230152 SE Collaboration and competition: on forms and formats of being together in science (2014S)

This course aims to give insight into the ways in which science can be studied as a collective effort. Sociologist of science Robert Merton (1942) already put communism/communalism forward as one of the norms of science, and in the development of the social studies of science the research group and research system have been central units of analysis (Fleck, Kuhn, Latour & Woolgar). More specifically, attention for the growth of science emerged in the 1960s with the introduction of the term ‘big science’, while recently scientific collaboration is increasing as well as quantitative and qualitative studies on the subject. Closely related to definitions of collaboration are the questions: why to collaborate, how to collaborate, and how to measure collaboration? By looking at scientific collaboration from different perspectives, the course follows its development, from first forms of collaboration in natural history and astronomy, via large-scale physics (Manhattan Project and the Large Hadron Collider) and biology (the Human Genome Project and Long Term Ecological Research network), towards integrative research (converging technologies, systems biology, ecological synthesis) and e-science in the social sciences and humanities. Different forms of collaboration will be discussed: intra- and inter-organisational collaboration; multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research, as well as different ways of governing collaboration. Finally, the course focuses on the politics of collaboration, exploring the relation between collaboration and competition, the rise of big data, and the limits of (global) scientific collaboration.