Maximilian Fochler’s research while affiliated with University of Vienna and other places

Within the last two decades, research has increasingly been called upon to respond to societal issues and tackle global challenges (e.g., global health, climate change, food security). While such demands are not fundamentally novel and research funding has long been conditioned by expectations of practical applications, contemporary transformations in research governance have intensified the steering of research by decision-makers and systematized the need for research to be accountable. One way in which research and political institutions have been attempting to qualify these transformations is communicated by the term research relevant for society. In Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields, important initial works have opened the study of relevance and analysed a range of empirical cases. However, we so far lack fine-grained analytical perspectives for studying the variety of practices related to creating relevance in research. Other research attributes, such as research credibility and legitimacy, remain much further conceptualized and investigated by STS. We therefore argue that working towards such perspectives is timely, amongst others for understanding the broader implications of doing relevance in research for research practices, academic cultures and institutions. In this special issue, we explore whether the analytical value of the concept of relevance can be strengthened by distinguishing different modes of relevance. These modes designate combinations of practices aiming at responding to societal and environmental problems in different ways: (a) relevance as selecting and reorienting research topics and disciplines, (b) relevance as engaging societal actors and conducting user-driven research, (c) relevance as re-arranging the interaction between science and policy, and (d) relevance as transforming academic institutions. We invite contributions that discuss these questions on the level of individual researchers, research groups/communities, or research institutions, as well as in diverse national settings and in heterogeneous assemblages of researchers and stakeholders. Engaging with the state of the art of research on relevance and with the planned contributions helped us to carve out the four modes, and in turn, the modes helped to situate the specific cases presented in the papers within the wider context of how relevance is practiced. We propose that distinguishing these four modes of relevance allows us to better analytically grasp the variety of ways in which researchers do relevance. Thereby, we want to open an empirically grounded discussion about a typology of modes of relevance that later work can build on and expand. Across all contributions, we also invite reflections on how work in STS and related fields (and the specific contributions in this special issue in particular) can be made relevant. Our special issue will propose a first systematic analysis of relevance and will offer institutions and actors using the concept of relevance a basis for further conceptualization and understanding.

Soil microbial ecology is a relatively young research field that became established around the middle of the 20th century and has grown considerably since then. We analyze two epistemic re-orientations in the field, asking how possibilities for creating do-able problems within current conditions of research governance and researchers' collective sense-making about new, more desirable modes of research were intertwined in these developments. We show that a first re-orientation towards molecular omics studies was comparably straightforward to bring about, because it allowed researchers to gain resources for their work and to build careers-in other words, to create do-able problems. Yet, over time this mode of research developed into a scientific bandwagon from which researchers found it difficult to depart, even as they considered this kind of work as producing mostly descriptive studies rather than exploring interesting and important ecological questions. Researchers currently wish to re-orient their field again, towards a new mode of conducting 'well-rounded' interdisciplinary and ecologically-relevant studies. This re-orientation is, however, not easy to put into practice. In contrast to omics studies, this new mode of research does not easily enable the creation of do-able problems for two reasons. First, it is not as readily 'packaged' and hence more difficult to align with institutional and funding frameworks as well as with demands for productivity and career building. Second, while the first re-orientation was part of a broader exciting bandwagon across the life sciences and promised apparent discoveries, the current re-orientation goes along with a different sense of novelty, exploring complex environmental relations and building an understanding at the intersection of disciplines, instead of pushing a clearly circumscribed frontier. Ultimately, our analysis raises questions about whether current conditions of research governance structurally privilege particular kinds of scientific re-orientation over others.

The mission and definition of citizen science are vividly debated. One of the crucial aspects contested is who has the agency to define it; another is how precise a definition can and should be and how much these definitions are reflective of the heterogeneity of practices and perspectives subsumed under the label citizen science. In this paper we draw attention to how citizens themselves actively construct their own roles within a project in relation to both their histories and the project’s scientists. Drawing on a set of in-depth interviews with participating Austrian beekeepers in the INSIGNIA project, we show how even within a small, relatively homogenous sample of participants, there is considerable diversity in how the citizen scientists see their roles. We explore how citizen scientists articulate a different set of relations towards science, their own practice as beekeepers, and their desired role in the project. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for academic reflection on citizen science as well as practical implementation for citizen science projects.

