Implanting a Discipline: The Academic Trajectory of Nuclear Engineering in the USA and UK

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering—channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and hurried into academic venues thereafter—proved unusually dependent on government definition and support. This paper contrasts the distinct histories of the new discipline in the USA and UK (and, more briefly, Canada). In the segregated and influential environments of institutional laboratories and factories, historical actors such as physicist Walter Zinn in the USA and industrial chemist Christopher Hinton in the UK proved influential in shaping the roles and perceptions of nuclear specialists. More broadly, I argue that the State-managed implantation of the new subject within further and higher education curricula was shaped strongly by distinct political and economic contexts in which secrecy, postwar prestige and differing industrial cultures were decisive factors.

Transnational Mobility and International Academic Employment: Gatekeeping in an Academic Competition Arena

This article draws upon concepts developed in recent empirical and theoretical work on high skilled and academic mobility and migration including accidental mobility, forced mobility and negotiated mobility. These concepts inform a situated, qualitative study of mobility among international postdoctoral researchers in life sciences and engineering fields who were employed at US and UK universities in 2008 and 2009. Informed by epistemological methods in the Foucauldian tradition of discourse and governmentality, the study explores how policy discourse and technologies empower and limit scientists and engineers in negotiating employment arrangements across national boundaries.     

Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather than a Game Changer

This paper investigates the use of metrics to recruit professors for academic positions. We analyzed confidential reports with candidate evaluations in economics, sociology, physics, and informatics at the University of Oslo between 2000 and 2017. These unique data enabled us to explore how metrics were applied in these evaluations in relation to other assessment criteria. Despite being important evaluation criteria, metrics were seldom the most salient criteria in candidate evaluations. Moreover, metrics were applied chiefly as a screening tool to decrease the number of eligible candidates and not as a replacement for peer review. Contrary to the literature suggesting an escalation of metrics, we foremost detected stable assessment practices with only a modestly increased reliance on metrics. In addition, the use of metrics proved strongly dependent on disciplines where the disciplines applied metrics corresponding to their evaluation cultures. These robust evaluation practices provide an empirical example of how core university processes are chiefly characterized by path-dependency mechanisms, and only moderately by isomorphism. Additionally, the disciplinary-dependent spread of metrics offers a theoretical illustration of how travelling standards such as metrics are not only diffused but rather translated to fit the local context, resulting in heterogeneity and context-dependent spread.

     

Overcoming Isolation: Women's Dilemmas in American Academic Science

Science is an intensely social activity. Professional relationships are essential forscientific success and mentors areindispensable for professional growth. Despitethe scientific ethos of universalism andinclusion, American women scientists frequentlyexperience isolation and exclusion at some timeduring their academic career. By contrast,male scientists enjoy informal but crucialsocial networks. Female scientists developnecessary strategies and defences, but manyleave or achieve less success in science whendeprived of necessary interpersonalconnections. There is indication that changewithin departments is occurring, but this isdependent upon institutional leadership.     

Institutional Struggles for Recognition in the Academic Field: The Case of University Departments in German Chemistry

This paper demonstrates how the application of New Public Management (NPM) and the accompanying rise of academic capitalism in allocating research funds in the German academic field have interacted with a change from federal pluralism to a more stratified system of universities and departments. From this change, a tendency to build cartel-like structures of allocating symbolic capital resulting in oligopolistic structures of appropriating research funds has emerged. This macro level structure is complemented by the strengthening of the traditional oligarchic structures of research, carried out by an increasing number of assistants under the direction of a professor on the meso level. The outcome of this institutional setting is a significant gap between the appropriation of research funds according to the allocation of symbolic capital and the production of knowledge in publications. The application of NPM therefore needs to be explained more as a result of the normative pressure of a globally established model of “rational” administration, and less as a result of its functional effectiveness. This is demonstrated by an empirical analysis with simple and multiple regressions using data on the allocation of research grants and publication records of German chemistry departments.     

"世界首富之国"卡塔尔

如果要问当今世界上哪个国家最富？许多人马上就会想到美国、日本或瑞士。其实最有钱的是中东沙漠小国卡塔尔。美国《金融杂志》最新公布的数据显示,卡塔尔2010年人均国内生产总值高达90149美元,雄居全球第一!近日它又因奇迹般地获得了2022年世界杯主办权,引起人们关注。     

Science Frustrated: The ‘Einstein Institute’ In Madrid

In April 1933, Albert Einstein was offered an ‘Extraordinary’ Chair of Physics at the University of Madrid. Einstein first accepted, then sought to withdraw without causing damage to the anti-Fascist Republican government. However, this proved an opportunity for the Spanish press to harness Einstein’s notoriety to their own programmes. This article discusses the genesis and resolution of this episode, which says much about Einstein and science and politics in modern Spain.