The papers in this special issue examine the content and practice of interactive social science and its developing institutional context. Although the contemporary environment of academic research and funding is relevant, the papers engage with themes which have preoccupied social scientists for...

This article looks at a selection of significant episodes in the history of organizational and management research, and the policies in this field of the UK Social Science Research Council. The episodes begin in the Council's early days in the mid-1960s, and run through its high-profile efforts...

Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) in the public sector are intermediaries between the state and academic research. Principal-agent theory has been used to illuminate the relations between RFOs and state institutions. This paper explores the extension of principal-agent concepts to the study...

Four science policy issues are discussed — intervention, interaction, interdisciplinarity, and international co-operation — in relation to how they affect the processes of making science policy, and have been shaped by them. The principal-agent model introduces to science policy the...

In less than a generation, air conditioning has spread around the world, increasing energy consumption and producing demand where none existed before. How has this come about? This article asks whether transition theories (and the multilevel perspective as an exemplar) are of value in addressing...

This paper is about the part which objects play in scripting the practices and strategies of their users. Goffman uses the concept of script to make sense of the conventional ordering of social interaction and the definition and maintenance of social worlds. As adopted by Latour (1992), Akrich...

This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution...

The literature on sociotechnical transitions and their governance tends to concentrate on the introduction of new technologies and systems of supply. In this paper we seek to extend the scope of debate, introducing aspects of practice theory as a means of also conceptualising the dynamics of...