Abstract
Synthesis centers, which catalyze and host working groups, are an innovative form of scientific organization that promotes the integration of scientific diversity and its engagement with real-world problems. Placed in historical perspective, such centers are examples of an ongoing process of renewal in the organizational and institutional arrangements of science, and they have consequences for the character and effects of scientific knowledge. We describe and analyze how intellectual and institutional innovations emerge and are entwined within such centers, then draw upon ideas from science studies, small group dynamics, and the group creativity and interdisciplinarity literatures to identify the patterns and processes of social interaction responsible for the centers’ performance.
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Notes
- 1.
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (London, 1627).
- 2.
Peter Weingart, “A Short History of Knowledge Formations,” in The Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Robert P. Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Carl Micham (New York: Oxford, 2010), 14.
- 3.
Bacon, The New Atlantis, 19.
- 4.
Bacon, The New Atlantis, 24.
- 5.
Judah Bierman, “Science and Society in the New Atlantis and Other Renaissance Utopias,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 78 (1963): 499–500.
- 6.
Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis: An Idea State of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916[1619]).
- 7.
From the Lynceographia [1612], quoted by Margaret Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963), 75.
- 8.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford, 1946 [1918]), 135.
- 9.
Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 131.
- 10.
Edward J. Hackett, “Science as a Vocation in the 1990s: The Changing Organizational Culture of Academic Science,” Journal of Higher Education 61 (1990): 241–279.
- 11.
Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–474; Ruth DeFries et al., “Planetary Opportunities: A Social Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a Sustainable Future,” BioScience 62 (2012): 603–606.
- 12.
Stephen Carpenter et al., “Accelerate Synthesis in Ecology and Environmental Sciences,” BioScience 59 (2009): 699–701; STEPS Centre, Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto (STEPS: Sussex, England, 2010).
- 13.
Principally, the ideas we use are drawn from the theory of scientific and intellectual social movements: Nicholas C. Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper, 1973); Scott Frickel and Neil Gross, “A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements.” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 204–232; John N. Parker and Edward J. Hackett, “Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Scientific Collaboration and Social Movements,” American Sociological Review 77 (2012): 21–44; the theory of interaction ritual chains: Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and research on collaborative circles: Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ugo Corte, Subcultures and Small Groups: A Social Movement Theory Approach (Uppsala: Dissertation, Uppsala University, 2012).
- 14.
More information about the cases is available in Edward J. Hackett et al., “Ecology Transformed: The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Changing Patterns of Ecological Research,” in Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, ed. Gary Olson, Nathan Bos, and Ann Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Stephanie H. Hampton and John N. Parker, “Collaboration and Productivity in Scientific Synthesis” Bioscience 61(2011): 900–910; Parker, Hackett, “Hot Spots”; John N. Parker and Edward J. Hackett, “The Sociology of Science and Emotions,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II, ed. Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (New York: Springer, 2014), 549–572; Edward J. Hackett and John N. Parker, “Ecological Science Reconfigured: Group and Organizational Dynamics in Scientific Change,” in The Local Configuration of New Research Fields: On Regional and National Diversity, ed. Martina Merz and Philippe Sormani 153–171. New York: Springer.
- 15.
Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and Structure of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 1.
- 16.
Ecological Society of America and the Association of Ecosystem Research Centers, National Center for Ecological Synthesis: Scientific Objectives, Structure, and Implementation, Report from a joint committee, based on a workshop held in Albuquerue, NM, 25–27 October 1992.
- 17.
C.S. Holling, “Resilience and the Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1–23.
- 18.
NSF funding for NCEAS as the center is described here has ended, but the center has secured new funding sources from NSF (as the LTER Network Office) and from The Moore Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, along with new mandates to be even more applied and problem oriented. NSF is now funding, at twice the budget, the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland. SESYNC is modeled on NCEAS but has a broader mandate consistent with its larger budget. NSF also funds the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (est. 2005) and the National Center for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (est. 2008), further indicating its commitment to the scientific synthesis.
- 19.
Donald Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1997).
- 20.
