MinervaPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-09-26DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09545-z
Björn Hammarfelt, Johanna Dahlin
{"title":"Abstracting It All: The Soviet Institute of Scientific Information (VINITI) and the Promise of Centralisation, 1952-1977.","authors":"Björn Hammarfelt, Johanna Dahlin","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09545-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11024-024-09545-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the aftermath of the Second World War, effective handling of scientific information was identified as crucial for advancement and international competitiveness. Here, we study how the Soviet Union, through the founding of <i>The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information</i> (VINITI), developed its own grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. By studying its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge, we provide rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort, we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952-1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as \"enrichment\", \"abstracting\" and \"pre-printing\". A key principle emerging from our analysis is how the notion of concentration becomes a fundamental principle for its operations. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old-fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"63 1","pages":"115-133"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11880166/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143574291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2025-03-25DOI: 10.1007/s11024-025-09577-z
Sarah Rose Bieszczad, Maximilian Fochler, Sarah de Rijcke
{"title":"Diving into Relevance: How Deep Sea Researchers Articulate Societal Relevance within their Epistemic Living Spaces.","authors":"Sarah Rose Bieszczad, Maximilian Fochler, Sarah de Rijcke","doi":"10.1007/s11024-025-09577-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11024-025-09577-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying. The field is currently in transition regarding its understanding of societally relevant research, as it has been criticised for failing to provide narratives that adequately demonstrate its societal relevance and the corresponding disconnect between its epistemic foci and the concerns of researchers, industry, and society more broadly. This transition is reverberating throughout ocean research institutions, prompting deep sea researchers to reconsider and re-articulate the relevance and applicability of their work. This article examines how deep sea researchers from two European ocean research institutes articulate the societal relevance of their work within their unique epistemic environments. Using a person-centred approach, we identify three ideal-type articulations of relevance: fundamental, translational, and solution-oriented. These articulations are shaped by financial, institutional, cultural, and media-related factors within the researchers' epistemic living spaces as well as their epistemic commitments to the creation of particular types of knowledge. Our findings reveal diverse understandings of societal relevance among deep sea researchers, even within single institutions. By focusing on these articulations, we frame relevance as an active process, highlighting the various actions researchers undertake to produce knowledge they perceive as relevant.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"63 2","pages":"205-229"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12174193/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144334146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-09-12DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09544-0
Katharina C. Cramer, Nicolas V. Rüffin
{"title":"The EUropeanisation of Research Infrastructure Policy","authors":"Katharina C. Cramer, Nicolas V. Rüffin","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09544-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09544-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Political interest in Research Infrastructures on a European scale has been a new phenomenon, marked in the early 2000s with the launch of the Lisbon Strategy and the European Research Area. European Research Infrastructure policy then developed through, first, the strategic incorporation of incumbents through new modes of coordination; second, the European Commission’s emphasis of joint responsibility at the supranational level, claiming its own accountability and mobilizing the subsidiarity principle to its advantage; third, the incentivization of conformity to the European Commission’s policy agenda through generous financial schemes and fourth, the implementation of tailor-made legislation. While this topic speaks to current debates in EU studies, it also amends analyses of Big Science as an empirical puzzle within European politics and integration and launches a scholarly effort to come to terms with the new phenomenon of Research Infrastructures.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142219971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-09-09DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09541-3
Jonatan Nästesjö
{"title":"Between Delivery and Luck: Projectification of Academic Careers and Conflicting Notions of Worth at the Postdoc Level","authors":"Jonatan Nästesjö","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09541-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09541-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper investigates how early career academics interpret and respond to institutional demands structured by projectification. Developing a ‘frame analytic’ approach, it explores projectification as a process constituted at the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history, the findings show that respondents jointly referred to <i>competition</i> and <i>delivery</i> in order to make sense of their current situation. Forming what I call <i>the project frame</i>, these interpretive orientations were legitimized by various organizational routines within the studied departments, feeding into a dominant regime of valuation and accumulation. However, while the content of the project frame is well-defined, attempts to align with it vary, indicating the importance of disciplines and academic age when navigating project-based careers. Furthermore, this way of framing academic work and careers provokes tensions and conflicts that junior scholars try to manage. To curb their competitive relationship and enable cooperation, respondents emphasized the outcome of project funding as ‘being lucky.’ They also drew on imagined futures to envision alternative scripts of success and worth. Both empirically and conceptually, the article contributes to an understanding of academic career-making as a kind of pragmatic problem-solving, centered on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142219970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-08-03DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09537-z
Marianna Zieleńska, Magdalena Wnuk
{"title":"Benchmarking and the Technicization of Academic Discourse: The Case of the EU at-Risk of Poverty or Social Exclusion Composite Indicator","authors":"Marianna Zieleńska, Magdalena Wnuk","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09537-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09537-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on the critical discourse analysis of journals and working papers from 2011-2020 referring to the at-risk of poverty or social exclusion composite indicator (AROPE), we shed light on how benchmarks technicize academic discourse, particularly in its part contributed by economists. First developed to measure progress towards the poverty target set in the EU's Europe 2020 strategy, AROPE has easily permeated academic debate. Its anchoring in statistical procedures and expertise has allowed it to function in this debate as a neutral and purely technical measurement tool, obscuring the interests and normative choices underlying its design and implementation. As a result, the discursive practices associated with the benchmark have led to the reproduction and legitimization of the anti-poverty policy objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. Simultaneously, AROPE has provided a 'cognitive infrastructure' that enabled an economic view of the world geared towards raising competitiveness. It has made it possible to assess which Member State is doing well and which is doing poorly, and making recommendations on how the laggards should improve. Our analysis shows that benchmarks such as AROPE support the process of shaping Europe as a supranational entity, creating a picture of common European problems with uniform definitions, on the basis of which it is possible to divide Member States into better and worse performers and even promote common solutions through good practices. We conclude by highlighting that the academic discourse around AROPE, generated mainly by economists, reflects the growing interdependence of the academic and political spheres and the pressure for research to have social and political impact.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"217 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141883759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-07-31DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09535-1
