Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Chapter 1: The Innovation Society -- The Problem -- Conceptual Starting Points -- Aims and Purpose -- Chapter 2: From Forbidden to Cure-All -- Introducing the x-factor -- Innovation Policy and Its Roots -- Mission Economy -- Chapter 3: Economization -- Thinking Like an Economist -- Imbalanced Rationalization -- Managerialism -- No Size Fits All -- Chapter 4: We're All Entrepreneurs Now -- The Entrepreneurship Industry -- The Me Generation -- What Entrepreneurship Really Is -- Chapter 5: Faster, Better, Stronger -- Selling Promises -- The Entrepreneurial State -- The Innovationists -- Move Fast and Break Things -- Chapter 6: Empty and Real Innovation -- Consequences -- Misunderstandings -- Real Innovation -- The Alternative -- Acknowledgments -- Literature -- Index.

New public management (NPM) tar stor plats i dagens sociologiska studier av arbetsliv och samhällsutveckling, men försök att ge begreppet teoretisk stadga är sällsynta. I denna artikel inplaceras NPM i en längre samhällsutveckling som går tillbaka till det moderna samhällets rationalisering och "avförtrollning". Dess inverkan på arbetsliv och samhälle diskuteras med hjälp av klassisk sociologisk teori som utgår från att samhället byggs upp av olika värdesfärer med inre lagbunden autonomi (Eigengesetzlichkeit). Idén, som kommer från Max Weber, har utvecklats inom den sociologiska funktionalismen samt av Jürgen Habermas. Här används den tillsammans med senare organisationssociologisk kritik av ledning och styrning av professionella verksamheter som delvis går emot professioners egenart, vilken också denna kan förstås utifrån idén om Eigengesetzlichkeit. Inom denna teoretiska ram diskuteras konfliktytan som uppstår då NPM möter samhällets sfärer, särskilt professioner. Ambitionen är att utforska möjligheterna att använda klassisk sociologisk teori för att analysera ett aktuellt och kontroversiellt ämne.

The politics of European collaborative Big Science are inherently uncertain. The European Spallation Source (ESS) for materials science, planned to be built in Sweden with a collaborative European funding solution that was recently finalized is the most recent example. Sweden has so far invested around one billion SEK (&E110 million), taking a significant risk given these uncertainties and given Sweden's complete lack of experience in hosting such big labs. Tracing the Swedish government's investments in the ESS project, this article shows that so far, the Swedish ESS bid seems to be generally well funded, but that a long-term plan for the funding and a contingency plan for increased costs seem to be absent. This adds to the seeming unprepared- ness of Sweden and elevates the already quite high level of risk for Swedish science and science policy of investing in the ESS.

Intergovernmental collaboration in the area of big science has been an important resource for European science since the 1950s. Yet, as a policy area, it has traditionally been left outside of the political integration work of the European Community/Union. Despite this formal detachment, the political realities of the collaborations often draw upon and reflect the (geo)political dynamics of Europe. This article reports on a study of two big projects in the making (the European Spallation Source and the European X-ray Free Electron Laser), and uses two historical cases for comparison (the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility). It highlights critical issues in establishing and operating collaborations, relates these to the broader context of European political integration, and discusses, on the basis of this, signs of continuity and change in this distinct area of European research policy.

Synchrotron radiation laboratories are large scientific facilities where various scientific experiments are carried out by the use of radiation produced by particle accelerators. Research with synchrotron radiation emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a peripheral activity at particle physics laboratories. It has since expanded and taken over facilities from particle physics, and developed specialized accelerators of its own, gradually becoming an important resource for a variety of scientific disciplines, foremost for different types of studies of materials on atomic and molecular level. This thesis is a study of the institutionalization of synchrotron radiation – its scientific and technological, but also political and sociological, development. Three case studies, chosen to complement each other, highlight different aspects of this process. The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in Menlo Park, California, was a pioneering laboratory in the early days of synchrotron radiation. MAX-lab in Lund, Sweden, originated as a small scale university project and expanded gradually to become a national and international user facility. The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, is a multinational collaborative European project and one of the world's largest synchrotron radiation laboratories. The analysis is organized around three themes: the changing dynamics of science, changes in science policy, and the identification of scientific entrepreneurs – actors with particularly strong roles in the institutionalization. In recent decades, science has encountered increased demands for accountability and social and economic returns, resulting in disciplinary and organizational restructurings and internal sociological changes. These include the collectivization of scientific research and the sophistication of scientific instrumentation. The thesis identifies synchrotron radiation laboratories as manifestations of these trends; they are a new type of 'big science', sustaining small scale science in various fields – small science on big machines. It is argued that both the laboratories and the scientific activities they host are particularly well adapted to the new social and political conditions.