Stephen Carpenter et al., “Accelerate Synthesis”.
- 21.
Brian Sidlauskas et al., “Linking Big: The Continuing Promise of Evolutionary Synthesis.” Evolution 64 (2009): 871–880.
- 22.
Ecological Society of America and the Association of Environmental Research Centers. National Center for Ecological Synthesis: Scientific objectives, structure, and implementation. Report of a workshop held in Albuquerque, October 1992. (1993)
- 23.
Resilience refers to the amount of change a system can absorb while maintaining its structure and function, its capacity for self-organization, and its capacity for learning and adaptation (see Parker and Hackett, “Hot Spots”).
- 24.
John Parker, “Integrating the Social into the Ecological: Organization and Research Group Challenges,” in Collaboration in the new life sciences, ed. J.N. Parker, N. Vermeulen, and B. Penders (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 85–109.
- 25.
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1935]), 44.
- 26.
Sarnoff A. Mednick, “Remote Associates Test,” Journal of Creative Behavior 2 (1962):213–14; Edward M. Bowden and Mark Jung-Beeman, “Normative Data for 144 Compound Remote Associate Problems,” Behaviorial Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 35 (2003): 634–639; Diana R. Rhoten, Erin O’Connor, and Edward J. Hackett, “The Act of Collaborative Creation and the Art of Integrative Creativity: Originality, Disciplinarity, and Interdisciplinarity,” Thesis Eleven 96 (2008): 83–108.
- 27.
Teresa M. Amabile, “Social Psychology of Creativity: A Componential Conceptualization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (1983): 997–1013; Teresa M. Amabile, “Componential Theory of Creativity,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 12–096 (2012); Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies; Thomas Heinze et al., “Organizational and Institutional Influences on Creativity in Scientific Research,” Research Policy 38 (2009): 610–623; J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth, Fostering Scientific Excellence: Organizations, Institutions, and Major Discoveries in Biomedical Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 28.
Harry M. Collins, Robert Evans, and Mike Gorman, “Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 657–666.
- 29.
Robert Frodeman, Julie Thomson Klein, and Carl Mitcham, The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 477.
- 30.
Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
- 31.
Hollingsworth and Hollingsworth, Fostering Scientific Excellence.
- 32.
Amabile, “Social Psychology of Creativity”; Amabile, “Componential Theory”.
- 33.
Rhoten, O’Connor, and Hackett, “The Act of Collaborative Creation”; Parker and Hackett, “Hot Spots”; Parker and Hackett, “The Sociology of Science”.
- 34.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
- 35.
Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 36.
See editors’ introduction on the late writings of Kuhn.
- 37.
The concept of emotional energy also encompasses micro interpersonal social processes such as trust, “instrumental intimacy,” and “escalating reciprocity.” These are treated in fine detail by Farrell, Collaborative Circles.
- 38.
To this end the phage group retreated to isolated locations such as the Anza Desert, and Bohr’s quantum physicists went rock climbing: Belver C. Griffith and Nicholas C. Mullins, “Coherent Groups in Scientific Change: ‘Invisible Colleges’ May Be Consistent throughout Science,” Science (1977): 959–64.
- 39.
Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), XXIII.
- 40.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- 41.
Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures.
- 42.
Farrell, Collaborative Circles, 285.
- 43.
Griffith and Mullins, “Coherent Groups,” 962.
- 44.
Irving L. Janis, Victims of Group Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972).
- 45.
This is a more varied and detailed set of resources than those included in Randall Collins’ (1998) term “cultural capital,” since we include material and social forms of capital, but they serve much the same purpose Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies; Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups; Farrell, Collaborative Circles.
- 46.
H.M. Collins and Robert J. Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 47.
Farrell, Collaborative Circles.
- 48.
Roger Guimerà et al., “Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance,” Science 308 (2005): 697–702; John M. Levine and Richard L. Moreland, “Collaboration: The Social Context of Theory Development,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004): 164–172.
- 49.
Anita W. Woolley et al., “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 330 (2010): 686–688.
- 50.
