The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire…

Over the last decade or so, the rate of growth of academic publications involving discussion of 'citizen science' and 'community science', and similar variants, has risen exponentially. These fluid terms, with no fixed definition, cover a continuum of public participation within a range of scientific activities. It is, therefore, apposite and…

In their everyday work, scholars constantly acquire and transfer knowledge. Many of these knowledge flows are difficult to observe, not least because scholars are often not aware of them. This may be the reason why the attention to knowledge flows is very unevenly distributed across science studies, with bibliometric citation-based studies…

This paper analyses the interrelations between academic disciplines and society beyond academia by the case of sociology in Norway. For that purpose, this paper introduces the concept of disciplines' societal territories, which refer to bounded societal spaces that are shaped by the knowledge of a discipline, premised on the linkages between the…

This article offers a view on the emerging practice of managing external relations of the modern university, and the role of science communication in this. With a representative sample of research universities in four countries, we seek to broaden our understanding of the "science communication (SC) function" and its niche within the…

With the rise of research impact as a 'third' space (next to research and teaching) within the universities in the United Kingdom and beyond, academics are increasingly expected to not only produce research but also engage in brokering knowledge beyond academia. And yet little is known about the ways in which academics shape their practices in…

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,…

This paper aims to explore disciplinary variation in valuation practices by comparing the way research groups accumulate credibility across four epistemic cultures. Our analysis is based on case studies of four high-performing research groups representing very different epistemic cultures in humanities, social sciences, geosciences and…

Project funding rarely demands much change on behalf of the recipient. In contrast, cross-sectoral mobility funding requires recipients to change their environment and often some aspects of their research. There is a need to understand the impact on the researchers' experiences as knowledge producers within such programs, as part of the broader…

This study analyses the patenting activities of university science and engineering professors in Canada between 1920 and 1975. Unlike most studies on commercial activities in academia, which typically focus on the post-1980 period and on university practices, we focus on the pre-1980 period and on the individual decisions of professors to patent…

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…

There is a lack of objective evaluative standards for academic work. While this has been recognized in studies of how gatekeepers pass judgment on the works of others, little is known about how scholars deal with the uncertainty about how their work will be evaluated by gatekeepers. Building upon 35 interviews with early career academics in…

Leaders of the scientific community have declared that American science is in a crisis due to inadequate federal funding. They misconstrue the problem; its roots lie instead in the institutional interactions between federal funding agencies and higher education. After World War II, science policy elites advocated for a system of funding that…

Since the mid-twentieth century, the 'Scientific Revolution' has arguably occupied centre stage in most Westerners', and many non-Westerners', conceptions of science history. Yet among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to…

In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries' symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the perspectives of system actors located at the institutional, national and international levels to assess the perceived importance of eight systemic factors in contributing to the…