Mission Completed? Changing Visibility of Women’s Colleges in England and Japan and Their Roles in Promoting Gender Equality in Science

The global community, from UNESCO to NGOs, is committed to promoting the status of women in science, engineering and technology, despite long-held prejudices and the lack of role models. Previously, when equality was not firmly established as a key issue on international or national agendas, women’s colleges played a great role in mentoring female scientists. However, now that a concerted effort has been made by governments, the academic community and the private sector to give women equal opportunities, the raison d’être of women’s universities seems to have become lost. This paper argues otherwise, by demonstrating that women’s universities in Japan became beneficiaries of government initiatives since the early 2000s to reverse the low ratio of women in scientific research. The paper underscores the importance of the reputation of women’s universities embedded in their institutional foundations, by explaining how female scientific communities take shape in different national contexts. England, as a primary example of a neoliberal welfare regime, with its strong emphasis on equality and diversity, promoted its gender equality policy under the auspices of the Department of Trade and Industry. By contrast, with a strong emphasis on family values and the male-breadwinner model, the Japanese government carefully treated the goal of supporting female scientists from the perspective of the equal participation of both men and women rather than that of equality. Following this trend, rather contradictorily, women’s universities, with their tradition of fostering a ‘good wife, wise mother’ image, began to be highlighted as potential gender-free institutions that provided role models and mentoring female scientists. By drawing on the cases of England and Japan, this paper demonstrates how the idea of equality can be framed differently, according to wider institutional contexts, and how this idea impacts on gender policies.     

The impact of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Droit de Suite</Emphasis> in the UK: an empirical analysis

The Droit de Suite, known in the UK as Artists’ Resale Rights, provides an artist with the inalienable right to receive a royalty based on the resale price of an original work of art. This paper provides an empirical analysis of actual changes in the UK auction market for art that is newly subject to the Droit de Suite (DDS) because of a change in law. All changes are measured relative to changes for art not subject to the DDS and relative to changes in the auction markets for art in countries where there has been no change in law. We do a difference-in-difference analysis, differencing price growth and sales growth across market segments and across countries over the period 1993–2007. Our results suggest that the introduction of the DDS has not had a consistent negative impact on the UK art auction market during the period of study.     

Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education

‘Academic drift’ is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas.     

Follow the Money: Engineering at Stanford and UC Berkeley During the Rise of Silicon Valley

A comparison of the engineering schools at UC Berkeley and Stanford during the 1940s and 1950s shows that having an excellent academic program is necessary but not sufficient to make a university entrepreneurial (an engine of economic development). Key factors that made Stanford more entrepreneurial than Cal during this period were superior leadership and a focused strategy. The broader institutional context mattered as well. Stanford did not have the same access to state funding as public universities (such as Cal in the period under consideration) and some private universities (such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins University in their early histories). Therefore, in order to gather resources, Stanford was forced to become entrepreneurial first, developing business skills (engaging with high-tech industry) at the same time Cal was developing political skills (protecting and increasing its state appropriation). Stanford’s early development of entrepreneurial business skills played a crucial role in the development of Silicon Valley.     

The Legacy of the Studiengruppe Für Systemforschung

The Studiengruppe für Systemforschung was dissolved in 1974. Several members of the group moved to the Research Centre Karlsruhe. There, despite their new institutional surroundings, they remained faithful to the Studiengruppe’s conceptual foundations, and developed a new Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis. This has since become the leading technology assessment group in Germany.     

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.     

Institutional Expansion and Scientific Development in the Periphery: The Structural Heterogeneity of Argentina’s Academic Field

The relationship between “marginal” and “mainstream” science has, in recent decades, become a matter of discussion. Traditional perspectives must be reexamined in the wake of transformations in the international circulation of knowledge and the subsequent diversification of scientific “peripherality”. Argentina represents an interesting case with which to explore the structure of “peripheral centres” and new forms of scientific development. While it has recently experienced an expansion in terms of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization, that process has been coupled with entrenchment of existing institutional asymmetries and persistent intra-national inequalities; academic prestige is distributed according to opposite principles of legitimation (local/international). Our main task is to explore the current state of research capacities pursuant to that expansion in order to analyze the diverse styles in which knowledge is produced. In our analysis, we make critical use of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the Latin American category of “structural heterogeneity,” while also focusing on the question of circulation. The paper outlines how professionalization has developed locally over time, and the historical tension between the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and the public universities. It describes the current structure of the scientific field in terms of researchers, institutes, publishing circuits, and institutional evaluative cultures. It focuses on geographical asymmetries in order to assess the distribution of new human and material resources throughout the country. Finally, it addresses the current situation under the new government, and raises concern over recent regressive actions.     

Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan,Michel Foucault,and Voluntary Death

Abstract

Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true taboo in the modern, biopolitical era. The result is that regular death has been privatised and institutionalised, wars are waged in the name of life, capital punishment has become a scandal, and suicide has become a problem for sociological and psychiatric analysis rather than law. In contrast to the dominant view, Foucault portrays suicide not as a mark of pathology but as a form of resistance (tragic or pleasurable) to disciplinary power, and argues for an aestheticisation of voluntary death as part of a beautiful life. Through a reading of the writings of Québecoise author Nelly Arcan, this essay presents but also critiques and expands upon Foucault's accounts of suicide, exploring the thesis that the pathological model of suicide produces the subjects that it intends to treat.     

Live and prerecorded popular music consumption

Changing consumption habits have rearranged the popular music market in the last decade, and a pattern in which live music attendance gets an increasing share of the market has emerged. This work analyzes the demand for the popular music sector considering its double dimension as supplier of live concerts and prerecorded music. We use the 2006/2007 wave of Spain’s Survey on Habits and Cultural Practices, and estimate a bivariate probit model for attendance to live concerts and the purchase of prerecorded music. Results allow us to describe the profile of the average and frequent consumer in both markets, which shows some similarities—gender effects and the role of cultural capital—but also striking differences—time restrictions and relation to economic activity, and the use of technology. Finally, we find evidence of demand complementarities, with a direct causal link from prerecorded music to live attendance that helps explain recent institutional changes.     

Bourdieu and Science Studies: Toward a Reflexive Sociology

Two of Bourdieu’s fundamental contributions to science studies—the reflexive analysis of the social and human sciences and the concept of an intellectual field—are used to frame a reflexive study of the history and social studies of science and technology as an intellectual field in the United States. The universe of large, Ph.D.-granting graduate programs is studied in two parts. In the first analysis, relations between institutional position and disciplinary type are explored by department. A positive correlation exists between historians of science and institutional position (as higher prestige or capital). In the second analysis, attention to intellectual tastes for research topics is explored at an individual level with respect to departmental position and the individual’s discipline and gender. Scholars in nonelite history of science departments have low field interest in democracy, social movements, or public participation; environment or sustainability; and gender, race, or sexuality; whereas those in history of technology programs and nonelite STS programs have a higher field interest in those areas, and historians of technology have a higher interest in class or labor issues. Among social scientists, there is a higher interest among scholars in nonelite programs in environment or sustainability and in democracy, social movements, or public participation.     

Character and organization

In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.     

Government Grants to Private Cultural Institutions–The Effects of a Change in the Italian Legislation

In Italy, the Regular Grant is the most important subsidy to private cultural institutions. Since 1996, law 534/96 has regulated its provision. This law greatly improves on the previous legislation, as it redefines the prerequisites to become a recipient and specifies performance indicators to which the size of the grant must be tied. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of the new law, the characteristics of the government choice process and the redistribution profile of these grants using a variety of estimating techniques on official data gathered for the purpose.     

Revisiting ‘Weinberg’s Choice’: Classic Tensions in the Concept of Scientific Merit

Alvin Weinberg’s classic and much debated two articles in Minerva, “Criteria for Scientific Choice” (1963) and “Criteria for Scientific Choice II – The Two Cultures” (1964), represent two of the first and most important attempts to create a meta-discourse about priority setting in science policy, and many of the points advanced remain relevant. The goal of this paper is to elaborate on the relevance of some of Weinberg’s original arguments to priority setting today. We have singled out four issues for attention: The tension between scientific and institutional choice, the assumptions behind the triad of scientific, technological and social merit, the elusive ‘externality from size’ argument for funding promoted by Weinberg, and finally the problems involved in the idea of basic science as an ‘overhead cost’ for applied science, and applied science as an ‘overhead’ on a sectoral mission. These four issues will be elaborated from a policy perspective and connected to present day challenges for science and technology policy.     

