The research area of institutional sociology of science is supervised by Dr. Mikhail Sokolov, the Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Sociology. Two research projects are currently run within this broad approach at the University.
The first one is a comparative study of the political economy of the American, British, German, Russian and French science. Institutional organization theory (DiMaggio, Meyer), information economics (Spence, Stiglitz), social network theory (White, Burt), science and technology studies (Woolgar , Collins, Shapin) and microsociological approach of interaction order (Goffman, Garfinkel) are applied in this study to explain how financing and control are distributed in the academic world and how academic status emerges. This study is conducted jointly by the STS Center research fellows and Katerina Guba (EUSP), Tatjana Zimenkova (Bielefeld University), Maria Safonova (Higher School of Economics), Natalia Forrat (Northwestern University, Chicago) and Sofia Tchouikina (Clermont-Ferrand University).
The second project deals with the citation behaviour under different cultural conditions. Citation indices are now among the main tools for evaluating intellectual input. Still, the opponents of such approach often point out that references cannot be viewed as equal to universal recognition currency as citation practices vary substantially from one national academic culture to another, from one discipline to another, etc. Moreover, references are also subject to strategic manipulations by editorial boards of academic journals and by authors themselves. And despite the fact that these ideas have now become a commonplace, there has been little attempt to prove this position and no attempt to make a systematic description of how different citation cultures are organized. This study is conducted jointly by the Center staff and Katerina Guba (EUSP).
Материалы проекта
Михаил Соколов «Истоки интернациональной «видимости»: почему ученые из некоторых европейских стран публикуются и цитируются больше других»