Coping with Trouble

Uwe Schimank, Andreas Stucke (Editors) Coping with Trouble How Science Reacts to Political Disturbances of Research Conditions Campus Verlag • Frankfurt St. Martin’s Press • New York For information in the Western Hemisphere write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1994 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coping with trouble: how science reacts to political disturbances of research conditions / Uwe Schimank, Andreas Stucke, editors, p. cm. ISBN 0-312-12240-3 (St. Martin’s Press) 1. Research - Social aspects. 2. Research - Political aspects. 3. Research - Government policy. 4. Research - Political aspects - Case studies. 5. Research - Political aspects - Germany. I. Schimank, Uwe, II. Stucke, Andreas. Q180.55.S62C67 1994 507.2-dc20 94-14219 CIP Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Coping with trouble: how science reacts to political disturbances of research conditions / [Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln]. Uwe Schimank; Andreas Stucke (eds.). - Frankfurt/Main; New York: Campus Verlag; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994 ISBN 3-593-35020-3 (Campus) ISBN 0-312-12240-3 (St. Martin’s Press) NE: Schimank, Uwe [Hrsg.]; Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung <Köln> All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © 1994 Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt/Main Cover Design: Atelier Warminski, Büdingen Typesetting: C. Lehmann, Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany Contents Coping with Trouble as a Complex Constellation of Political and Research Actors: Introducing a Theoretical Perspective Uwe Schimank and Andreas Stucke 1 How German Professors Handled Increasing Scarcity of Resources for Their Research: A Three-Level Actor Constellation Uwe Schimank 35 Political Disturbances of Biomedical Research in Great Britain and the United States: How Political Choice Is Translated into Scientific Behavior Dietmar Braun 61 Conflict Avoidance within a System of Centralized State-Science Relations: The Agricultural Research Sector in France Gerhard Krauss 97 Interference between Scientists and Research Policy in a French Research Institution: The Case of the CNRS Christine Musselin and Catherine Vilkas 127 Academy of Sciences in Crisis: A Case Study of a Fruitless Struggle for Survival Renate Mayntz 163 German Unification as a Steamroller? The Institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in the Period of Transformation Hans-Georg Wolf 189 German National Research Centers under Political Pressure: Interference between Different Levels of Actors Andreas Stucke 233 Biotechnological Research in Germany: Problems of Political Regulation and Public Acceptance Raimund Hasse and Bernhard Gill 253 If People Become Afraid of Your Research Methods: Conflicts over Research Reactors in Berlin and Munich Jochen Gläser, Bettina Becker, Anne Goedicke, Thomas Hager, Marion Höppner, Astrid Karl and Grit Laudel 293 Space Policy in West Germany 1945-1965: Strategic Action and Actor Network Dynamics Johannes Weyer 333 A Theoretical Examination of the Cases: Why Coping Is Often Difficult and Defective Uwe Schimank and Andreas Stucke 357 Contributors 401 Coping with Trouble as a Complex Constellation of Political and Research Actors: Introducing a Theoretical Perspective Uwe Schimank and Andreas Stucke In this introductory chapter we will offer a theoretical frame of reference for all of the contributions to this book. We will do this in three respects. We will begin by describing the growing practical and - somewhat neglected - theoretical relevance of the topic of “Coping with Trouble.” Then we will clarify the main variables which constitute the topic - trouble and coping - and present an actor-theoretical frame of reference focussing on the aggregate effects of coping within complex constellations of actors. Finally, we will characterize the research approach guiding the organization of this book as a search for a “grounded theory of the middle range,” and provide a preview of the case studies to follow. Thus, this introduction sets the stage for detailed empirical studies. It does not anticipate their findings - we have saved that “harvest” for the conclusion. This chapter does, however, develop theoretical concepts which we hope will enable the reader to perceive familiar empirical phenomena in a new light. 1 Political and Theoretical Relevance of the Topic Anticipating the more detailed discussion in the following section, the kinds of trouble we are concerned with here are violations of certain vital interests of state-financed researchers or research institutes1 by political action. Many 1 We exclude industrial research from our consideration, even where it is mainly financed by the state. This is certainly not to deny that industrial researchers are faced with trou ble, too. 8 Schimank and Stucke contemporary examples come to mind Quickly. One kind of trouble is certain ly the situation which John Ziman has portrayed in reference to the United Kingdom as “science in a ’steady state’” (Ziman 1987). The money for the promotion of research which had been provided Quite generously by the state for more than two decades became increasingly scarce during the 1970s and 1980s in many of the major Western countries. A “period of affluence” turned into a “period of scarcity.” Attempts to establish more rigorous evaluations of the Quality of the research promoted institutionally or by project grants were typical of this phase, most visibly in Great Britain. No matter how use ful such evaluations may be from the point of view of the state, for the re searchers and institutes involved these new conditions of their resource acQui sition were obviously often troublesome. Another freQuent source of trouble was political demands to increase the societal utility of scientific research by directing it toward areas of vital con cern for important societal groups. Environmental problems, or the develop ment of technologies needed by major domestic industries suddenly had top priority. The trouble implied in this was aptly described under the heading of “science as a commodity” (Gibbons/ Wittrock 1985), which means the dan ger of research becoming increasingly instrumentalized for the realization of very narrow or even - in the case of military research, for example - dubious societal interests. The dependence of researchers and institutes upon increas ingly scarce resources from the state made them increasingly vulnerable to such pressures. Thirdly, in some fields, research faces trouble or might be facing it soon because of political regulations forbidding specific scientifically promising research themes or methods. The most spectacular recent cases have been in certain subfields of genetic engineering. But the restrictions imposed upon empirical social research by data-protection laws, for example, also hamper research. Again, as with the other types of trouble, there might be - and often are - very understandable societal and political concerns motivating these political interventions. As private citizens wanting to protect, say, their own health or privacy, even the affected researchers themselves might be in favor of such political measures. But for the researchers’ work, they constitute trouble - and it is only this fact that is of concern to us here. Finally, there is a type of trouble which results from fundamental institu tional rearrangements of research institutes or even the research system as a whole. The ongoing transformations of the societies in Eastern Europe serve Theoretical Perspective 9 as a particularly dramatic illustration of comprehensive change throughout the system. The rapid political, economical, social, and cultural changes oc curring in these societies confront their research systems with entirely new demands and expectations. A very special subcase of this is the unification of Germany, because the entire society of the former German Democratic Republic was integrated into the totally different societal structure of the Federal Republic of Germany, with strong repercussions in the research sys tems of both the East and the West. For all of these types of trouble - resource scarcity, political instrumentali- zation, political regulation, and institutional rearrangements - countless stories from the history of scientific research in different countries could be told. Trouble, and coping with trouble, are nothing new. What may be new about the current and, as may be expected, future situation is the cumulation and interrelation of at least the first three kinds of trouble. This estimation be comes plausible within a long-term view of the development of the research system of modem societies. Since the Renaissance, the differentiation of scientific research as an autonomous societal subsystem has emphasized the character of scientific knowledge as an end in itself. Serving at first mainly as a legitimatory device to ward off interference by the church into the production of scientific knowl edge, it later became more useful for defending research autonomy against extrascientific demands from the state, the military, and industry. The greater the researchers’ and research institutes’ autonomy

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