Olof Hallonsten

• Dr. habil.
• Lund University

Judging from the steep rise in number of publications in organizational sociology and management studies about “hybrid organizations”, it would seem as if this is either something new or something that has grown in importance in the past decades. In this article, we make a thorough attempt to provide the concept a proper anchoring in sociology and...

Many claims have been made in the past that Management and Organization Studies (MOS) is becoming increasingly fragmented, and that this fragmentation is causing it to drift into self-reference and irrelevance. Despite the weight of this claim, it has not yet been subjected to a systematic empirical test. This paper addresses this research gap usin...

Public intellectuals were once honest and knowledgeable academics who engaged in critical debate and spoke truth to power, but seem today rather to be celebrities who make vast amounts of money from selling an oversimplified message to policymakers and the public. This chapter discusses the role of the new public intellectuals for the rise of overs...

The Swedish school system was radically reformed in the 1990s, and went from one of the world’s most uniform and egalitarian, to one of the world’s most deregulated and marketized. In recent years, the political controversy has heated over the for-profit corporations that operate independent schools and allegedly make major profits off the public p...

In this essay we put forward a critique of the prevailing orthodoxy of creativity and innovation which are rarely fundamentally questioned neither in science nor in public discourse. We urge to reconsider contemporary purposes and consequences of what we call instrumental and humanist conceptions of creativity and innovation. Based on our critique...

Current society’s obsession with innovation is tightly connected with the reorientation of politics and public life to economic concerns, and the rise of an enterprise culture that reshapes individuals as economic subjects. These changes have been ongoing since the 1960s and 1970s, and include the elevation of economic priorities to a prime role in...

The obsession with innovation is paralleled and intertwined with a similar obsession with entrepreneurship, which is viewed as the path to salvation for individuals, organizations, and society at large. Entrepreneurship has become a prime cultural ideal in current society, and an entrepreneurship industry has been formed that promotes the narrative...

Current society’s obsession with innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth is superficial and unsustainable. It has little to do with real innovation, which is a process involving hard work and long-term devotion. Instead, innovation today is a catchword that has evolved into an ideology and a myth mobilized to underpin current society’s st...

Insightful sociological analyses of current society have identified acceleration as its defining feature. A competitiveness ideal, and a constant aspiration to exceed the promise of a better future with the help of technological progress, have led to a broad exploitation of vague but powerful expectations The result is often mere window-dressing, b...

In this article, we problematize the notion that the continuously growing use of bibliometric evaluation can be effectively explained by ‘neoliberal’ ideology. A prerequisite for our analysis is an understanding of neoliberalism as both denoting a more limited set of concrete principles for the organization of society (the narrow interpretation) or...

Evaluation is ubiquitous in current (academic) science, to the extent that it is relevant to talk about an evaluation regime. How did it become this way? And what does it mean for scientists, groups, organizations, and fields? Picking up on the inspiring debate in a previous issue of this journal, four articles in this special section go deeper in...

Swedish universities and colleges have received a substantial funding increase since the turn of the millennium, as part of continued policies of expanding the admission of students to higher education to broader layers of the population and strengthen Swedish public research and development to increase the competitiveness of the Swedish knowledge-...

As a theoretical framework in organization studies, institutional logics is immensely popular. It has been used in a large amount of highly contributory and enlightening empirical studies, and developed far beyond its original formulation in a classical paper by Friedland and Alford (1991). In our paper, we identify three key theoretical problems t...

Organizational scholars have long studied and theorized the apparent divergence of discourse and practice in organizational settings, and how it affects leadership, management, and professional work. In this article, we review this work and connect it to an hitherto unexplored philosophical line of thought from the writings of the late Czech playwr...

In an attempt to summarize and draw preliminary conclusions from the many fine responses to my article ‘Stop evaluating science’, this short piece brings some additional reflections on the topic with the primary intent not to close the debate but to keep it open. Discussing, in turn, three main topics of the responses and an additional topic that a...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are tools for scientific research that have received increased attention in science policy in Europe in recent years, including the launch of specific governance bodies and a structured process of prioritization and organization of RI projects in the making. But there is no commonly accepted definition of what RIs are...

Pan-European research infrastructures (RIs) have been labelled a ‘pillar’ of the European Research Area initiative and ‘engines’ which are expected to drive forward the European Union (EU) economy by advancing its science and technology and ultimately its competitiveness on the global arena. The focus of this article is on the origins and nature of...

This article provides new insights into the consequences of university–industry collaboration for the content and conduct of academic research by analysing the Swedish research funding programme for the so-called ‘materials consortia’, in place between 1990 and 2000. Using secondary sources, the analysis highlights the causality in university–indus...

