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- Convenors:
-
Jochen Gläser
(TU Berlin)
Nathalie Schwichtenberg (German Center of Higher Education and Science Studies)
Grit Laudel (Technical University Berlin)
Susanne Wollin-Giering (TU Berlin)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We invite researchers who believe that collective frames of researchers play a role in their empirical studies to share their work. We are particularly interested in the role frames play in explanations of the production of scientific knowledge and in strategies of empirically identifying frames.
Long Abstract:
Ever since the social construction of scientific knowledge became an object of study and a target of explanation, the frames of actors involved in these construction processes needed to be dealt with empirically and conceptually. Social theory considers frames as specific cognitive structures that provide actors with knowledge about situations and proven solutions for typical problems (Giddens, 1979 Goffman 1974; Schütz, 1967). Collective frames are shared between researchers, are constructed and maintained through mutual observation and communication, and are passed on to new members in socialisation processes. Such frames played an incognito role in a divergent set of studies including the investigation of scientific controversies (Collins 1981), epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999), individual and collective notions of research quality (Ochsner et al. 2013), and ignorance (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013). They were explicitly treated only in a study of academic careers (Laudel et al. 2019). Unfortunately, the terminological variety, theoretical ambiguity and limited methodological support for their study prevented science studies from paying attention to an underlying common interest. So far, frames were introduced ad hoc. We think that science studies could benefit from their more systematic treatment.
With our session, we want to begin a discussion about the role of collective frames in the production of scientific knowledge and thus for science studies. We invite researchers who believe that collective frames of researchers play a role in their empirical studies to share their work. We are particularly interested in the role frames play in explanations of the production of scientific knowledge and in the strategies of empirically identifying frames.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jochen Gläser (TU Berlin)
Long abstract:
Studies of criteria for research quality and their application have largely proceeded without defining the concept ‘research quality’. This reluctance to define and theoretically position the concept research quality condemns studies to reporting researchers’ opinions about research quality in their fields. Explaining the emergence of such opinions or their effects in particular situations of assessment is impossible without defining “research quality” and positioning it ain a theory. Furthermore, methodological choices about how to collect data on the role of research quality in processes of knowledge production or in the governance of science cannot be supported if a theoretical understanding of the concept is lacking. I will present a suggestion to define ‘research quality’ as a collective frame of scientific communities for the assessment of the utility of contributions. From this definition follows that researchers do not hold fixed notions of ‘research quality’ but construct the ‘quality’ of objects of assessment situatively by enacting collective quality frames in response to specific circumstances. An important methodological consequence of this understanding is that we should be wary of researchers’ opinions on research quality as communicated in surveys or interviews. These methods of data collection create situations in which researchers must communicate their frames to people they perceive as outsiders who are laypersons with regard to their research. Thus, valid data on a scientific community’s quality frames can only be collected in situations in which researchers do enact these frames for each other.
Grit Laudel (Technical University Berlin)
Long abstract:
If we define notions of research quality as collective frames of scientific communities for the assessment of the utility of scientific contributions, methodological challenges arise because as cognitive structures actors are only partly aware of, frames are notoriously difficult to detect. Furthermore, the enactment of such frames in interactions between researchers must be analysed, which requires interpreting quality judgments uttered by researchers in the language and context of their research. The common approach of co-constructing quality notions in interactions between researchers and their STS observers, e.g. by letting researcher specify general quality criteria like originality cannot ascertain how quality frames are enacted in situ.
I will present an another qualitative approach, which I applied for identifying quality notions used by researchers in three specialties (plant biology, medieval history, ultrafast physics) when assessing the work of their colleagues. Quality judgments were investigated in formal assessment situations (peer review of publications and grant proposals) as well as informal assessment situations (seminar and conference discussions), using observations, content analysis of review documents, and interviews with researchers. This general strategy was tailored to the communication practices of each research field. From the arguments made by researchers, I distilled field-specific quality criteria with bottom-up coding and compared them across various assessment situations to arrive at collectively shared notions of research quality. I will discuss the methodological challenges of this approach.
Jonatan Nästesjö (Lund University)
Long abstract:
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 on the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history, the findings reveal that respondents jointly refer to competition and delivery to make sense of their current situation. Forming what I call 'the project frame,' these interpretive orientations contribute to a narrow regime of valuation and accumulation, shaping the respondents’ research practices and social identity as early career academics. However, attempts to align with the project frame vary, indicating the significance of disciplinary background, group memberships, and wider evaluative landscapes in understanding the dynamics of projectification. Additionally, early career academics do more than passively accept their situation as given. By emphasizing the importance of luck and drawing on imagined futures, respondents negotiate the normative meanings of the project frame. Understood as acts of keying, this allows them to adapt to certain institutional demands of the early career while committing to broader definitions of recognition and worth. Both conceptually and empirically, the article contributes to an understanding of academic career-making as a kind of pragmatic problem-solving centred on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations.
Susanne Wollin-Giering (TU Berlin)
Long abstract:
Many academic careers are characterized by precarious working conditions, series of short-term contracts, project-based funding, and fierce competition for limited permanent positions, resulting in considerable uncertainty. This uncertainty is further increased by a hardly investigated phenomenon: phases of unemployment, occurring in all disciplines and career stages.
Notably, phases of unemployment are actively used for the continuation of the research career, e.g. for finishing publications, conducting experiments, conference participation, or literature research. Unemployed researchers thus adhere to a collective interpretive frame that justifies continuing research as a pathway to sustaining their academic careers.
