Research organizations and major discoveries in twentieth-century science: a case study of excellence in biomedical research

Abstract

"This paper is a small part of a much larger historical and cross-national research agenda in which the author has been engaged for more than a decade. The agenda has confronted two major problems: (1) How does the institutional environment in which actors are embedded constrain their behavior and (2) how do the structure and culture of organizations facilitate or hamper their innovativeness. The paper addresses the problem of how the structure and culture of research organizations influence the creation of fundamental new knowledge. More specifically, the paper is part of a research project which is concerned with the question of why research organizations varied in their capacity to make major breakthroughs in biomedical science in the twentieth century. The perspectives that have been useful in shaping this project have come from diverse sources - the literatures on national systems of innovation, on organizational innovation, on evolutionary economics, on organizational capabilities, and literatures in the history and sociology of science. The ideas in these literatures have been refined and extended through many dozen historical case studies of major discoveries, which my colleagues and I have conducted in approximately 200 research organizations in twentieth-century Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. The theoretical framework of the paper is used to analyze the structure and culture of the one research organization which had more major breakthroughs in biomedical science than any other in the twentieth century: the relatively small Rockefeller University in New York City. Hopefully, this case study will shed light on the kinds of organizational strategies, structure and culture which facilitate the creation of fundamental new knowledge in very hybrid fields of science." (excerpt)

Der Autor berichtet von Teilergebnissen einer größeren historischen und internationalen Forschungsstudie, in deren Mittelpunkt insbesondere zwei Fragen stehen: Inwieweit ist das institutionelle Umfeld, in welches wissenschaftliche Akteure eingebettet sind, für ihr Verhalten zwingend? In welcher Weise erleichtern oder behindern die Struktur und Kultur von Organisationen ihre Innovationsfähigkeit und die Entstehung neuen Wissens? Der Autor beschäftigt sich im vorliegenden Arbeitspapier speziell mit der Frage, warum Forschungseinrichtungen ihre Fähigkeit veränderten, größere Durchbrüche in der Biomedizin im 20. Jahrhundert zu erreichen. Er untersucht dies anhand einer Fallstudie der relativ kleinen Rockefeller Universität in New York, die jedoch in der Biomedizin größere Durchbrüche erzielte als jede andere Universität. Im Anhang befindet sich ein umfangreiches Namensregister der einschlägigen Wissenschaftler. (ICI)