Henrik Bruun

Both funding agencies and scholars in science studies have become increasingly concerned with how to define and identify interdisciplinarity in research. The task is tricky, since the complexity of interdisciplinary research defies a single definition. Our study tackles this challenge by demonstrating a new typology and qualitative indicators for a...

The article provides an introduction to and a demonstration of the self-organizing map (SOM) method for organizational researchers interested in the use of qualitative data. The SOM is a versatile quantitative method very commonly used across many disciplines to analyze large data sets. The outcome of the SOM analysis is a map in which entities are...

This paper describes the study of the distribution and integration of knowledge in a small control system development project called the Automation System for Agricultural Implements (AGRIX). The activity of integrating socially distributed knowledge is called knowledge networking. We distinguish between three modes of knowledge networking - modula...

The prevalence and role of interdisciplinary research has been debated both among scholars and policy makers. Unfortunately, there is a lack of good tools for measuring how common such research is, and how important it is in the dynamics of science. In this paper we set out to develop a new tool for the measurement of interdisciplinary research; a...

Despite debate about how scientific knowledge production is in transition from Mode 1 to Mode 2, there has been little discussion of the implications for research education and its organisation in university departments. We have found that preparing new researchers for such transitional conditions requires a re-focusing of their training, with an e...

We studied the emergence of biotechnology in Turku, Finland. First, we analysed it as a result of the interaction between the city and its national and international environment, focusing on the city’s industrial policy as the mediator. Second, we diagnosed the construction of BioCity, the first biotechnology centre building of Turku, as a key even...

To learn more about the formation, transformation and interaction of knowledge networking, we studied two processes of commercialisation of scientific knowledge. Both involved a Lactobacillus strain - Lp299v, in Sweden, and LGG, in Finland - and two different companies. The first, a small science company, was established expressly to commercialise...

A theory of the embodiment of action is proposed. Reflections on relations between human intentions, the human body and the notion of agency lead us to argue that phenomenological analysis is not sufficient for such a theory. Our consideration, that the most fundamental level of embodied agency is that of life itself, brings us to the philosophy of...

Evolutionary Economics (EE), Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) are often seen in literature on technology as alternative ways of accounting for technological change. Superficially they seem to exclude each other because of contradictory understandings of how technology. changes, but in this paper we argue that...

Scenario-making is a common method for anticipating technological and other kinds of futures. This article discusses scenario-making from a methodological point of view. How do we cope with contingency, that is, the problem of not knowing what developmental trajectories in the present will turn out to determine future events? Two distinctions are s...

Scenario-making is a common method for anticipating technological and other kinds of futures. This article discusses scenario-making from a methodological point of view. How do we cope with contingency, that is, the problem of not knowing what developmental trajectories in the present will turn out to determine future events? Two distinctions are s...

The method of constructing scenarios is neither straightforward nor unproblematic. We propose first of all the term epistemic closure for representing the necessary methodological limitations of scenario construction. Whenever a particular kind of epistemic closure becomes a habit within some field of scenario-making, we use the term conventional s...

This is a study of the process of planning and implementing the Digital North Denmark programme (DDN) in the Danish region of North Denmark. The purpose of DDN (2000-2003) is to diffuse information technology in the region in a way that promotes innovation as well as a core set of societal values. The programme is funded by the Danish state (DKK 17...

Computational analysis of natural language is often focused on the syntactic structure of language– often with no regard to the overall context and area of expertise of the analyzed text. In this paper, we present a means of analyzing text documents from various areas of expertise to discover groups of thematically similar texts with no prior infor...

This study compares two recent Nordic attempts, at the municipal level, to make industrial policy by using a network approach. The first case focuses on biotechnology development in Turku, a city in southwestern Finland, while the second case highlights the making of a strategic industrial plan for Trondheim, a city in the middle of Norway. The com...

In the first half of the 1990s, many regions experienced economic stagnation and unemployment as a result of the worldwide economic recession. These problems were particularly severe in Finland, where the recession was deepened by the collapse of trade with Russia. Consequently, Finnish regions had to rethink both the contents and the means of thei...