Based on interviews with 20 researchers from different fields such as ethnology, sociology, plant biology, and astronomy, I will show how this frame is enacted and maintained in practice by looking at 1) irritations to and 2) factors stabilising the frame.
Hence, I will analyse the conflicting frames researchers face: on the researcher's side an exit frame in the form of the awareness of non-academic career paths as legitimate alternatives; and frames from non-academic actors, such as the expectations of employment agencies that do not fit well with academic careers. Likewise, I will consider epistemic, personal, financial and temporal factors, along with social networks, that may facilitate or impede adherence to the frame to continue research.
Harro van Lente (Maastricht University)
Long abstract:
In this paper, I investigate how epistemic imaginaries change in response to societal challenges like the climate crisis. I define epistemic imaginaries as textual or visual representations of an ideal set of future achievements within a research field. Such future achievements range from ‘holy grails’ of the field to be awarded with a Nobel prize, to generic and mundane assessments of what, realistically, can be expected to be achieved in the near or not so near future. By defining what can be realistically be expected, epistemic imaginaries frame research agendas, directly by stating or suggesting something is impossible to achieve, or indirectly, by foregrounding other priorities. I am interested in how scientific agenda setting processes respond to the demands and pressures of the climate crisis. Theoretically, the paper bridges the sociology of expectations and studies on frames in epistemic cultures. Empirically, I study (i) plasma chemistry and (ii) neurodegenation research. In the two chosen research fields, I delineate epistemic imaginaries and investigate how these - in the last decade - have changed by the prospects of the climate crisis. I will formulate tentative insights into how epistemic imaginaries change, with pathways, stages and mechanisms. The theoretical gain of the paper is to clarify epistemic imaginaries and to specify their roles in the frames of epistemic cultures. To improve the governance of science, such insights are important and urgent, too. As epistemic imaginaries frame the direction of science, they may facilitate or hinder change for the better, too.
Alex Rushforth (Leiden University)
Long abstract:
Recent times have seen the rise of a trans-national research assessment reform movement. The Netherlands is perhaps the country that is overall, furthest along in enacting this reform agenda across its national research system. Its 'Recognition and Rewards' initiative frames Dutch science as excessively relying on narrow, quantitative performance criteria, calling instead on multiple actors to work towards broadening what counts as quality when assessing academic research and researchers and diversifying career pathways.
In this talk, I will combine problem frame stakeholder mapping (Bryson, 2004) with science studies accounts of researchers as 'agents of science policy'. This novel synthesis is useful, firstly, in helping to map, analyze, and evaluate 'mid-flow' responses among various Dutch research system stakeholders to the Recognition and Rewards problem framing to date. Secondly, it helps to highlight what is currently a significant 'known unknown' in how these reforms will play: whether the research quality framings researchers employ in their roles as evaluators and producers of knowledge, will align favorably to Recognition and Rewards' problem framing. On this second point, I argue that problem frame stakeholder mapping is a potentially useful empirical technique for exploring relations between collective action frames at the level of social movements and the research quality frames drawn on by researchers. This is important, as how the research assessment reform movement's problem frames play out at the researcher level of the science system is likely to be highly consequential for whether its values and ambitions can be meaningfully realized at all long term.
Nathalie Schwichtenberg (German Center of Higher Education and Science Studies)
Long abstract:
The production of scientific knowledge relies to a great part on the integration of existing contributions (such as data, code, or material samples) into subsequent research processes. These integration processes are not yet fully understood in science studies. While Merton’s "organized skepticism" describes how researchers (should) respond to new knowledge claims, we know little about how scientists’ receive scientific contributions (of all sorts) and how they decide on their use in everyday research activities.
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with members of two scientific communities (invasion biology and solar physics), I argue that (a lot of) these decisions are guided by a collective frame which I call “scientific trust”. Scientific trust is a community- specific frame that gets activated whenever the receiver of a scientific contribution has to decide on its use, but lacks relevant information regarding its use . According to the specific context of the reception the result of this activation can either lead to trust or mistrust in the contribution and thus guides the use decision.
I am going to present my methodological approach to collecting and analyzing data to identify collective frames, which remains a big challenge for empirical research. Doing so I will address the challenge of collecting data for studying a latent phenomenon like trust, and present the different types of scientific trust I identified in the reconstructioning of my empirical cases. Finally, I want to emphasize the value of the frame concept for theory building in science studies.
Tobias Lehmann (TU Berlin)
Long abstract:
Negative results can be defined as outcomes of research processes that disappoint the expectations of individual researchers or of scientific communities. They are rarely published, as editors, reviewers and authors tend to favour positive results, even though researchers have repeatedly emphasised the value of negative results in collective knowledge production, such as their potential to falsify erroneous assumptions, and have called for initiatives to facilitate their communication. However, as one of these initiatives, journals dedicated to the publication of negative results, shows, the availability of this publication channel has not led to a change in researchers’ publication practices.
I will draw on publication data to illustrate this lack of uptake by authors, as shown by the very low numbers of papers published by these journals, and on document analyses of public statements by researchers arguing for or against the publication of negative results to reconstruct competing sets of collective frames that may account for the failure of ‘journals of negative results’ to become established as viable publication venues. The analysis shows a tension between unconditional ascriptions of (epistemological and practical) value to negative results and a questioning of both this unconditional value and of the journal article as the adequate medium for communicating negative results.
In conclusion, I argue that while other ways to communicate negative results might prove more successful, the genre of the research article, which is linked to specific expectations on the parts of authors and readers, does not appear to fit this purpose.