Welcome to the pages of the Chair of Organizational Sociology!
Here you can find the latest news:
New Paper published:
This paper examines cultural innovations in German public theaters using North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) as the most populated region as an example. Though existing analyses, including social structure-centered audience research, have focused on the demand side, diagnosing a steady decline and aging of the cultural audience, our analysis addresses the supply side, especially the number of premieres and first performances and their adoption into the repertoire. The results show that recent efforts by public theaters to increase both the number of venues and the number of plays on the municipal or regional level have not been sufficient to stabilize the declining audience. Too few new plays are scheduled, even fewer of which make it into the repertoire. Our results suggest that theaters can retain their capability for renewal only by placing significantly more new plays and attracting new audience members. With regard to such renewal, decentralized competition as a characteristic of the NRW theater landscape seems a favorable institutional context.
Two-dimensional mapping of university profiles in research
There are size-leveling indexes used to demonstrate profiling of entities in different fields, such as the Activity Index (AI) or the Index of Relative Specialization (RESP). Concentrating on the RESP, we consider German state universities as entities and their academic disciplines as fields. While it is common to illustrate several RESP values concurrently using heatmaps, we show that an interpretation of such heatmaps without further information can be misleading. Therefore, we introduce a weight for each RESP value that represents the fraction of a field at a university. Those weights correspond to RESP values that are uniquely identifiable by field and university, resulting in tuples of RESP values and their weights. We introduce a new kind of heatmap that not only illustrates RESP values but represents their corresponding weights. Those new heatmaps are less misleading than classical ones. Our introduction of a new class of heatmaps improves heatmap representation, especially for longitudinal RESP data without the need for additional tables to show the extra information.
Fuchs, J.E., Heinze T. Two-dimensional mapping of university profiles in research (2022).
Political upheavals and their influence on the development of mathematics - Wuppertal scientists receive 650,000 euros sponsorship
How did mathematics develop in Germany between the years 1920 and 1960 under the impression of political upheavals? Professors Dr. Volker Remmert and Dr. Thomas Heinze at the University of Wuppertal are investigating this central question in a new joint project. They are receiving a total of 650,000 euros in funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Click here for the BUW press release.
National and organizational patterns of Nobel laureate careers in physiology/medicine, physics, and chemistry
This paper examines the distribution of Nobel laureates in Physiology/Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry across countries and research organizations. We provide basic information about where future laureates received their education and/or conducted their research, then present heat maps depicting country and organizational specialization patterns. In addition, we identify the organizational ultra-elite in science: universities and research institutes that show continuously above-average numbers of future laureates, typically in one career phase. Furthermore, we identify those universities and research institutes that have undergone considerable growth (or decline) in their capabilities for highly innovative research. Also, we compare country-specific profiles with those at the organizational level. Our findings are interpreted in the light of findings from comparative-historical studies.
Conference contribution to the 10. EU-SPRI conference (10.6.2021)
Arlette Jappe and Thomas Heinze have contributed a paper to the 10. conference of the "European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation" (EU-SPRI), 10.-11.6.2021. Title and abstract follow here.
Effects of funding on the stratification of universities. Comparing Europe with the United States
Abstract: This paper argues that stratified structures in university systems should be addressed more explicitly in debates on research funding in the context of higher education (HE). Is a steeply stratified academic system with a stable set of distinguished elite institutions the best answer to the growing demand for knowledge in democratic and globalized societies? The paper connects findings from three streams of literature: (a) network analysis in quantitative science studies, (b) resource concentration in the US-American HE system, and (c) research to construct and analyse a common database for European higher education institutions (HEIs). The literature on US-American research universities reveals a crystalline hierarchy with intense competition for scientific talent at the top but little opportunity for upward institutional and personal mobility. We conclude that while there seem to be large cumulative advantages in terms of research output and prestige to be gained by differentiating a segment of outstanding elite organizations, rich-core ordering as characteristic of the US-American system also presents challenges for the role of science in liberal democracies: intellectual closure through control of faculty positions by a small number of central HEIs, and social closure through a failure to significantly expand the supply of the best research-based education to meet increasing demand.
Conference contribution to the 16. annual conference of the GfHf (16.9.2021)
Arlette Jappe and Thomas Heinze have contributed a paper to the 16. annual conference of the "Gesellschaft für Hochschulforschung" (GfHf), 16.-17.9.2021. Title and abstract follow here.
Professionalism of bibliometric research evaluation using the example of the Netherlands and Italy
Abstract: This presentation describes the construction and use of bibliometric information in the evaluation of university research in the Netherlands and Italy. The selection of these two cases is based on an extensive meta-analysis of bibliometric evaluation practices in Europe in the period 2005-2019, investigating which methods can be considered as de facto standards of bibliometric quality measurement and which social actors defined these standards. Beyond the methods of bibliometric information gathering, the paper also addresses the question of systematic control effects inherent in the institutional design of the respective university evaluation procedures. Our thesis is that the Netherlands and Italy can be considered opposite cases, both in terms of the professional development of evaluative bibliometrics, and in terms of respect for higher education autonomy within the regularly recurring evaluation process. Actors in German higher education research and policy can learn from the comparison of these two neighboring European countries about the successful use of bibliometric data to support the quality development of university research and about the problems that can arise if evaluation procedures are institutionalized too rigidly.
ISSI 2021 - 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
Thomas Heinze and Joel E. Fuchs contributed two paper and one poster to the 18. conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), 12.-15.7.2021.
New Paper published:
Jappe, A., Heinze, T. (2020): Jurisdiction of Bibliometrics, pp. 91-98 in: Ball, R. (Ed.): Handbook Bibliometrics. Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter.
New Paper published:
Heinze, T., Jappe, A., Tunger, D., Fuchs, J.E., Eberhardt, P. (2020). Universitäten mit Profil. Umfassende Daten zu Forschungs- und Lehrprofilen deutscher Universitäten frei zugänglich verfübgar. Wissenschaftsmanagement 26: 26-30.
New Paper published:
New Paper published:
New Paper published:
New Paper published:
Heinze, T., Jappe, A. (2020). Fundamentales Spannungsfeld: Wissenschaftliche Relevanz und Originalität. Forschung & Lehre, 3/2020: 198-200. Preprint with references here.