The Swedish school system was radically reformed in the 1990s, and went from one of the world's most uniform and egalitarian, to one of the world's most deregulated and marketized. In recent years, the political controversy has heated over the for-profit corporations that operate independent schools and allegedly make major profits off the public purse. A majority of independent schools in Sweden are operated by limited liability companies, but hundreds of schools are also operated by non-profit foundations and associations. The latter category are of interest in this article. With the help of a thorough legal historical analysis of the corporate law on associations in Sweden, and how the two forms of associations – economic associations and non-profit associations – are defined in the law, we discuss how well the law matches the purposes and needs of elementary schools in Sweden. The article concludes that the ambiguities and confusion around the law on economic associations in this specific case, and the essential lack of legislation for nonprofit associations, warrants a fundamental questioning of whether it is at all appropriate for independent schools in Sweden to be operated by economic and nonprofit associations.

Twentieth-century massification of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic organizations, a tendency that has been called academic drift. The drift as such can have multiple causes, and in this article, we relate academic drift to the concepts of institutional logics and isomorphism from neoinstitutional organization theory, delineating policy-making, norm shifts and organizational action in response to uncertainty as three component processes of academic drift. Using the case of the organizational field of the Swedish HES and its recent 35-year history, we draw both empirical and theoretical conclusions, and demonstrate the weight of the research mission in the building of institutional legitimacy for university colleges.

In many countries, current research policy is dominated by managerialism and excellence, manifesting the aim of making universities into national strategic assets in the globally competitive knowledge economy. This article discusses these policy trends and their mirror in recent developments in public funding for academic research, with special attention to Sweden. A review of the language in three con- secutive Swedish governmental research bills from the past 10 years shows a clear policy shift towards the promotion of excellence and stra- tegic priority on the level of higher education institutions. Reforms to the funding system, especially the launch of speci␣c strategic excellence funding programmes, are introduced to put the policy in practice. While the policy shift itself might be discursive, the changes to the funding system clearly show a determination on behalf of the Swedish govern- ment to increase strategic pro␣ling and the pursuit of excellence in research on behalf of universities.

"This thought-provoking book expands on the notion that Big Science is not the only term to describe and investigate particularly large research projects, scientific collaborations and facilities. It investigates the significant overlap between Big Science and Research Infrastructures (RIs) in a European context since the early twenty-first century. Contributions to this innovative book not only augment the study of Big Science with new perspectives, but also launch the study of RIs as a promising new line of inquiry. Chapters testify to a generational shift that is taking place in this field, amending and complementing prior analyses of Big Science. Advancing our knowledge, this interdisciplinary book explores how Big Science and RIs can be categorized, how the politics around them can be understood, and how they relate to the surrounding science and research policy landscape of Europe. Big Science and Research Infrastructures in Europe will be of value to students and scholars interested in science and innovation policy across sociology, economics, management and political science. Policymakers, science administrators and operators of RIs will also benefit from the critical insights provided"--

In this essay we put forward a critique of the prevailing orthodoxy of creativity and innovation which are rarely fundamentally questioned neither in science nor in public discourse. We urge to reconsider contemporary purposes and consequences of what we call instrumental and humanist conceptions of creativity and innovation. Based on our critique we speak out to transcend reified notions of creativity and innovation by engaging in disciplined imagination of desirable alternative futures using the example of craft as a timeless form of work. Craft, we argue, prefigures a type of creativity and innovation that addresses the social and ecological challenges of contemporary economy and society and may thus serve as a source for inspiration to radically re-think current, ingrained notions of creativity and innovation.