Editorial

On Friday 29 Jan 2010, EASST Council hosted a meeting of representatives from national STS organisations in a dozen European countries. The goals of the meeting were to share strategies for securing and nurturing the STS field, and to discuss ways in which EASST might contribute to those strategies.

As the first order of business, representatives from each country presented their respective national organizational structures and concerns. The basic concerns were shared across national boundaries – recruiting students, funding research, job security for ourselves and our graduates, achieving recognition of what the field has to offer, the challenges (especially for an interdisciplinary field) of achieving some sort of permanence within the academic environment. What varied, across national boundaries and also over time and among institutions within national boundaries, was the structure of challenges and opportunities for realizing those goals. For instance, at a given time and place one may see an emphasis on extramural funding; the Matthew principle [1] may reign so that a research group that acquires outside funding also receives matching funds, tenured positions, and/or other forms of institutional recognition. Then suddenly, some years later, policies change and internal funds are steered to assist research groups under threat of “extinction” due to little outside funding. Similarly, in some countries we have seen incentives devoted to promoting interdisciplinarity … and then seen those incentives fade in favor of established disciplines. Incentives can shift from teaching to research and back again. Advantages can vary, sometimes tipping towards smaller departments, sometimes towards bigger ones.

EASST, meanwhile, has the challenge of keeping up with the growth of the field. This means achieving visibility and relevance to entering students, and maintaining that relevance as they disperse into various work situations after graduation. Of course, maintaining relevance to post-graduate students also means maintaining relevance for those of us already established in academic careers. Are EASST conferences a sufficient focus, and what else do we offer aside from conferences? This is not only a problem of nurturing EASST as an organization, but also a problem of motivation – EASST council members want to feel they are contributing to the field, not just keeping up an organization for its own sake. And so we ask: What can EASST do for you?

None of this should be surprising to us, given our science theories and analytical tools. We should be uniquely positioned to analyze our own contingent strategic situations and to turn structural barriers into opportunity structures. For institutions to thrive in Academe seems to require institutional leaders who recognize local opportunity structures, and who do the work it takes to make use of those structures while they last. That said, sharing stories amongst ourselves can be helpful. While recognizing that what succeeded in one place may not fully translate to another, comparing notes can help us see what our local opportunities consist of and how we might make use of them.

Furthermore, some strategic tools seem to cross temporal and spatial boundaries. Activities that nearly all meeting participants reported using as strategic tools were conferences and journals. These are both tools where EASST may be able to increase its efforts and offer more support.

Most countries represented reported organizing national and/or regional conferences and workshops. Many offered session streams in national or regional languages as well as English-language streams. Besides organizing our own bi-annual conferences, which have also sometimes been used as a venue for national session streams for the hosting country, EASST has a policy of offering economic support for between-conference-year events, as witness the workshop report below on Technoscience and the Transformation of the Global South. Between-conference event support depends, of course, on our budget situation. In recent years, the budget has allowed us to maintain the offer.

Another widespread strategy was national or regional journals. Several countries and regions had journals or efforts afoot to start them, and they increasingly attract international authors and readers. The field needs journals. More journals. Having more journals does not weaken those already in place, but rather helps establish them as top-ranked within a substantial field, as opposed to lower-ranking specialist journals at the margins of established disciplines such as Sociology or History. Again, given our knowledge of the workings of the science community, it should come as no surprise to us that journals are “ranked” not directly on the basis of content quality, but through what are taken to be indicators of quality: circulation and citation. Nor should we be surprised that circulation leads to citation and vice versa. The journal that lands on your desk four times a year, simply as a perk of professional society membership, is more likely to be read than the one you have to go search out at the library. The journal you read, you are more likely to remember both when looking up sources to cite and when wondering where to submit your next article manuscript. The first remembrance contributes to the journal’s citation score and thus its reputation for quality; the second contributes to its submission base, from which the editors can select and build the journal’s content quality. Over time, the more widely cited, the more likely a journal is to develop into an “obligatory passage point” that all in the field feel they must subscribe to (or join the professional society that offers it as a membership perk) and publish in. In other words, the Matthew principle proves true once again. Recognizing this as the STS professionals we are, one concrete outcome of the 29 January meeting was the decision to start conversations exploring whether the opportunity structures are such that EASST might develop a closer relationship with one or more of the national/regional STS journals in Europe.

Participants were keen to continue their discussions and to share material and are currently doing so on line. It is hoped that this will feed into richer resources on the EASST website in due course.

Note

1. Matthew 25:29: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’