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Short abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies how organizations at the boundaries of science, politics, and the media who engage in science communication shape – and are shaped by – the role of science in society. What do empirical insights from two German case studies imply for STS and organization studies?

Long abstract:

Organizations take on central roles in science communication: Internationally, scientific academies (Lentsch 2010) as well as novel organizations in the realm of journalism (Suhr et al. 2022) are relevant communicators. A case in point is the COVID-19 pandemic where organizational science communication resonated broadly in the media as well as politics.

In Germany, the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (Beck and Nardmann 2021), as well as the Science Media Center (SMC) (Broer 2020), engaged in science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing highly visible yet controversial scientific policy advice and media services.

Due to their positioning at the boundaries of science, politics, and the media, such organizations shape the social status of science (Rödder 2020): For example, they formalize the development of consensus among individual scientists in ad-hoc working groups to advise the government or they standardize processes of selecting scientific experts for media reports.

At the same time, such organizations are shaped by the role of science in society: For example, they need to deal with structurally conflicting expectations regarding science communication within politics and the media (Rödder 2020) or with challenging public attitudes towards science such as science-related populism (Mede and Schäfer 2020).

Through qualitative analyses of media coverage, documents, and expert interviews with journalists, scientists, as well as employees of the Leopoldina and the SMC Germany, we explore the role of organizations in communicating science in times of crisis. In our talk, we discuss empirical findings and their implications for STS and organization studies.