Institutional persistence and the material transformation of the US national labs: The curious story of the advent of the Advanced Photon Source

The 1990s saw a radical shift in the US investment in large-scale projects along with a shift in the rationale for US support of such projects and the national laboratories which host them. Previously, the largest projects were for the esoteric field of high energy and justifications drew on the Cold War priorities of national security and the cultural benefits of a free society. Starting with Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source, a materials science accelerator, all this changed. From this time forward those promoting large-scale projects instead pointed to more practical considerations in line with the post-Cold-War moral economy valuing entrepreneurship and measurable utility. It might seem that change resulted from a direct competition between high energy physicists and materials scientists that was mediated by high-level policy makers in favor of the latter. This case study reveals a much more telling and nuanced story in which science policy was shaped at every turn by the need of the US national laboratories to adapt to a changing social, political, economic, technological and scientific context amidst the underlying desire for institutional persistence. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.