This article examines the most recent history of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with particular emphasis on how this laboratory shifted its research program from accelerator-based particle physics towards astroparticle physics, cosmology and multi-disciplinary photon science. Photon science became the central experimental research progra...

The R&I Observatory country report 2017 provides a brief analysis of the R&I system covering the economic context, main actors, funding trends & human resources, policies to address R&I challenges, and R&I in national and regional smart specialisation strategies. Data are from Eurostat, unless otherwise referenced and are correct as at January 2018...

This article chronicles the most recent history of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) located in Hamburg, Germany, with particular emphasis on how this national laboratory founded for accelerator-based particle physics shifted its research program toward multi-disciplinary photon science. Synchrotron radiation became DESY’s central experim...

The innovation systems framework enables a view of innovation as a process involving different actors in different constellations, but it has nonetheless most often been paired with quantitatively oriented studies of patents, licences and spin-offs. In this article, the authors use two cases of technological innovation at an academically organized...

The cross-disciplinary field of materials science emerged and grew to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, drawing theoretical and experimental strength from the rapid progress in several natural sciences disciplines and connecting to many industrial applications. In this article, we chronicle and analyze how materials science es...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop new conceptual tools for analyzing how contemporary collaborative academic work is organized on micro-level, and its social and economic impact, in broad terms. Thus it makes a contribution towards a better view on how contemporary academics organize their professional activities in light of profound...

The third sector of national innovation systems comprises non-academic, publicly owned R&D organizations that complement universities and private-sector firms and are normally called ‘research institutes’. Scholarly attention to these organizations has been scarce, partly a consequence of the theoretical imbalance in favor of conceptualizations of...

The transformation of Big Science into its current state was a historical process that followed several paths and logics, involving not least the recombination of existing scientific, technological, political, and organizational assets. It took place largely—but not exclusively—within existing institutional frameworks, and depending on the viewpoin...

This book uses a variety of perspectives, conceptual tools and empirical cases to argue that Big Science in North America and (Western) Europe has transformed dramatically and, by most accounts, beyond recognition. Promoting a new understanding and a partly new use of the slightly worn-out and arguably very vague and analytically unworkable term “B...

Big Science, defined as in the introduction to this book as the combination of big organizations, big machines, and big politics, has its origin in the unprecedented mobilization of science and technology in the service of the state during World War II. These efforts produced the first nuclear weapons, among other important inventions, and from the...

The gradual but rather profound shift in (Western) European and US science policy from the 1960s and on has been discussed at several points in the preceding five chapters, in terms of a gradual abolishment of the Social Contract for Science and the Linear Model of Technological Innovation through “commodification” (Radder 2010), “economization” (B...

A key difference between the old and transformed Big Science, in their fundamental purposes and in an epistemic sense, was illustrated with the help of Weisskopf’s (1967) distinction between “intensive” and “extensive” sciences. The distinction can be translated to an organizational analysis of old and transformed Big Science and used to reveal sev...

Historians of science Catherine Westfall and Robert Crease have made remarkable efforts of chronicling and analyzing the histories of the Argonne National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Their journal articles and books about the various big reactor- and accelerator-based infrastructu...

A key feature of transformed Big Science that distinguishes it from the old is that the big organizations are support organizations for small or ordinary science projects. As noted especially in Chaps. 2 and 3, the primary areas of use of neutron scattering, synchrotron radiation, and free electron laser labs, and thus the ultimate motivation for t...

‘Academic capitalism’ contributed to the mishandling of the Macchiarini case by officials at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, argues Olof Hallonsten.

The use of very large instrumentation, usually called Big Science, became an important part of Western science systems after World War II, with nuclear and particle physics at the center. Throughout the Cold War era, however, science policy priorities and objectives gradually shifted and in parallel therewith, new uses of Big Science emerged that w...

Cabled ocean observatories are examples of “Big Science” facilities requiring significant public investments for installation and ongoing maintenance. Large observatory networks in Canada and the United States, for example, have been established after extensive up-front planning and hundreds of millions of dollars in start-up costs. As such, they a...

National laboratories constitute large sectors of national R&D systems, but their scientific vis-a-vis organizational change remains understudied. This chapter examines the seeming paradox that although most national labs started as mission-oriented projects, they remain in operation with new missions. Analyzing the renewal of DESY (Germany) and SL...

This book analyses the emergence of a transformed Big Science in Europe and the United States, using both historical and sociological perspectives. It shows how technology-intensive natural sciences grew to a prominent position in Western societies during the post-World War II era, and how their development cohered with both technological and socia...

In its fifty-year history, the German national research laboratory DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, German Electron Synchrotron) has undergone a gradual transformation from a single-mission particle physics laboratory to a multi-mission research center for accelerator physics, particle physics, and photon science. The last is an umbrella ter...