MAX WEBER AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF OFFICE

This article focuses upon a crucial aspect of Max Weber's work, one that has been largely neglected by scholars of organization, in cultural economy as much as in economic sociology more generally. That is Lebensführung, the conduct of life. The article argues that Weber's approach to questions of Lebensführung locates him as a late but prodigious practitioner in a tradition of the ethics of office, particularly as the latter becomes a defensive doctrine. In making this case, the vocabulary of office in Weber's work is explored and its importance for an understanding of the ethico-cultural constitution of a variety of instituted personae is highlighted. The article concludes by briefly suggesting why and how a Weberian ethics of office remains a key resource for scholars of organizational life, including those operating in the emergent field of ‘cultural economy’.     

The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US

This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefitted from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the “profit as progress” assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how “science values” (“knowledge as progress”) may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes.     

Science and Social Space: Transformations in the Institutions of Wissenschaft from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the German system of scientific research, traditionally dominated by the universities, underwent rapid institutional change and functional differentiation. This paper analyses this development as a constitutive factor in Germany’s transition from a predominantly industrial to a primarily ‘knowledge-based’ society. This perspective broadens and deepens our understanding of the current debate concerning the social production of knowledge.     

The Significance of Scientific Capital in UK Medical Education

For decades, debates over medical curriculum reform have centred on the role of science in medical education, but the meaning of ‘science’ in this domain is vague and the persistence of the debate has not been explained. Following Bourdieu, this paper examines struggles over legitimate knowledge and the forms of capital associated with science in contemporary UK medical education. Data are presented from a study of two UK medical schools, one with a traditional, science-oriented curriculum, another with an integrated curriculum. Constructions of legitimate knowledge were explored at both schools through six months participant observation, interviews with faculty members (n=15) and students (n=37) and documentary analysis. Findings show that medical schools compete for both scientific and clinical capital, but ultimately science has greater legitimacy. ‘Science’ is defined in accordance with the structure of the traditional curriculum and has become a symbolic resource – a mark of distinction for both medical schools and medical students – which is equated with clinical competence. The significance of science is circumscribed by the medical education field, yet the struggles for scientific capital there have ramifications beyond medical education itself. It is argued that Bourdieu’s concepts are particularly useful tools for studying the meanings that science takes on outside of the scientific field.     

中国历史文化名城保护公益诉讼研究 ——以北京市为例

保护以北京为代表的国家历史文化名城需要与时俱进,如何以法治思维和法治方式对历史文化名城的保护工作固本强基,是当下面临的一项重要使命与重大课题.近年来全国多地的实践结果显示,公益诉讼为将历史文化名城保护纳入法治轨道提供了有效抓手,其不仅有利于激发社会公众的参与热情,而且也有助于发挥司法机关的监督力量.然而,将公益诉讼机制...     

传统对外观念对晚清外交的影响

传统对外观念对晚清外交产生了重要的作用和影响。中国古代没有近代外交观念,实施的是所谓羁縻之道,其"羁縻勿绝"观念成了清政府议抚求和的直接理由,并融入到条约关系之中。历代王朝的"怀柔远人"和"一视同仁"观念,将与他国交往视为单向赐予,在晚清便利了列强向中国进行勒索,且得以均沾他国所攫取的各种特权。"因俗而治"和"不治治之"的观念和方针,对清政府让弃主权产生了深刻影响,且在涉及朝贡关系的交涉中也处于被动,但其中蕴有尊重他国主权的要素。春秋时期产生的"要盟无质"或"要盟不信"观念,在列强以武力强迫中国订立不平等约的背景下,自然而然地转为本能的抵拒,并留下了具有某种价值的思想资源。其他如天朝观念等亦产生重要影响。传统对外观念虽有消极的一面,但含有构建和谐国际社会的积极因素。     

Challenging Incommensurability: What We Can Learn from Ludwik Fleck for the Analysis of Configurational Innovation

This paper argues that Ludwik Fleck’s concepts of thought collectives and proto-ideas are surprisingly topical to tackle some conceptual challenges in analyzing contemporary innovation. The objective of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to establish Ludwik Fleck as an important classic on the map of innovation analysis. A systematic comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigms, a concept highly influential in various branches of innovation studies, suggests a number of pronounced yet under-researched advantages of a Fleckian perspective in the context of technological change and innovation. Secondly, the paper links these advantages to some recent changes in the organization of innovation. Due to the rising pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), configurational innovation has become commonplace that cuts across the boundaries of established trajectories of knowledge generation. Fleck’s graded understanding of the closedness of thought collectives and his weak notion of incommensurability provide powerful metaphors to grasp the peculiarities of configurational innovation.