Which organizational forms produce science? Expansion, diversity and cooperation in Germany's higher education and science system embedded within the global context, 1900-2010

Overview and introduction “Which organizational forms produce science? Expansion, diversity, and cooperation in Germany's higher education and science system embedded within the global context, 1900-2010”. Already the title of my dissertation manifests an approach that examines the topic of the development of scientific productivity in the German higher education and science landscape from different perspectives: levels, dimensions, and an extensive timeframe. Deriving from and contributing to the international research project “Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development, and the Knowledge Society” (SPHERE), my research focuses on the investigation of the influence of higher education development and science capacity-building on scientific knowledge production, globally, comparatively, and considerable depth for Germany, a key science producer for well over a century. Focusing mainly on the different structures and institutional settings of the German higher education and science system, the dissertations shows how these affected and contributed to the long-term development of scientific productivity worldwide. The historical, comparative, and in-depth analyses are especially important in light of advancing globalization and internationalization of science, stronger networks of scientists worldwide, and the emergence of the “knowledge society”. The research design combines macro- and meso-level analyses: the institutionalized and organizational settings in which science is produced. Since information about single authors was limited in availability, extensive micro-level analyses were not possible here, yet the research articles analyzed were all written and published by individuals working in organizations, which are in the center of analysis here. By reference to the dimensions expansion, diversity, and cooperation, I elaborated the frame of my investigation, and sorted my research questions, including country, organizational field and form, and organizational levels. The structure of this work (see outline) addresses these themes and the observed timeframe spans the years from 1900 to 2010 – more than a century (see section 1.2). My main goal was to investigate how and why scientists publish their research results in peer-reviewed journal articles. The point is to emphasize the importance of scientific findings/discoveries, because non-published results are non-existent for the scientific community. From the ways and in which formats scientists publish their work, we can deduce how science is organized (within and across disciplines). My dissertation analyzes publications in peer-reviewed journals, because they are the most important format – alongside patents in applied fields – to disseminate new knowledge in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (hereafter STEM+ fields). Articles not only record new knowledge, but also contribute to the reputation of researchers and their organizations. Journal publications in reputable journals with peer-review have become the “gold standard” measure of scientific productivity. Within the last several decades, the scientization of many dimensions of societal life proceeded, and the generation of new knowledge increasingly became the focus of political, economic, and social interests – and research policymaking. Therefore, it is important to identify the institutionalized settings (organizations/organizational forms) in which science can best be produced. Here, the diverse types of organizations that produce science – mainly universities, research institutes, companies, government agencies and hospitals – were identified and differences and similarities of these organizational forms were analyzed on the basis of their character, goals, tasks, and the kinds of research their members produce. In a first step, I show why I structured my work at the interface of higher education research, science studies, and bibliometrics (see chapters 2 and 5). Analyzing publications is still the key task of bibliometrics, but the results are used by many other actors as well: higher education managers, politicians, and scientists themselves to make claims about the quality of science, to compare each other, or to influence the structure, organization, and output of the higher education and science system. While it is difficult to make direct statements about the quality of research on the basis of simply counting the number of research articles a scientist publishes, the quality of journals is used as a proxy to compare across disciplines. To measure quality, other parameters are necessary. Thus, here statements focus on the quantity of science produced, not on the intrinsic quality of the analyzed research articles, the specific research achievements of individual scholars, organizations or organizational forms, or even countries. Nevertheless, output indicators elaborated here definitely show the huge expansion of scientific production and productivity, the stability of the research university over time as the most important science producer in Germany, but also rising differentiation and diversification of the organizational forms contributing to overall scientific output. Furthermore, the start of a considerable and on-going rise in national and international collaborations can be dated to the early 1990s. The chapter about the multidisciplinary context (see chapter 2) discusses the relationship between higher education research and science studies in Germany as well as the special position of scientific knowledge in comparison to other forms of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is generated, distributed, and consumed by the scientific community. To get an overview about the most important studies in the field, and to contextualize my work within the already existing empirical studies, I describe the current state of research in chapter 3. Research questions Section 1.2 provides a detailed description of my research questions: Which organizational forms produce science? 1. How has worldwide and European scientific productivity developed between 1900 and 2010 in comparison? 2. How has the German higher education and science system been embedded in the global developments of higher education and science over time? 3. How has scientific productivity in Germany developed between 1900 and 2010? 4. Among all science-producing organizational forms, what do the key organizational forms contribute to scientific productivity? 5. Which organizational forms provide the best conditions for scientific productivity? 6. Which single organizations produce the most research in Germany? 