The use by biologists and engineers of non-specialist information sources and its relation to their social involvement

Earlier investigations showed that many academics obtain information pertaining their own field of science from the general massmedia, such as newspapers. Who are those scientists? Is there a relation between the social engagement and the use of non-specialist information sources? We investigated the social engagement of biologists and engineers in correlation to their use of general massmedia in the Netherlands. Biologists find their work social significant, most of engineers do not. Many biologists are members of non-specialist organizations, subscribe to non-specialist journals about science and participate in non-scietific activities related to their work. Most engineers do not. Many members of both groups (biologists and engineers) use non-specialist informations sources like general science magazines and national newspapers to obtain information about their own field of science. And most biologists and engineers did so to obtain information about new developments in their own field and in related fields. We did not find any correlation between the social engagement of scientists and their use of non-specialist information sources. Most scientists use them.     

Electronic Health Records reshaping the socio-technical practices in Long-Term Care of older persons

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in Long-Term Care (LTC) of older persons are expected to improve resident-centered care by reducing ambiguities in information coordination between LTC workers and organisations. While there are research findings concerning such intended outcomes, we are interested in analysing what sort of other, possibly unanticipated outcomes the use of EHRs in LTC may produce. We argue that the scrutiny of EHRs in LTC requires an understanding of their implementation as socio-technical processes, whereby EHRs are perceived as performative artifacts of LTC rather than technological tools or passive objects. While EHRs have been extensively studied in health-care settings, few studies have concentrated on eldercare settings. We aim to fill these gaps by drawing from a qualitative interview study (n = 25) conducted with Finnish LTC workers in 2018. Using thematic content analysis, we analyse how LTC workers negotiate and interpret socio-technical practices of EHR-use at their workplace. Our findings suggest that, along with improving workers’ accountability, EHRs are also considered disorganised, unrefined and burdening, thereby disrupting both the intended effects of EHRs and the continuity and the nuanced characteristics of caring.     

Academics’ “ambidextrous behavior” and doctoral science mentoring practices

Although academics (academic scientists) are the vanguards in mentoring doctoral science students, emergent science policies increasingly push academics to venture into industrial science work with industrial scientists. This puts academics in a situation of heightened role strain given that academic life is already exacting in terms of teaching, research, and service. Now, academics have to balance between intrinsic and extrinsic demands. In this paper, we examine how academics’ involvement in academic and in industrial science activities impacts how academic scientists mentor doctoral students. We introduce the idea of academics’ “ambidextrous behavior” and apply it in three scientific activities, namely: (1) formally collaborating in academic and in industrial research projects, (2) informally networking with academic and with industrial scientists, and (3) producing patents and publications. We test the hypothesis that academics, who exhibit ambidextrous behavior, manifest mentoring practices that differ from colleagues who do not exhibit such behavior. We adduce evidence from a face-to-face survey of 104 East Asian chemical science professors, and analyze data using principal component and regression analyses. Our results provide insights on how academics’ involvement in both academic and industrial science activities shapes the way doctoral students are mentored. Our work also exemplifies how the concept of ambidextrous behavior can be applied in examining aspects of scientific apprenticeship in academia at a time when knowledge production increasingly takes place at the intersecting sectors of Etzkowitz’s (Res Policy 27(8):823–833, 1998) Triple Helix science (i.e., academia, government, and industry).     

Professional and ethical dissent : Individual, corporate and social responsibility

Professional and ethical dissent by scientists and engineers is common; in a recent study 10% of engineers surveyed had objected to some work or practices in their organizations. The organizational world has begun to respond, albeit slowly, by recognizing that dissent is legitimate, even beneficial, and by providing mechanisms for the examination and resolution of it. Growing legal protection for dissenters supports this spirit of organizational renovation, although the law unfortunately relies on fairly slow administrative case processing. These trends offer a great opportunity for progress in the next decade.     

Articulating care and responsibility in design: A study on the reasoning processes guiding health innovators' ‘care-making’ practices

This article explores how health innovation designers articulate care and responsibility when designing new health technologies. Towards this end, we draw on Tronto's ethic of care framework and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) scholarship to analyse interviews with Canadian health innovators (n = 31). Our findings clarify how respondents: 1) direct their attention to needs and ways to improve care; 2) mobilise their skill set to take care of problems; 3) engage in what we call ‘care-making’ practices by prioritising key material qualities; and 4) operationalise responsiveness to caregivers and care-receivers through user-centred design. We discuss the inclusion of health innovation designers within the care relationship as ‘care-makers’ as well as the tensions underlying their ways of caring and their conflicting responsibilities.     

