Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 44, Issue 8, October 2015, Pages 1584-1600
Research Policy

The bureaucratization of science

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2015.04.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Use large-scale survey of scientific projects to analyze bureaucratization of science.

  • Size associated with greater bureaucratization of scientific research projects.

  • Also show effects of interdisciplinarity and interdependence on bureaucratization.

  • Size-bureaucratization effects contingent on field-level interdependence.

  • Discuss implication for policy debates about authorship and careers in science.

Abstract

While science is traditionally treated as a distinct domain of work organization, increasingly science is organized around larger and larger work groups that resemble small firms, with knowledge as the product. The growth of organized science raises the question of whether we also see a bureaucratic structuring of scientific work groups as predicted by organization theory, with implications for the academic credit system and scientific labor markets. Building on organization theory, we examine the relation between project group size, technical environment, and bureaucratic structuring of scientific work. Using survey data on scientific projects, we find size predicts bureaucratic structuring, with declining marginal effects. We also find that interdisciplinarity and task interdependence have distinct effects on bureaucratic structuring. Finally, the relationship between size and some dimensions of bureaucratic structuring is contingent on levels of work group interdependence in the field. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for policy debates about authorship and scientific careers.

Introduction

“Secretaries post off papers from the laboratory at an average rate of one every ten days. However, far from being reports of what has been produced in the factory, members take these papers to be the product of their unusual factory.” (Latour and Woolgar, 1979:47).

Science is increasingly becoming a team activity (Wuchty et al., 2007). While this trend began decades ago (Price, 1963, Swatez, 1966), the sizes of contemporary research teams in many fields are beginning to approach that of medium-sized firms (Biagioli, 2003, Birnholtz, 2006, Milojević, 2014, Pavlidis et al., 2014, Salonius, 2008). Rather than a focus on an individual's lab bench, scientific work increasingly takes place in a setting that more closely resembles a small “factory” or “quasi-firm”, run by a “small businessperson” lab director (Etzkowitz, 1983, Hackett, 1990, Latour and Woolgar, 1979, Shrum et al., 2007). This growth in the size of scientific work teams raises the question of the impact of size on the organization of scientific work (Carayol and Matt, 2004, Chompalov et al., 2001, Swatez, 1966). We extend prior work on the organization of science by examining the internal organization of scientific projects, in particular how the structuring of research projects varies by size and environmental context, building on the classic sociology of organization structures (Blau, 1970, Child, 1973, Meyer, 1972, Pugh et al., 1968).

We argue larger research teams are associated with more bureaucratic structuring of the team: greater division of labor, standardization, hierarchy and decentralization. Furthermore, project scope and team interdependence also affect bureaucratic structuring. Finally, the size–structure relation is contingent on the level of interdependence in the research team.

In addition to developing the sociology and economics of science, this work also tests the utility of organization theory for explaining the structures of self-organizing groups of professionals, and by examining the effects of size at modest group sizes (with the bulk of the projects having on the order of 5–10 people), to see how sensitive these size–structure relationships are across even a modest size range.

Two key insights drive this discussion. First, a scientific project is not a point mass, but consists of a group of members organized along a variety of dimension (Barley and Bechky, 1994, Carayol and Matt, 2004, Chompalov et al., 2001). And, this internal structure may be critical to performance (Andrews, 1976, Carayol and Matt, 2004, Cummings et al., 2013, Fox and Mohapatra, 2007, Hollingsworth, 2009). Secondly, science is not science. Fields differ significantly in their structure and dependencies (Collins, 1975, Fuchs, 1992, Hargens, 1975, Whitley, 1984). Therefore, we examine the internal structure of scientific projects, and the environmental contexts in which these structures operate.

In the following sections, we discuss the changing nature of scientific work, use organization theory to generate hypotheses about the structural implications of these changes, test these hypotheses using recently collected data from a broad sample of research projects across scientific fields, and then conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the sociology and economics of science: in particular, training, careers, and the reward structure in science.

Section snippets

The growth of organized science

While science being conducting in organizations (such as universities, government labs, and industry labs) is not a new phenomenon (Blau, 1994, Pelz and Andrews, 1976), we are observing a fundamental change in the organization of individual research projects. While traditionally science is seen as an individual endeavor (Hagstrom, 1964, Shrum et al., 2007), increasingly scientific projects are group activities, and the groups are growing larger (Adams et al., 2005, Wuchty et al., 2007). While

Size, interdisciplinarity, technology, and the bureaucratization of scientific work

This work on the relation between size and structure begins with Weber’s classic analysis of the characteristics of bureaucratic organization (in contrast to paternalistic or collegial organization), which emphasizes the importance of division of labor, formalization and standardization, hierarchy and decentralization, as well as specialized competence and internal careers, among other aspects of the ideal-type bureaucracy (Weber, 1978). Weber (1978) notes that bureaucratization is associated

Data and methods

To test these questions requires information from a large sample of projects spanning fields and institution types. We will use data from a survey of scientists in the US. The population of interest is scientific projects in the fields of science covered by the Web of Science. Here, field is defined by the field of the journal where the paper is published, as defined by the ISI classification (classified into 22 fields covering all ISI science and social science journals, see Appendix A). This

Results

We begin with a discussion of descriptive statistics (see Table 1). Average project size is 7 members (including an average of almost three non-authors). The mean of interdisciplinarity is 2 fields. About three-quarters of projects have internal division of labor, while 24% and 31% report some external division of labor and existence of a non-author technician, respectively (cf. Leahey and Reikowsky, 2008). Thus, division of labor, including use of technicians, is quite common in contemporary

Implications

Our results suggest that the increasingly common large research groups in science have more bureaucratized work organization. In the following sections, we discuss the potential implications of these changes for scientific training, careers, and authorship.

Conclusions

Scientific work is increasingly “organized”. This provides an opportunity for incorporating organization theory into the study of science (cf. Chompalov et al., 2001, Collins, 1975, Fuchs, 1992). We find that university research groups commonly share the features of bureaucratic structuring, including division of labor, standardization and formalization, hierarchy, and decentralization. In addition, size is a key driver of this bureaucratic structuring, consistent with predictions based on

Acknowledgments

We thank Ed Hackett and Rogers Hollingsworth for encouraging this project with valuable advice. We also thank the participants in conferences and seminars at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, New York; Politecnico di Milano, Department of Business Engineering; Georgia Tech School of Public Policy; University of Bordeaux, IV; Conference on the Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Torino; Korean Advanced Institute of Science and

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