This paper traces how the self-understanding of soil science has changed in relation to ideas of societal relevance and academic legitimacy. While soil science was established as an academic discipline with strong links to agriculture, this link was largely lost around 1980. This led to a perceived crisis of the discipline, which has been followed by a long process of redefining its self-understanding. Building on document analysis and qualitative interviews, this paper traces five ways in which soil scientists have re-articulated the relevance of soil science, and analyses if and how these re-articulations are linked to new kinds of research practices and new self-understandings of soil science as a discipline. We conceptualise these re-articulations of relevance as different epistemic commitments that have provided soil scientists with a repertoire of relating their research to societal and environmental problems. At the same time, we also highlight how this epistemic diversity has created tensions in the discipline's self-understanding. Related to recent calls to further integrate different kinds of soil-related knowledge, we argue that these tensions still need to be turned into productive interaction to create synergy instead of competition between different ways of articulating relevance—allowing different kinds of soil-related research to thrive, both in their distinct regimes of relevance, and in a fruitful co-production. This paper shows that studies of how ways of articulating relevance change over time can provide new insights to debates about what conditions support science in gaining societal relevance.

This paper draws on the notion of the asset to better understand the role of innovative research technologies in researchers’ practices and decisions. Faced with both the need to accumulate academic capital to make a living in academia and with many uncertainties about the future, researchers must find ways to anticipate future academic revenues. We illustrate that innovative research technologies provide a suitable means for doing so: First, because they promise productivity through generating interesting data and hence publications. Second, because they allow a signaling of innovativeness in contexts where research is evaluated, even across disciplinary boundaries. As such, enrolling innovative research technologies as assets allows researchers to bridge partly conflicting valuations of productivity and innovativeness they are confronted with. However, the employment of innovative technologies in anticipation of future academic revenues is not always aligned with what researchers value epistemically. Nevertheless, considerations about potential future academic revenues derived from innovative research technologies sometimes seem to override particular epistemic valuations. Illustrating these dynamics, we show that processes of assetization in academia can have significant epistemic consequences which are important to unpack.

Science is about venturing into the unknown to find unexpected insights and establish new knowledge. Increasingly, academic institutions and funding agencies such as the European Research Council (ERC) explicitly encourage and support scientists to foster risky and hopefully ground-breaking research. Such incentives are important and have been greatly appreciated by the scientific community. However, the success of the ERC has had its downsides, as other actors in the funding ecosystem have adopted the ERC’s focus on “breakthrough science” and respective notions of scientific excellence. We argue that these tendencies are concerning since disruptive breakthrough innovation is not the only form of innovation in research. While continuous, gradual innovation is often taken for granted, it could become endangered in a research and funding ecosystem that places ever higher value on breakthrough science. This is problematic since, paradoxically, breakthrough potential in science builds on gradual innovation. If the value of gradual innovation is not better recognized, the potential for breakthrough innovation may well be stifled.

Building on group discussions and interviews with life science researchers in Austria, this paper analyses the narratives that researchers use in describing what they feel responsible for, with a particular focus on how they perceive the societal responsibilities of their research. Our analysis shows that the core narratives used by the life scientists participating in this study continue to be informed by the linear model of innovation. This makes it challenging for more complex innovation models [such as responsible research and innovation (RRI)] to gain ground in how researchers make sense of and conduct their research. Furthermore, the paper shows that the life scientists were not easily able to imagine specific practices that would address broader societal concerns and thus found it hard to integrate the latter into their core responsibilities. Linked to this, researchers saw institutional reward structures (e.g. evaluations, contractual commitments) as strongly focused on scientific excellence (“I am primarily paid for publishing…”). Thus, they saw reward structures as competing with—rather than incentivising—broader notions of societal responsibility. This narrative framing of societal responsibilities is indicative of a structural marginalisation of responsibility practices and explains the claim, made by many researchers in our sample, that they cannot afford to spend time on such practices. The paper thus concludes that the core ideas of RRI stand in tension with predominant narrative and institutional infrastructures that researchers draw on to attribute meaning to their research practices. This suggests that scientific institutions (like universities, professional communities or funding institutions) still have a core role to play in providing new and context-specific narratives as well as new forms of valuing responsibility practices.

Resumen La manera en que los empresarios planean sus negocios y construyen sus compañías, determina el tipo de relaciones entre academia industria y gobierno. ¿Pero cómo se forman los estilos regionales de planificación y emprendimiento específicamente? Este artículo conceptualiza a los empresarios como una comunidad de práctica y muestra que las narrativas pedagógicas en esta comunidad juegan un papel crucial en la forma en que establecen sus negocios porque los empresarios aprenden tanto del mito como de la realidad de éxitos y fracaso de negocios similares; estas narrativas forman las imágenes mentales que los empresarios usan para establecer sus propios objetivos y estrategias. En particular, estas historias resuelven la compleja dinámica de la capitalización financiera. Nuestros resultados reportados aquí se basan en entrevistas biográficas con empresarios y emprendedores seriales en el grupo de biotecnología de Viena, Austria.