What is distinctive about contemporary science? This question is addressed in this project by examining how emerging ideas and social arrangements of contemporary science affect the practices and outcomes of scientific research in one strategic case, the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. These institutes are research organizations that explicitly seek to break disciplinary barriers, forge new tools for public/private collaboration, and speed the application of transformative science.
Intellectual Merit
The project will engage in this analysis by using multiple methods including ethnography, oral history, and archival analysis to engage in historical and contemporary comparisons. It will explore how the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery embody what is different about contemporary science as well as what remains the same. Three questions guide the research:
1. How do widely discussed ideas about such issues as interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and public/private collaboration shape the evolution of a new institution?
2. How do these ideas affect scientific work as well as the public work of forging relationships with the Institutes' constituencies?
3. How (and for whom) do new ways of doing science succeed? What new metrics are needed to capture their success?
Potential Broader Impacts
The project will support graduate research training and scholarly publication, expand a publicly accessible electronic archive, enabling others to study the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery. Broad dissemination of findings will be accelerated through a concluding symposium that brings together the researchers, stakeholders in the Institutes, science policymakers, and invited scholarly commentators. A policy-oriented whitepaper and a book summarizing the results of the symposium will also serve to broaden the projects overall impact.
The results of this project will have the potential to guide future investment in research and research infrastructure. It will add new evidence to ongoing discussions about the value of interdisciplinarity, the pros and cons of public/private collaborations, and the community-wide effects of centers and institutes.
In two years of study, our initial plan was to :(1) trace how contemporary scientific ideologies (i.e. the broad vision of Mode Two knowledge production) were both realized and transformed in the genesis of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery; (2) examine how such ideologies continue to affect daily scientific practice as well as the public work of forging and maintaining relationships with the Institutes.’ constituencies; and (3) explore how and for whom this attempt to implement "Mode Two" knowledge production succeeds. Our data collection has concluded and we have drafted 4 scholarly papers with plans for additional work. At this stage, however, the outcomes of our work are more practical. They include: 1) Two of the PIs taught a graduate seminar at the University of Wisconsin--Madison on the changing character of knowledge production (science) in the 21st century. This graduate seminar included students from a variety of different disciplines and concluded with a symposium where the students presented their work to faculty from across campus; 2) Two graduate students were trained in qualitative social science research methods; 3) Working with the staff at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the researchers for this project developed and tested a set of mechanisms for engaging citizens in science related discussion; 4) The researchers funded by this project held a final research symposium, which brought together faculty and staff from across the University of Wisconsin--Madison campus, members of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery community, and three outside scholars to discuss the research funded by this project and related work by the outside scholars. Our preliminary finds are the following: 1) The tension between academic and business norms pervades the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and the University of Wisconsin--Madison campus as well as US higher education more broadly. In varied situations, involved actors negotiate the tension differently, sometimes using business-oriented expectations to meet academic ends, sometimes using academic practices to meet business goals, and other times creating a temporarily stable balance between divergent goals and norms. 2) The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery sits at the intersection of the public and private sectors. In a second paper, we consider three dimensions of public and private, and show how distinguishing between them enables a more subtle analysis of the work that goes on around the public-private interface. 3) A belief in the innovative potential of interdisciplinary is at the heart of debates about how to organize science in the 21st century and a commitment to interdisciplinarity is central to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. In this paper, we explore the performative aspects of interdisciplinarity and we demonstrate that the meanings of interdisciplinarity are multifaceted, contested, and often contradictory. 4) Large interdisciplinary research institutes while rare creations are disinctive points in the topography of late 20th and 21st century science. The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery constitute one such locale. We explore the factors that make this small populations of organizations look alike and the more limited ways in which they are disinctive.