Rhoten, O’Connor, and Hackett, “The Act of Collaborative Creation”; Parker and Hackett, “Hot Spots”; Parker and Hackett, “The Sociology of Science”.
- 51.
Rachel Schurman and William Munro, “Ideas, Thinkers, and Social Networks: The Process of Grievance Construction in the Anti-Genetic Engineering Movement,” Theory and Society 35 (2006): 1–38.
- 52.
Fleck, Genesis, 43.
- 53.
Thomas S. Kuhn, Essential Tensions: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977[1959]); Michael Polanyi, Knowing And Being. With an Introduction by Marjorie Grene (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969); Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Ian I. Mitroff, “Norms and Counter-norms in a Selected Group of Apollo Moon Scientists: A Case Study in the Ambivalence of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 579–95; Richard Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization.
- 54.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 226.
- 55.
Donald Pelz and Frank M. Andrews, Scientists in Organizations (revised edition) (New York: Wiley, 1976), xv.
- 56.
Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007) 56.
- 57.
Pelz and Frank M. Andrews, Scientists in Organizations; Edward J. Hackett, “Essential Tensions: Identity, Control, and Risk in Research,” Social Studies of Science 35 (2005): 789–826; John N. Parker and Beatrice I. Crona, “On Being All Things to All People: Boundary Organizations and the Contemporary Research University,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 262–289.
- 58.
Pelz and Frank M. Andrews, Scientists in Organizations; Mitroff, “Norms and Counter-norms”; Hackett, “Essential Tensions”; Parker and Hackett, “Hot Spots”.
- 59.
Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction.
- 60.
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963).
- 61.
Kuhn, Essential Tensions.
- 62.
Gerald Holton, “Subelectrons, Presuppositions and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9 (1978): 166–224.
- 63.
Ernest B. Hook, Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
- 64.
Parker and Hackett, “Hot Spots”.
- 65.
Rhoten, O’Connor and Hackett, “The Act of Collaborative Creation,” 290–291.
- 66.
Janis, Victims of Group Think.
- 67.
Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups; see also Hull 1988 for similar behavior among the contentious cladists and systematists: David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1988).
- 68.
Christopher Henke, Cultivating Science: Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
- 69.
Donald Cash et al., “Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Development,” PNAS 100 (2003): 8086–8091.
- 70.
Gerald Gordon and Sue Marquis, “Freedom, Visibility of Consequence, and Scientific Innovation.” American Journal of Sociology 72 (1966): 195–202.
- 71.
Donald Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1997).
- 72.
Warren Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965): 106.
- 73.
Hackett, “Essential Tensions,” 803.
- 74.
François Jacob, The Statue Within (New York: Basic Books, 1995 [1987]): 258).
- 75.
Hackett, “Essential Tensions,” 801.
- 76.
Hackett, “Essential Tensions”; Edward J. Hackett and John N. Parker, “Research Groups,” in Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference Handbook, ed. William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 164–174.
- 77.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).
- 78.
Sawyer, Group Genius; Corte, Subcultures and Small Groups.
- 79.
Farrell, Collaborative Circles, 23. Conditions fostering group flow include well-defined but open-ended goals, full and spontaneous engagement, complete concentration, group autonomy, balanced participation, personal familiarity, constant and spontaneous communication, and building on others’ ideas: Sawyer, Group Genius; Corte, Subcultures and Small Groups.
- 80.
Robert Frodeman, Julie Thomson Klein and Carl Mitcham, The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 81.
Collins, Robert Evan and Mike Gorman, “Trading Zones”.
- 82.
Barry J. Marshall, “One Hundred Years of Discovery and Rediscovery of Helicobacter pylori and Its Association with Peptic Ulcer Disease,” in Helicobacter pylori: Physiology and Genetics, ed. Harry LT Mobley, George L Mendz and Stuart L Hazell (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2001).
- 83.
Mitroff, “Norms and Counter-norms”.
- 84.
John A. Stewart, Drifting Continents and Colliding Paradigms: Perspectives on the Geoscience Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990).
- 85.
Holton, “Subelectrons, Presuppositions”.