A manufacturing system design framework for computer aided industrial engineering

This paper describes a framework that formalizes within a concurrent engineering approach the key steps in the process of manufacturing systems design. Many of the functions performed by industrial engineers, ergonomists and process planners are included in the framework and may be used iteratively as design detail is progressively added. The paper describes the framework and prototype software, indicates how the framework is evaluated and illustrates how a workplace may be designed. The emphasis of the work is the design of human centred manual assembly systems. The overall objective of the work is to improve the process of manufacturing systems design.     

MAKING VISIBLE

This article analyses recent photographic practices that make visible underlying realities faced by Western societies today as they struggle to reconcile contradictions between their policies on race, immigration and ethnicity and the quest for an integrated national identity. The main case studies are drawn from the works of Mohamed Bourouissa and Tobias Zielony. The article demonstrates how their photographic projects confront the logic of social and cultural marginalisation of the immigrant communities, which often overlaps with their spatial consignment to urban peripheries. By combining reality and fiction, symbolism and documentation, these projects offer alternatives to the modes of representation available in photojournalism, as well as re-connecting with the genre of street photography.     

The Impact of Cultural Norms on Women*

Women student engineers' and professors' classroom experiences, especially their everyday interactions with men student engineers and professors, can be negative. This ethnographic study of the discourse used by professors and students during a sophomore design class demonstrates that some women's difficulties are the result of cultural features of engineering that are only rarely open to redefinition by women. In spite of many engineering educators' sincere commitments to improving women's experiences in engineering education, these cultural features diminish the successes of reform-minded engineering education. I detail how discourse in whole-class and teamwork settings indicated the cultural norms of engineering talk and how this discourse reinforced traditional practices that were only rarely open to revision. Also, I comment on the use of ordeals in this classroom. My findings suggest that engineering education must change before inclusion of women is realized. In particular, I suggest the changes needed are complex and include 1) more communication about the ways that cultural norms impact women and other marginalized groups, 2) forums where participants can speak openly without fear of retaliation, and 3) attention to changing those policies and practices that send narrow messages about who engineers are and what engineering might be.     

Square Scientists and the Excluded Middle

The historiography on American science and technology in the 1970s is still small, yet there are already three distinct strands of work: studies of countercultural scientists, portrayed as enacting or advocating ‘groovy’ research; studies of the politically polarized debate pitting conservative and libertarian ‘cornucopianists’ against environmentalists and modelers forecasting resource scarcity; and studies of the early commercialization of technoscience (e.g., biotechnology) that took off in the 1980s. Left out, I argue, are a class of ‘square scientists’ with little sympathy for the counterculture, and yet open to (even eager for) a new kind of science oriented to the same problems activists said they wanted science to solve: pollution, mass transit, housing, biomedicine, disability technologies, pedagogical machines, etc. Square scientists at places like NASA and Texas Instruments adapted military‐industrial‐academic templates to a wide variety of socially ‘relevant’ topics in the 1970s. Yet square scientists still looked to the military‐industrial complex for allies, rather than to countercultural colleagues. This potential middle ground remained excluded – contributing, in large part, to the failure of schemes to reorient US R&D to civilian social problems, and to the invisibility of the squares in today's historical accounts.     

Identity and publication in non-university settings: academic co-authorship and collaboration

Increased collaboration between researchers working in university, industry, and governmental settings is changing the landscape of academic science. Traditional models of the interaction between these sectors, such as the triple helix concept, draw clear distinctions between academic and non-academic settings and actors. This study surveyed scientists (n = 469) working outside of university settings who published articles indexed in the Web of Science about their modes of collaboration, perceptions about publishing, workplace characteristics, and information sources. We study the association between these variables, and use text analysis to examine the roles, duties, sites, topics, and workplace missions among non-university based authors. Our analysis shows that 72% of authors working in non-university settings who collaborate and publish with other scientists self-identify as academics. Furthermore, their work life resembles that of those working in university settings in that the majority report doing fundamental research in government research organizations and laboratories. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, this research suggests that peer-reviewed publications are much more dominated by non-university academics than we previously thought and that collaboration as co-authors on academic publications is not likely to be a primary conduit for the transfer of scientific knowledge between academe and industry.

