the Soviet Union] has been that their work belongs to the state and that it is their duty to serve the state and the Soviet people”.
Schmitt, R. W.,op. cit. “By Choice or by Chance, Human Values in Applied Science”, unpublished paper
Benett, D. J. and Glasner, P. E.,op. cit. “The Role of Scientific Establishments in the Promotion and Inhibition of Multidisciplinary Programmes”,Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, VI (1980) point to breadth and interdisciplinary interest and judgement as prime qualities of members of the Australian scientific establishment.
Campbell, L., and Garnett, W.,The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882).
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Ziman, J. What are the options? social determinants of personal research plants. Minerva 19, 1–42 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02192547
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02192547