Peter Woelert, Bjørn Stensaker
{"title":"Strategic Bureaucracy: The Convergence of Bureaucratic and Strategic Management Logics in the Organizational Restructuring of Universities","authors":"Peter Woelert, Bjørn Stensaker","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09535-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09535-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over recent decades, one can identify two key narratives associated with changes in university organization and governance. The first narrative focuses on the administrative consequences of an off-loading state relinquishing direct control over some of universities’ internal operations while at the same time driving bureaucratization at the institutional level. The second narrative focuses on the emergence of an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment driving universities to transform into strategically managed organizations. In this paper, we argue that while the organizational logics associated with these two narratives imply differently accentuated forms of legitimation, they converge and combine with respect to key dimensions of universities’ internal organizing, ultimately giving rise to a hybrid form of organizational governance we label ‘strategic bureaucracy’. Such strategic bureaucracy, we illustrate, is characterized by a strong focus on strategic leadership and the associated management techniques while also intensifying organizational features traditionally associated with bureaucratic governance such as formalization and hierarchical authority.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"262 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141866959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-07-09DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09539-x
Joseph C. Hermanowicz
{"title":"The Therapeutic University","authors":"Joseph C. Hermanowicz","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09539-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09539-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Universities are generally understood as organizations that extend knowledge based on codified bodies of work developed from systematic research and scholarship. This article examines the emergence of an organizational form that increasingly competes in contemporary higher education: the therapeutic university. A recent phenomenon, the therapeutic university is predicated on emotion in which the goal is to make the experience as a student as comfortable as possible. The article discusses organizational morphology of the therapeutic university by identifying practices within it. The practices establish a contest between a rational-universalistic orientation of the university on the one hand and an emotion-particularistic orientation on the other. The article provides an explanation for why this organizational form arose and what it purports to accomplish. Its operations are ensnared by major paradox: as its identity implies, the therapeutic university postures to do good, but its practices, it is argued, debilitate students and higher learning. The mandate that the broader society gives to higher education is thereby susceptible to lost confidence. The article concludes by discussing a way in which universities may be inoculated from the conditions that support their present-day therapeutic proclivities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141570447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-06-21DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09534-2
Øyunn Syrstad Høydal
{"title":"Could I Write Like Carol Weiss?","authors":"Øyunn Syrstad Høydal","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09534-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09534-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Academic papers in the social sciences were once more essayistic in their form. The carefree launching of concepts and ideas of academic value were the order of the day, all without the security of the present standardized paper format inspired by the natural sciences. This text draws on the most cited paper by the acclaimed scholar Carol Weiss, as an outset to discussing academic writing; why we write as we do and what we may lose by doing so. This means exploring the history of academic writing as well as discussing the complex, yet exciting, relationship between writing, identity, language, and the very process of conducting research.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141503648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09530-6
Öznur Karakaş
{"title":"The Persistence of Gender Inequality in e-Science: The Case of eSec","authors":"Öznur Karakaş","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09530-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09530-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>E-science, or networked, collaborative and multidisciplinary scientific research on a shared e-infrastructure using computational tools, methods and applications, has also brought about new networked organizational forms in the transition of higher education towards the entrepreneurial academy. While the under-representation of women in ICTs is well-recorded, it is also known that the potential of new organizational forms such as networked structures to promote gender equality remains ambiguous, as they tend to perpetuate already existing inequalities due to their embeddedness in larger and longer-term structural or institutional gender effects. Based on a year-long ethnographic study in a networked academic e-science collaboration in Sweden and 45 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with its affiliated researchers, this article analyzes the multi-level obstacles to achieving gender equality in e-science to highlight the ways in which gendered disparities persist in this new, project-based academic networked organization in Sweden, hereafter called eSec. At the <i>organizational level</i> eSec remains deeply embedded in the traditional disciplinary and institutional academic setting, inadvertently reproducing existing gender imbalances across sciences. Furthermore, as a project-based organization, it is also embedded in the shift towards an entrepreneurial university model driven by new managerialism, the latter having a well-documented adverse effect in gender equality. This represents <i>a structural-level</i> obstacle which leads to especially female junior faculty leaving academy for industry. An <i>individual level</i> obstacle is observed alongside these as disavowal (<i>Verleugnung</i>) of gender disparities, an affect identified as a key mechanism of subjectivation in neoliberalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141194702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MinervaPub Date : 2024-05-29DOI: 10.1007/s11024-024-09526-2
Jochen Gläser
{"title":"From Effects of Governance to Causes of Epistemic Change","authors":"Jochen Gläser","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09526-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09526-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper I argue that the attempts by science studies to identify epistemic effects of new governance instruments have largely failed. I suggest two main reasons for this failure. The first reason is that neither quantitative nor qualitative studies of effects of governance instruments meet the respective methodological standards for establishing causality. While much of this could be repaired, the second reason is more severe: given the complex causal web between governance and knowledge production and the multi-level nature of causation, a strategy that starts from a particular governance instrument and tries to identify its effects cannot work. I propose to reverse this strategy by starting from the observation of epistemic change and applying a strategy of “causal reconstruction” (Mayntz), which identifies the causes of this epistemic change and among them the contribution by governance. This approach has the advantage of starting from well-identified change. Challenges posed by the new approach include the empirical identification of epistemic change and the need to integrate sociological methods in science policy studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141170221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}