- 86.
Heather E. Douglas, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
- 87.
Paul Thagard, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Parker and Hackett “Hot Spots”; Parker and Hackett, “The Sociology of Science”.
- 88.
Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bent Flyvbjerg, “Phronetic Planning Research: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections.” Planning Theory and Practice 5 (2004): 283–306; Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009); Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
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Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the cheerful and enduring support of Jim Reichman, Stephanie Hampton, Frank Davis, the NCEAS staff, and hundreds of scientists who took time from their research visits to answer our questions, complete our surveys, explain things to us, and simply allow us to spend time with them. We thank Nancy Grimm for suggesting NCEAS as a research site and Jonathon Bashford for helpful analyses and discussions. An earlier version of some of the ideas and evidence presented in this paper appeared in Hackett et al. (2008).
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (SBE 98–96330 to Hackett, SBE 1242749 to Hackett and Parker) and by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA (DEB 94–21535).
We are deeply grateful to Dave Conz for years of collegiality and conviviality, and dedicate this work to him.
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Methodological Appendix
Methodological Appendix
3.1.1 National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Our study of NCEAS began in 1998 and continues to the present. We interviewed administrators, resident scientists, and working group members; examined documents, publications, and citation data; observed working groups; and administered a brief questionnaire. One of us was in residence as a participant observer in 2004–2005, the other from 2008 to 2011.
During those and other visits we spent more than 140 hours in ethnographic observation of working groups, and hundreds more observing informal interaction in the groups and conducting interviews. We observed the entire course of each working group session, arriving at NCEAS each morning before scientists arrived to work, and leaving only after all work had been completed that day. We took detailed notes of group behavior as it occurred, adding detail from recollection during the evening. Throughout the project we have been deeply engaged with the Center: material from our study was used in official evaluative site visits (1999, 2002, and 2008), discussed on several occasions with the NCEAS director, and summarized at length within the Center’s (successful) renewal proposal.
3.1.2 The RA
We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with RA members from 2003 to 2010 in Tempe, AZ; Madison, WI; Decatur, GA; Cedar Key, FL; Stockholm, Sweden; Wageningen, Netherlands; Kruger National Park, South Africa; and Gabriola Island, Canada. 30 initial interviews were conducted, each lasting 45–90 minutes. We asked about RA’s past, present and future directions, and about practices occurring on island, group structure, organizational and intellectual challenges, intergenerational dynamics, and receptivity of their work by the scientific community. We also inquired into group leadership and selection processes, the successes and failures of specific projects, researchers’ personal motivations, interdisciplinary interactions, and the impact of resilience research on science and policy. After the first round of interviewing, initial findings were tested through dozens of follow-up interviews ranging from brief exchanges to multihour conversations. Altogether, we spoke with more than 50 researchers (most several times), including all but two members identified by RA founders as central to its development, and many operating at RA’s periphery (junior scientists and new members). We also spoke with many non-RA members about the group.
We conducted ethnographic observations, beginning during the second author’s stay as a visiting researcher at Stockholm University’s RA node (May–July 2003). Not an RA member, he returns regularly to interview, observe, and trace changes over time. Over 200 hours of (non-participant) observations were undertaken “on island” at Kruger National Park, South Africa (2006; five days and nights), at the first resilience conference (Stockholm University, 2008; four days and two nights), and on Gabriola Island, British Columbia (2009; ten days and nights). On island, access was provided to all activities except board meetings. Observations began during breakfast and continued late into the evening. Meals were eaten together and drinks shared. Scientific conversations were observed, as were discussions regarding RA’s current organization and future directions, and informal activities (safari excursions, limerick contests). Observations at the Stockholm conference included scientific presentations, organizational meetings, science-policy dialogues, and informal activities (e.g. the resilience art exhibit at The Swedish Museum of Natural History).
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Hackett, E.J., Parker, J.N. (2016). From Salomon’s House to Synthesis Centers. In: Heinze, T., Münch, R. (eds) Innovation in Science and Organizational Renewal. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59420-4_3
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