David P. Baker’s research while affiliated with University of Luxembourg and other places

Scientific reasoning has emerged as a powerful social force, particularly due to the institutionalization of science, a process that has significantly accelerated since the late 20th century. This phenomenon, known as scientization in the social sciences, encapsulates how scientific reasoning has become the dominant medium for shaping science-society relationships. Despite its growing prominence, the mechanisms and outcomes of scientization remain less well understood. A systematic search of Elsevier's Scopus database reveals a sharp increase in references to scientization since the late 1970s, with 296 publications doing so by 2020. This study examines how mechanisms such as rationalization, professionalization, technologization, commercialization, and actorhood have driven the institutionalization of science, impacting culture, academic disciplines, and policy-making. Our findings highlight the critical need for a more nuanced understanding of how scientization influences modern societies, particularly within the policy sphere, where the interplay between science and policy has substantial and far-reaching consequences.

Since the turn of the 20th century, the number of scientific journal research articles (known as papers) reporting new discoveries—from the mundane to the sublime—has unceasingly doubled nearly every decade. Today, the annual volume is well over three million papers, the majority of which appear in thousands of globally accessible, main scientific journals covering the range of the sciences, especially science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM), and appearing in many languages but chiefly the contemporary lingua franca of English. Too often dialogue about the state of science is needlessly nationalistic, with an overabundance of reference to scientific and technology competition between the U.S. and China (e.g. The Economist 2024). What most observers do not appreciate is that Europe has twice played a pivotal role—at critical junctures—in the development of what can fittingly be described as global mega-science, without which the world’s STEMM knowledge would be significantly less advanced than it is now. Already at the end of the 19th century, regions of Europe developed an innovative organizational model that would lead to a societal cross-subsidy of research as never before. Then, in the early 1980s, not long after expert science-observers predicted an imminent collapse in the rate of new discovery—and well before Asia’s major contributions came online—papers published by European scientists surpassed those contributed by North American scientists. The region of small and mid-sized countries gave the world a super-hub of scientific collaboration, significantly increasing globalization of research and in the process saving the pace of science from stagnation. In both instances, it was the European research university, frequently maligned in science policy, that proved to be the decisive organizational form at the heart of scientific innovation and knowledge production for the world, facilitating mega-science on a global scale (Baker & Powell 2024).

https://theconversation.com/scientists-around-the-world-report-millions-of-new-discoveries-every-year-but-this-explosive-research-growth-wasnt-what-experts-predicted-237274

Global Mega-Science explains the unprecedented worldwide expansion of higher education and of research collaborations that have transformed the production of science. Growing global science capacity relies on the rise of the research university and unprecedented investments in research, which reflects the influential global ”university-science model”. Most nations have established research universities to educate academics and professionals—all contribute to scientific discovery. Science increasingly relies on global collaborative efforts, esp. the STEM+ disciplines and “mega-science” projects, such as the Covid-19 vaccines, but all fields rely more than ever on collaboration within diverse networks. Unique in its historical scope (1900-2020) and in theorizing the rise of “mega-science” via the worldwide diffusion of the “university-science model”, the book covers numerous cases of historically leading science countries, from Germany and the United States to China and other Asian countries as well as small states with the newest research universities (Luxembourg, Qatar)—embedded in worldwide trends and patterns.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

Co-authored research articles in the disciplinarily heterogeneous field of higher education have dramatically increased in this century. As in other fields, rising international co-authorships reflect evolving international collaboration networks. We examine higher education research over two decades, applying automated bibliometric topic identification and social network analysis of 9067 papers in 13 core higher education journals (1998-2018). Remarkable expansion in the volume of papers and co-authorships has, surprisingly, not resulted in a more diverse network. Rather, existing co-authorship patterns are strengthened , with the dominance of scholars from a few Anglophone countries largely maintained. Researchers globally seek to co-author with leading scholars in these countries, especially the US, UK, and Australia-at least when publishing in the leading general higher education journals based there. Further, the two-mode social network analysis of countries and topics suggests that while Anglophone countries have led the development of higher education research, China and Germany, as leading research-producing countries, are increasingly influential within this world-spanning network. Topically, the vast majority of co-authored papers in higher education research focuses on individual-level phenomena, with organizational and system or country-level analysis constituting (much) smaller proportions , despite policymakers' emphasis on cross-national comparisons and the growing importance of university actorhood. We discuss implications thereof for the future of the multidisciplinary field of higher education.