This paper deals with the methodological problem of how to include material influences in comparative studies of research processes. Both Actor-Network-Theory and ‚Mangle-of-Practice‘ confirm convincingly enough that materiality must be taken into account in empirical investigations of...

Social entities create institutional frameworks, i.e. internal systems of rules which govern (but do not control) the actions of their members. Both scientific communities and scientific organisations are social entities whose institutional frameworks include rules promoting internal...

Under conditions of an increasing scarcity of reviewer time, a ‘remote peer review’ of research organisations — conducted without meetings between assessors or with the assessed academics at their institution — might be an easier and cheaper solution. This paper explores the impact of...

The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion about links between epistemic properties and institutional conditions for research by providing an exploratory analysis of such links featured by projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Our analysis identifies epistemic properties...

Im Zuge der Transformation des ostdeutschen Wissenschaftssystems sahen sich viele Wissen-schaftlerInnen der Industrieforschung und der anwendungsnahen Forschung der Akademie der Wissenschaften damit konfrontiert, ihre Forschung trotz teilweise positiver Evaluation nicht in den bisherigen...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theory of organisational learning (OL) by developing a middle range theory of how research institutes learn. Because of a research institute’s specific division of labour in the organisation-environment interactions, the means of mediation between...

Gegenstand der Studie ist die Veränderung der Anwendungsbezüge der ostdeutschen außeruniversitären Grundlagenforschung (GF) im Gefolge des Institutionentransfers. Das forschungspolitische System der DDR praktizierte eine durchgehende hierarchische Steuerung mit einer geringen formalen...

Although ‘research income’ is one of the most common indicators for assessing research quality, its validity has never been systematically investigated. The conditions under which Australian and German physicists obtain external funding were analysed in a comparative qualitative study. The...

Peer review is a practice of research assessment where a researcher's work is evaluated by colleagues working in the same field on similar topics. Since interdisciplinary research is a new synthesis of expertise, the problem arises that peers in that sense do not exist. The aim of the paper is...

Interviews with scientists about the content and reward of collaborations, and classification of contributions of co-authors and scientists cited in acknowledgements, identified six types of research collaborations with distinct patterns of rewards; showed that about half of the collaborations...