The use of quantitative performance measures to evaluate the productivity, impact and quality of research has spread to almost all parts of public R&D systems, including Big Science where traditional measures of technical reliability of instruments and user oversubscription have been joined by publication counts to assess scientific productivity. B...

The politics of European collaborative Big Science are inherently uncertain. The European Spallation Source (ESS) for materials science, planned to be built in Sweden with a collaborative European funding solution that was recently finalized is the most recent example. Sweden has so far invested around one billion SEK (≈€110 million), taking a sign...

In its fifty-year history, the German national research laboratory DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, German Electron Synchrotron) has undergone a gradual transformation from a single-mission particle physics laboratory to a multi-mission research center for accelerator physics, particle physics, and photon science. The last is an umbrella ter...

This paper examines the formation and expansion of a new organizational field in experimental science: synchrotron radiation laboratories. These labs were once peripheral servants of some specialisms of solid-state physics, but over the 40 years studied they have grown into a worldwide generic resource for tens of thousands of users in a broad spec...

The synchrotron radiation activities at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (formerly Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) started out in 1972 as a small-scale Stanford University project. The project gradually grew to become one of the first national centers for synchrotron radiation in the United States and, eventually, an independent laboratory...

Messy governance and a lack of long-term planning threaten the success of the European Spallation Source, says Olof Hallonsten.

Twentieth-century massification of higher education and academic research led to mission diversification and structural diversification of national higher education systems (HESs), but also a tendency of non-university colleges to seek to develop into full-scale universities by the emulation of practices of established academic organizations, a ten...

There is general consensus in the study of science, and especially research policy studies, that a wave of profound change has struck academic science in the past decades. Central parts of this change are increased competition, growing demands of relevance and excellence, and managerialism reforms in institutions and policy systems. The underpinnin...

Although the nuclear era and the Cold War superpower competition have long since passed, governments are still investing in Big Science, although these large facilities are nowadays mostly geared towards areas of use closer to utility. Investments in Big Science are also motivated not only by promises of scientific breakthroughs but also by expecta...

Intergovernmental collaboration in Big Science has been an important resource for European science since the 1950s, as a means to compete on global level. But interestingly, collaboration in (basic) science has traditionally been left outside of the political integration work of the European Community/Union, which has resulted in a cluttered policy...

The most recent fashion in the policy-level promotion of excellence in academic research seems to be the launching of funding programs directed to young and promising (postdoc level) researchers with the purpose of assisting them in establishing their own research profile at this allegedly crucial and fragile career stage. In the Swedish public res...

Studies of institutional transformation in science have largely overlooked Big Science installations, despite far-reaching changes to the roles and functions of such large labs in the past decades. Here, we present and analyze two Big Science labs that have undergone profound transformations from single-purpose particle physics labs to multi-purpos...

Big Science accelerator complexes are no longer mere tools for nuclear and particle physics, but modern-day experimental resources for a wide range of natural sciences and often named instrumental to scientific and technological development for innovation and economic growth. Facilities compete on a global market to attract the best users and facil...

20th century massification of higher education and research in academia is said to have produced structurally stratified higher education systems in many countries. Most manifestly, the research mission of universities appears to be divisive. Authors have claimed that the Swedish system, while formally unified, has developed into a binary state, an...

In many countries, current research policy is dominated by managerialism and excellence, manifesting the aim of making universities into national strategic assets in the globally competitive knowledge economy. This article discusses these policy trends and their mirror in recent developments in public funding for academic research, with special att...

Intergovernmental collaboration in the area of big science has been an important resource for European science since the 1950s. Yet, as a policy area, it has traditionally been left outside of the political integration work of the European Community/Union. Despite this formal detachment, the political realities of the collaborations often draw upon...

This paper discusses the institutional persistence of systems of national laboratories (SNLs) that unlike other public and private research organizations appear to have experienced only minor institutional shifts in recent years. Although national laboratories started as time-limited mission-oriented projects, most of them have remained in operatio...

Proliferating excellence gold standards in the global academic system tend to obscure the far-reaching diversification of academic missions, practices, ambitions and identities brought by massification. This article approaches this topic by a review of theory on academic scholarship and how it has changed in the wake of academic massification and t...

This special section of an issue of Science and Public Policy grew out of an interest in following the politics of the European Spallation Source (ESS) Facility at Lund, Sweden. The ESS spectacle provided a platform from which to review different research infrastructure projects and to place them in the context of science policy as a whole. Large-s...

MAX-lab is a Swedish national synchrotron radiation facility, first established as a small-scale university project in the late 1970s and then gradually developed into a national and international user facility. This article presents a historical study of MAX-lab that illustrates the decentralized character of the Swedish science policy system and...