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This article compares two science advisory organizations: the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), with a special focus on how their respective policy systems absorb the knowledge delivered for use in decision processes. The science-policy processes of these two organizations differ in important respects; ICES delivers highly specified knowledge to a specified uptake mechanism, while the IPCC produces unspecified knowledge for an unspecified uptake mechanism. Since both environmental governance areas are criticized for lack of needed action, a comparison is of interest asking how this might relate to the organization of science advice. As theoretical resources for this explorative comparison we utilize two approaches from the field of science and technology studies: the co-production approach, which focuses on the entanglements of scientific and political processes, and the systems-theory-oriented multiple-worlds model, which assumes a clear difference in institutional logics between the scientific and the political field. Since the IPCC has been critically analysed by several studies utilizing resources from the two approaches, we contribute with new insights by bringing in ICES, which is a much less studied organization exposing a different science-policy structure. One important finding is that the two theoretical approaches focus on different aspects, exposing ‘links’ and ‘integration’, both of which we argue are important for analysing and assessing science advisory organizations. Moreover, these aspects can be advantageously integrated into a single theoretical framework.

Universities in many liberal democracies, such as the US, the UK, or Germany, grapple with a pivotal question: how much room should be given to controversial utterances? On the one side, there are those who advocate for limiting permissible speech on campus to create a safe environment for a diverse student body and counter the mainstreaming of extremist views, particularly by right-wing populists. On the other side, concerns arise about stifling the free exchange of ideas and creating an atmosphere of fear and censorship. The debate is further complicated by participants’ occasional uncertainties about the legal norms relevant in the given context, such as when freedom of speech is an issue and when it is not. This paper addresses the question of whether universities should allow actors with primarily political (as opposed to scholarly) agendas to speak on campus. Focusing on German universities, we begin by discussing some of the potentially relevant legal norms. We then propose shifting emphasis from whether we should make room for public political discussions on campus to how such events must be organized so that they deliver the goods that their advocates emphasize while avoiding the dangers of which critics warn. Drawing on conflict management literature concerned with process design, we make several practical suggestions on how to organize an event that brings political discourse to the university campus without causing harm.

The notion of science as a stratified system is clearly manifested in the markedly uneven distribution of productivity, rewards, resources, and recognition. Although previous studies have shown that institutional environments for conducting research differ significantly between national science systems, disciplines, and subfields, it remains to be shown whether any systematic variations and patterns in inequalities exist among researchers in different national and domain specific settings. This study investigates the positioning of citation elites as opposed to ‘ordinary’ researchers by way of examining three dimensions of concentration (accumulation of publications and citations, specialisation, and institutional concentration) in biology, economics and physics in Denmark and the UK. Across all three dimensions, we put Richard Whitley’s bipartite theory to the test, suggesting a nexus between the intellectual structure of a discipline and the configuration of its elite. The study draws on a dataset of researchers who published most of their publications in either physics, biology, or economics over the 1980–2018 period and with at least one publication in 2017–2018 while affiliated to either a British or a Danish university. We find higher degrees of concentration in the UK compared to Denmark, and that physics and biology respectively display the greatest and lowest degree of concentration. Similar patterns in disciplinary differences are observed in both countries, suggesting that concentration patterns are largely rooted in disciplinary cultures and merely amplified by the national context.

The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees’ evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia.