Paul K. Hoch

MIGRATION AND THE DENATIONALIZATION OF SCIENCE

Our aim in this paper is to theorize the relationship of international migration to the more general internationalization of scientific disciplines and specialties. We take account of the existing literature on intellectual migration, but draw especially on our case studies of the spread to English-speaking countries of “German” theoretical physics and the Vienna Circle’s “unified science.” The most obvious role for scientific migration is that of an import-export mechanism: ideas are carried by migrants from one place to another, resulting in their presence in both places. This simple model is insufficient to describe the actual complexities, either practical or conceptual. We consider conceptual issues first, especially those involved in the idea of internationalization.

Institutional mobility and the management of technology and science

Using a theory which views scientzjc or technological innovation as generated from a re-synthesis of prevzously existzng knowledges and techniques—in general obtained zn various different institutional environments, both inside and outside the firm—policies are proposed for optimizing the mobility (and, hence, interactions) of the carriers of these knowledges and techniques.

New UK interdisciplinary research centres: reorganization for new generic technology

This article considers the various strategic and organizational problems connected with the UKs introduction of university-based Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IRCs) to develop the knowledge bases underlying key new generic technologies—such as biotechnology and high temperature superconductivity. The new IRCs are set against the context of the UKs declining economic competitiveness and the UKs present rationalization of higher education, including the further concentration of university scientific research in fewer departments and centres. The origins of the IRC model are examined and related to similar cantres now being introduced in the USA. Mobility between the IRCs, university departments and participating firms is seen as a key issue, as is the question of whether a balance of resources can be maintained. A sensitive issue is whether or not the sort of strategic management of research resources envisioned will result in long-term distortions of organizational decelopment—and of the overall i...

Technology analysis as ancestral ritual and power politics: Essay review

John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing W. Aspray London and Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1990 337, pp.,

Flight into self absorption and xenophobia

35 (US). Science, Technology and Socxety: new directions A. J. Webster London und Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1991, 181 pp.,£35 hbk and £9.99 pbk.

Forced Migration and Scientific Change: The Vienna Circle in the United States and Empirical Research Methods in Sociology

The year after 1933 saw a remarkable growth and transformation of physics in Britain and America. Following the rise of a Nazi government in Berlin, over a hundred German-speaking and predominantly Jewish physicists emigrated to other countries, especially to the English speaking ones. Their reception in Britain and America was to be strongly influenced by the disparity between the then predominantly experimental physics – center on Rutherfords nuclear physics school at Cambridge and Lawrence Braggs crystallography at Manchester – and the quantum theoretical work done in the main German center of Gottingen, Munich and Berlin, with which many of them has been previously associated.