7. What is the impact of increasing internationalization of research on national and international cooperation, measured in publications in scientific journals? Theoretical framework Theoretically (see chapter 4), I apply a neo-institutional (NI) framework to explore and explain both the tremendous expansion of higher education and science across the world and considerable differences across time and space in the institutional settings, organizational forms, and organizations that produce scientific research in Germany. Sociological NI focuses on understanding institutions as important in guiding social action and shaping processes of social development. Such an approach emphasizes the development, functioning, and principles of institutions. Milestones in NI describe the nexus of organization and society supposing that organizational structures express myths and reflect ideals institutionalized in their environment. While capturing, copying, and asserting these, structural similarity (institutional isomorphism) between organizations in society will be established. The concept of “organizational field” emphasizes relationships between organizations within an environment. Organizational fields (communities) consist of all relevant organizations. In section 4.1.2 I discuss the differences between institutions and organizations and the difficulty of a distinction of the terms, especially in German-speaking sociology, which does not distinguish clearly between these terms. Fundamentally, NI approaches differ in the dimensions or pillars and levels of analysis they privilege (see figure 5, p. 80), but they share fundamental principles and the theoretical framework. Thus NI is particularly suitable for a multi-level analysis of scientific productivity across time and space. The historical development of the German higher education and science system must analyzed considering also global developments, because on the one hand it had an enormous impact on the development of other systems worldwide, and, on the other hand, global trends affect the on-going institutionalization and organization(s) of science in Germany. Intersectoral and international cooperation is growing and becoming increasingly important, leading to diverse networks within and between higher education and science systems worldwide. The classical, national case study is hardly longer possible, because macro units like countries are highly interdependent, embedded in global, regional and local relationships, such that borders between the global and the national dimension are increasingly blurred. Nevertheless, countries are units with clearly defined boundaries and structures, thus they can be handled as units to compare. The theoretical perspectives and different levels of analysis addressed here are displayed in Figure 5. I apply the “world polity” approach as a broader lense with which to make sense of the truly global arena of higher education and science (macro level). The focus of this perspective is on global and international structures and processes, which developed over time. Through this perspective, I explore global diffusion and formal structures of formal principles and practical applications. Combining historical and sociological institutionalism helps to focus on developments and processes over time on the meso level, to explain how institutions have developed and change(d). The concepts of “critical junctures” and path dependencies are useful to explain these processes over time. To describe the transformation of knowledge production over the entire twentieth century, and to analyze different organizational forms that produce science in Germany, two prevalent theoretical concepts are discussed: Mode 1 versus Mode 2 science, and the Triple-Helix model to describe the relationship between science, industry and state. In “The New Production of Knowledge” Michael Gibbons and his colleagues describe the transformation of knowledge from an academic, disciplinary, and autonomous – “traditional” – organization of science (Mode 1) with a focus on universities as the key organizational form, to a more applied, transdisciplinary, diverse, and reflexive organization of science (Mode 2) that features a more diverse organization of science, relying on a broader set of organizations producing knowledge. Within the literature, debates center on whether this new model has replaced the old, and which of these models best describes the contemporary organization of science (here: the STEM+ fields). In turn, the Triple-Helix model preserves the historical importance of the universities. This approach assumes that future innovations emerge from a relationship between universities (production of new knowledge), industry (generation of wealth), and state (control). Data and methods In these analyses, only peer reviewed journal publications were used – as the best indicator for measuring the most legitimated, authoritative produced science. This focus enabled an investigation of publications in-depth and over a 110 year timeframe. Research articles in the most reputable, peer-reviewed, and internationally reputable journals are the gold standard of scientific output in STEM+. The data I used is based on a stratified representative sample of published research articles in journals in STEM+-fields. My measure relies on the key global source for such data, the raw data from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) (the other global database is Elsevier’s Scopus, which also indexes tens of thousands of journals), which was extensively recoded. Methodologically, my approach is based on a combination of comparative institutional analysis across selected countries and historically of the German higher education and science system, and the systematic global evaluation of bibliometric publication data (see chapter 6). The SCIE includes more than 90 million entries (all types of research), mainly from STEM+-fields. I focus on original research articles, because this type of publication contains certified new knowledge. The SPHERE dataset covers published research articles from 1900 to 2010. From 1900 to 1970, we selected data in 5-year-steps in the form of a stratified representative sample. From 1975 onwards full data is available for every year. Depending on the research question, either five or ten-year steps were analyzed. A detailed description of the sampling and weighting of the data can be found in chapter 6. In consideration of the criteria above, I analyzed 17,568 different journals (42,963 journals were included into the database if we count the same journals in different years), and a total of 5,089,233 research articles. To prepare the data for this research, it had to be extensively cleaned and coded. Very often our international research team found missing information on the country level and/or on the level of organizations/organizational forms. From June 2013 to December 2015, research in the archives of university libraries was necessary to manually add missing information, particularly organization location and author affiliations. In the field of bibliometrics, we find different methods to count publications. In this work, I mainly apply the “whole count” approach (see table 1, p. 126). This decision is based on the assumption that every author, organization, or country contributed equally to a publication. An overestimation of publications can’t be precluded, because research articles are counted multiple times, if a paper is produced in co-authorship, which has been rising worldwide over the past several decades. The absolute number of publications (worldwide, Europe, Germany) is based on a simple counting of research articles (without duplicates, in cases of co-authored articles). Summary of the most important results The empirical part of my work is divided into three parts. In the following sections, I will present the most important findings. The global picture – higher education and science systems in comparison The central question of my research project was “which organizational forms produce science”? For a better understanding and classification of the results of my case study, I embedded the German higher education and science system into the European and global context. I answered the questions “how did the worldwide and European scientific productivity developed between 1900 and 2010 in comparison”, and “how was/is the German higher education and science system embedded in global developments of higher education and science over time” as follows: First, I show that the worldwide scientific growth followed a pure exponential curve between 1900 and 2010 (see figures 3 and 10; pp. 50, 147) – and we can assume that this strong upward trend continues today. The massive expansion of scientific production had and still has a tremendous influence on societal developments, beyond simply economic and technical developments, but rather transforming society. I show that higher education and science systems worldwide exhibit communalities, which have led to similar developments and expansion of scientific productivity. The comparison of important European countries (Germany in comparison with Great Britain, France, Belgium and Luxembourg) uncovered the contribution of the development and spread of modern research universities and the extraordinary and continued rise in publication output (see section 7.2; Powell, Dusdal 2016, 2017a, 2017b in press). Within the global field of science, three geographical centers of scientific productivity have emerged over the twentieth century: Europe, North America, and Asia. Their relative importance fluctuates over time, but today all three centers continue to be the key regions in the production of scientific research in STEM+ journals. Especially in Asia, the growth rates have risen massively in recent years (Powell et al. 2017 in press). Second, I investigated that all countries worldwide invest more into research and development (R&D) (figure 9, p. 140). These investments have a clear impact on the scientific productivity of nations, yet there are important differences between countries in absolute production and productivity rates. Alongside direct investments in R&D or the application of patents in STEM+-fields that influence the expansion of science, the capacity for producing more knowledge fundamentally depends on rising student enrolments, a growing number of researchers, the widening of research activities into various arenas of society, the development of products, and the (re-)foundation of universities (Powell, Baker, Fernandez 2017 in press). As part of the higher education expansion and massification during the 1960s and 70s, the numbers of researchers and students rose tremendously. The growth of scientific publications thus results from the on-going institutionalization of higher education and science systems worldwide. The growth of publications is also explained by the steady growth in the number of researchers working within these growing – and increasingly interconnected – systems. Third, I could reject the argument of Derek J. de Solla Price that the pure exponential growth of scientific literature has to flatten or would slow-down several decades after the advent of “big science” (see paragraph 2.4; figure 4 and 10; p. 53, 147). Although radical historical, political, economical, and technical events (see figure 11, p. 150) led to punctual short-term decreases in publication outputs, the long-term development of universities and other organizational forms producing science led to sustained growth of scientific publications, with the numbers of publications rising unchecked over the long twentieth century. In 2010, the worldwide scientific productivity in leading STEM+ journals was about one million articles annually. Fourth, I could show that the absolute numbers have to be put into perspective and standardized in relation to the investments in R&D, the size of the higher education and science systems, the number of inhabitants (see figure 12, p. 159), and the number of researchers (table 3, p. 162; figure 13, p. 164). The initial expansion of scientific publications in STEM+-fields is based on a general growth of higher education and science systems. The different institutional settings and organizational forms that produce science have an impact on scientific productivity. The selected country case studies – Germany, Great Britain, France, Belgium and Luxembourg – demonstrate that systems with strong research universities are highly productive; they seem to provide conditions necessary for science. As a result, not only the number and quality of researchers is important, but also the institutional and organizational settings in which they are employed. Fifth, in international comparison, Germany continues to contribute significantly to scientific productivity in STEM+ fields. With an annual growth rate of 3.35%, Germany follows the United States and Japan. In 2014, German governments invested €84.5 billion in R&D – 2.9% of overall GDP. The EU-target of 3% by 2020 was barely missed. In 2010, Germany produced 55,009 research articles (see table A5). In comparison to Great Britain, France, Belgium and Luxemburg, Germany still leads in scientific output in Europe –comparing just the absolute numbers. The size of the country itself and the institutionalization of the higher education and science systems influence publication outputs, of course, with these absolute numbers in relation to other key indicators showing a different picture. Standardized by the number of inhabitants, Germany published less articles per capita than Belgium and Great Britain. The number of researchers amounted to 327,997 (FTE) in 2010. The ratio of inhabitants to scientists was 1,000:4. Among these countries studied in-depth, Luxembourg and Great Britain had more researchers per capita than did Germany. The interplay of the organizational forms of science in Germany between 1900 and 2010 On the basis of the analysis of the global and European contexts, and development of worldwide scientific productivity over time in chapter 7, I started the in-depth case study of Germany. Bridging this overview and the following in-depth analyses is a chapter on the institutionalization of the German higher education and science system (see chapter 8). Here, I described the most important institutions and organizations and the organizational field – universities, extra-university research institutes and universities of applied sciences. Furthermore, I discussed the differences between West and East Germany during their division (1945–1990). Summarizing the most important results shows that the development of publications in Germany follows global and European trends (on a lower scale) (see figure 16, p. 208). Over time, Germany experienced pure exponential growth of scientific publications and a rising diversity of organizational forms that contribute to scientific productivity (see sections