     

The growth of chinese scientific research, 1973–84

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), scientific work came to a halt in China. Universities closed, primary and secondary school education shut down, and intellectuals (including scientists and engineers) were sent to the countryside or to factories to work. The effects of the Cultural Revolution are reflected in China's output of scientific literature. In 1973, for example, only one Chinese paper appeared in any of the world's 2300 most central journals covered by theScience Citation Index. After restrictive policies were loosened, however, scientific papers grew exponentially. By 1982, only six years after the Cultural Revolution ended, Chinese scientists produced 932 papers. This exponential growth of papers leveled off at this point and the number of papers appearing in the core 2300 journal stood at approximately 1000 in 1983 and 1984.     

The Creative Experience in Engineering Practice: Implications for Engineering Education

This research came about as an outgrowth of mounting concern among industrial leaders about the impact of traditional engineering education on the creative potential of future engineers. As there is little agreement on creativity or how to teach it, we chose to begin the study without assuming a theoretical stance about engineering creativity. Instead, we started with a search for first-hand information about creativity and the creative process experienced by working engineers. This phenomenological research paradigm is a way to describe a complex, dynamic experience without prior assumptions, the results of which can then be used to generate theory or develop a structure directly from the data. This approach has similarities to an expert system development, in which the knowledge and skills of an expert are gathered and processed to develop an understanding of the system or phenomenon. Eight professional engineers from the southeastern United States were selected by peer nomination as examples of (expert) creative engineers. They were trained in different areas of engineering (eg. chemical, mechanical, industrial) and worked in organizations ranging from large international consulting firms to small regional businesses. These subjects were interviewed about their experiences in doing creative work and their thoughts about the creative process, including the impact of relevant educational experiences. These interviews were audio-recorded and subjected to a phenomenological data analytic procedure, which extracted the experiential themes and educational issues. The experiential themes involved in the creative process of working engineers clustered as

• ? Desire and fulfillment (motivation),
• ? Autonomy and support (environment),
• ? Openness and knowledge (tools), and
• ? Engrossment and connection (process).

This paper discusses the implications and application of these themes for curricular innovation in engineering education.     

Six case studies of international collaboration in science

Summary This study, based on two empirical investigations undertaken in Croatia on samples of 320 eminent and 840 young researchers, shows a comparison between the professional values/norms of these groups (normative level of research ethics), as well as a comparison (of perceptions) about the frequency of ethically questionable and unacceptable behaviour of researchers in Croatian research institutions (behavioural level of ethos). Science ethics includes a core of cognitive and social standards about which there is relatively high consensus in both groups of researchers. Their cognitive standards correspond to epistemological realism with an accent on objective, reliable, measurable and precise new knowledge. Their basic social values include the broadest social responsibility, responsibility towards colleagues and students, and professionality in relation with funders and/or clients. Thus, research ethos is a combination of traditional cognitive norms and new socially-engaged values. However, research ethics is not a static or homogeneous set of professional values and norms. Young scientists value cognitive norms relating to basic research lower, but rank some cognitive standards more closely linked with applied empirical research higher. Considering the social dimensions of research ethics, young researchers rate traditional academic values of collegiality, communality and autonomy less important than do eminent scientists, but they hold professionalism and establishing research networks more important. As expected, cognitive and social values and norms are not strictly followed on the level of professional practice. In their everyday professional life eminent and young researchers experience particular questionable research practices that could harm research work and results, and impair collegial relations in science, more often than they encounter breaking social norms that harm or even threaten participants in and users of scientific professional work. Differences in perceiving the incidence of certain kinds of questionable behaviour between the eminent and the young may be attributed to their different professional position and experience.     

Scientists' performance and consolidation of research teams in Biology and Biomedicine at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research

Summary Empirical evidence is given on how membership in a consolidated, well-established research team provides researchers with some competitive advantage as compared to their colleagues in non-consolidated teams. Data were obtained from a survey of researchers ascribed to the 'Biology and Biomedicine' area of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research, as well as from their curricula vitae. One quarter of the scientists work as members of teams in the process of consolidation. Our findings illustrate the importance, for the development and consolidation of research teams, of the availability of a minimum number of researchers with a permanent position and of a minimum number of support staff and non-staff personnel (mainly post-doctoral fellows). Consolidation of research teams has a clear influence on the more academic-oriented quantitative indicators of the scientific activity of individuals. Researchers belonging to consolidated teams perform quantitatively better than their colleagues in terms of the number of articles published in journals covered in the Journal Citation Reports, but not in terms of the impact of these publications. Consolidation favours publication, but not patenting, and it also has a positive effect on the academic prestige of scientists and on their capacity to train new researchers. It does not significantly foster participation in funded R&D projects, nor does it influence the establishment of international collaborations. Impact is influenced to a remarkable degree by seniority and professional background, and is significantly greater for young scientists who have spent time abroad at prestigious research laboratories.     

