The article traces the origin and development of the concept of social skills in first and foremost American academic discourse. As soon as the concept of social skills was coined, the concern for people lacking such skills started and has been on the increase ever since (now sharing public attention with related concepts such as self-control,…

Bioinformatics--the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science--is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised…

Research agendas and academic evaluation are inevitably linked. By means of economic incentives, promotion, research funding, and reputation academic evaluation is a powerful influence on the production of knowledge; moreover, it is often conceived as a universal instrument without consideration of the context in which it is applied. Evaluation…

Since the mid-twentieth century, the 'Scientific Revolution' has arguably occupied centre stage in most Westerners', and many non-Westerners', conceptions of science history. Yet among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to…

Are universities able to operate as strategic actors? An organisational sociology based approach supported by a comparative field research project identifies three types of social, cultural and cognitive processes that play a decisive role in building and implementing local capabilities required to mobilise a strategic capacity. The paper…

For over 50 years, "Minerva" has been one of the leading independent journals in the study of "science, learning and policy". Its pages have much to say about the origins and conduct of the "intellectual Cold War", the defence of academic freedom, the emergence of modernization theory, and pioneering strategies in the…

Structure and organization seems to be at the root of many of the questions raised about institutional behaviour; however, with respect to research on university capacity building, few studies have examined research organizational problems, particularly in developing countries. This study investigates academic reactions to the structure and…

The paper introduces a concept of a "negotiated space" to describe university researchers' attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external…

This paper investigates the impact of changing science policy doctrines on the development of an academic field, working life research. Working life research is an interdisciplinary field of study in which researchers and stakeholders collaborated to produce relevant knowledge. The development of the field, we argue, was both facilitated and…

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role…

Realising the societal gains from publicly funded health and medical research requires a model for a reflexive evaluation precedent for the societal impact of research. This research explores UK Research Excellence Framework evaluators' values and opinions and assessing societal impact, prior to the assessment taking place. Specifically, we…

Between 1906 and 1909 the biologist Ronald Ross and the classicist W.H.S. Jones pioneered interdisciplinary research in biology and history in advancing the claim that malaria had been crucial in the decline of golden-age Greece (fourth century BCE). The idea had originated with Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the importance of…

Ambiguity surrounding the effect of external engagement on academic research has raised questions about what motivates researchers to collaborate with third parties. We argue that what matters for society is research that can be absorbed by users. We define "openness" as a willingness by researchers to make research more usable by…

Talcott Parsons is often identified as the "master" of mid-twentieth-century social theory. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, his writings were hardly any longer discussed, but mostly neglected. "The American University" is Parsons's last monograph published during his lifetime. On the basis of extensive archival research, this…

Science and technology influence international affairs by many different mechanisms. Both create new issues, risks and uncertainties. Advances in science alert the international community to new issues and risks. New technological capabilities transform war, diplomacy, commerce, intelligence, and investment. This paper identifies six basic…