The establishment of national systems of retrospective research evaluations is one of the most significant of recent changes in the governance of science. In many countries, state attempts to manage public science systems and improve their quality have triggered the institutionalisation of such systems, which vary greatly in their methods of assessing research performance, and consequences for universities. The contributions to this volume discuss, inter alia, the birth and development of research evaluation systems as well as the reasons for their absence in the United States, the responses by universities and academics to these new governance regimes, and their consequences for the production of scientific knowledge.

Recent changes to the funding and governance of higher education and scientific research systems are affecting both the organisation of the sciences and the nature of universities as strategic actors in many countries. Transforming the organisational contexts in which research is carried out has altered the dynamics of scientific change through shifts in the authority relations that influence the development and implementation of organisational strategies. The first part of this book deals with the transformation of universities as strategic organisational actors - in some cases creating them as such - while the second shows how governance and authority shifts are affecting the kinds of research goals being pursued by academics in different public science systems. By bringing together the analysis of organisational change in universities with that of how institutional changes are affecting intellectual innovation in different fields, this volume integrates work in the sociology of organisations, science policy, higher education studies, innovation research and the sociology of science. It is therefore of interest to a wide academic and policy development audience in many countries.

The establishment of national systems of retrospective research evaluations is one of the most significant of recent changes in the governance of science. This volume discusses the birth and development of research evaluation systems as well as the reasons for their absence in the United States. The book combines the latest research and an overview of trends in the changing governance of research. The focus is on institutionalisation processes and impacts on knowledge production.

The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies a novel approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation.
Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations--the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science--and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an important innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches.
By demonstrating that changes in authority relations are field-specific and have field-specific effects on knowledge production, and that these field-specific authority relations do indeed affect the conditions for intellectual innovation, the perspective explored in this book challenges science policy studies to 'bring work back in' to the study of the organisation and governance of the sciences.

Viele sozialwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen beruhen auf Rekonstruktionen von Situationen oder Prozessen. Das Lehrbuch vermittelt anhand zweier Beispieluntersuchungen anwendungsbereites Wissen uber alle Phasen solcher rekonstruierender Untersuchungen und stellt je eine Erhebungs- und eine Auswertungsmethode ausfuhrlich vor. Die Interviewpartner werden als Experten aufgefasst, die uber spezifisches Wissen uber die zu rekonstruierenden Sachverhalte verfugen. Die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse ermoglicht eine systematische Extraktion relevanter Informationen aus den Interviews und ist zugleich offen fur nicht erwartete Befunde. Mit Lernfragen nach jedem Kapitel und einer ubersichtlichen Gliederung eignet sich das Buch als praxisorientierte Einfuhrung."

Das Buch untersucht die Vorteile und die Schwierigkeiten, die Kooperationen unterschiedlicher wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen und Technikbereiche ergeben konnen."