Social Dimensions of Engineering Design: Observations from Mudd Design Workshop III

This paper reports on the Mudd Design Workshop III held at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in May 2001 to provide a forum for engineers and social scientists acting as designers, researchers, and educators, to explore social and societal issues in and for engineering design education. Sessions were devoted to social and systems issues and themes in design; collaboration in design; and pedagogical and institutional issues in design education. Major emergent themes included the need for dialogue about the social dimensions of engineering design to extend across entire college and university faculties, the use of design to enhance the study of values and ethics in undergraduate curricula, the importance of the framing of design problems, and the pedagogical choices made in design courses. Before leaving, participants made commitments to work toward change at least in their own environments.     

Internet technology and the epistemic strategies of scientists in post-apartheid South Africa: Race as a decisive factor

Internet technology is an indispensable tool in scientific research. Prior research confirms the importance of professional activities, professional networks, scientific collaboration and the internet among scientists, academics and researchers. In other words, professional activities, networks and collaboration are relevant epistemic strategies in both the short- and long-term objectives of knowledge production. Variations in these strategies are possible across different categories such as race and gender. Involving academics and scientists (n = 204) from sampled institutions in post-apartheid South Africa, this study examines how the use of technology by people in different racial categories influences their epistemic strategies of professional activities, networks and scientific collaboration.     

Die Regeln der Eisenhüttenkunde

The ways in which the sciences have been delineated and categorized throughout history provide insights into the formation, stabilization, and establishment of scientific systems of knowledge. The Dresdener school’s approach for explaining and categorizing the genesis of the engineering disciplines is still valid, but needs to be complemented by further-reaching methodological and theoretical reflections. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice is applied to the question of how individual agents succeed in influencing decisively a discipline’s changing object orientation, institutionalisation and self-reproduction. Through the accumulation of social, cultural and economic capital, they succeed in realising their own organisational ideas and scientific programs. Key concepts for the analysis include the struggle for power and resources, monopolies of interpretation, and the degree of autonomy. A case study from the Aachener Technische Hochschule shows that the consolidation of ferrous metallurgy can be conceived as a symbolical struggle between Fritz Wüst, professor for ferrous metallurgy, and the German Iron and Steel Institute, leading to a construction of a system of differences in which scientists accepted being scientists rather than entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs accepted becoming entrepreneurs and renounced science.     

Student Learning and Gender

Using a qualitative research design and an anthropological theory of learning, I studied a sophomore design class to investigate how teams of women and men student engineers acquired and shared scientific and technical knowledge while developing solutions to real-world problems for government and industry clients. The course provided a forum where women and men students not only learned technical information critical to their project, but also learned how to function as engineers on a team. The design class improved some women students' experiences, but these opportunities did not exist for all women in the class or in all settings on the campus. In spite of its notable successes, some facets of the organization of the course, its implementation by the faculty, and students' beliefs that their work was “basically useless” detracted from collaborative aims. These findings suggest classroom practices to create and maintain an environment where all students can participate and learn.     

Materials and methods of construction to resist the effects of cyclones

Failures of thousands of dwellings and that of a large number of engineered and non-engineered buildings and other industrial structures, caused by cyclones every year are of serious concern to professional engineers, scientists and researchers. The quality of common building materials used in the coastal regions of India such as stone and brick masonry, timber, steel and reinforced cement concerte, tiles, AC and other roofing sheets and also the effective methods of construction adopted, significantly affect the strength of structures in resisting severe cyclones. This paper discusses the common deficiencies on the properties of the materials used for walls and roofing of housing and other industrial structures, in resisting cyclonic wind forces and the ineffective construction practices leading to poor strength of overall structure. The paper also suggests some of the simple techniques to improve the cyclonic resistance of the structures.     

The importance of human relationships in scientific productivity

Fifty Brazilian scientists working in life sciences were interviewed in order to explore reasons of bursts and falls in their scientific productivity. Scientists recognize specific periods of time of their career during which they are more productive. Bursts of productivity are influenced mainly by human relationships and, to a lower extent, by material conditions (equipment, grants, etc), time dedicated to work and reasons linked to the kind of work carried out. The most productive scientists tend to attribute more importance to human relations than their colleagues with lower productivity scores. Some possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.