IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01514766.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Creating and Sustaining a Scientific Specialty : A Sensemaking Sensegiving Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Nicolas Battard

    (ICN Business School, BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - UL - Université de Lorraine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Paul Donnelly

    (TU - Technological University [Dublin])

  • Vincent Mangematin

    (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres, EESC-GEM Grenoble Ecole de Management)

Abstract

How do scientists create a new scientific specialty and sustain it in a fast changing and complex environment? Research on scientific and intellectual movement (Frickel and Gross, 2005) and on boundary work in science (Gieryn, 1999) are particularly suited to study the emergence of new scientific specialties. However, as highlighted by Granqvist and Laurila (2011), although both of these streams acknowledge the influence of indirect pressures, they further describe how individuals demarcate their activity from religion, state and engineering (Gieryn, 1983) than deeply problematise their role in the emergence of a new scientific field. In their study of the emergence of nanotechnology in the US, Granqvist and Laurila (2011) use a framing approach in order to describe the influence of futurist visions on the emergence of a new field. Frames help events to be meaningful and ‘function to guide to organise experience and guide action (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614). Frames and the very related process of sensemaking (Fiss and Hirsh, 2005) have been used to explain how individuals order their environment in emerging contexts (Granqvist and Laurila, 2011) but little attention has been paid to the full process of ordering and influencing the environment – described by Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) as sensemaking and sensegiving. Although sensegiving is important in the process of boundary shaping (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009), it has been neglected by the literature of emerging scientific fields. In such context, creating and sustaining a new scientific activity, scientists face numerous challenges such as gathering funding, publishing valid scientific outcomes, enrolling (Latour, 1987) and training new PhD students, being visible and recognised towards both the scientific community and the funding agencies, being legitimate and the like.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicolas Battard & Paul Donnelly & Vincent Mangematin, 2012. "Creating and Sustaining a Scientific Specialty : A Sensemaking Sensegiving Approach," Post-Print hal-01514766, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01514766
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01514766. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.