Is interdisciplinarity distinctive? Scientific collaborations through research projects in natural sciences

This article focuses on (inter)disciplinary collaborations through the co-application to research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the main provider of research funding in Switzerland. We suggest that interdisciplinarity is a potential mode of distinction and that its frequency and the disciplines involved may be associated with specific configurations of scientific, institutional, international, extra-academic, and network resources. We rely on biographical data on all biology and chemistry professors in Switzerland in 2000 (n = 342), including all their funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In a first step, we highlight the role of the resources mentioned previously in structuring the symbolic hierarchy of disciplines using multiple correspondence analysis. In a second step, we look at how interdisciplinarity fits into these structures based on an opposition between international and institutional resources and on the unequal distribution of scientific (and social) capital. We show that these interdisciplinary logics of social distinction differ across the two disciplines. On the one hand, collaborations with biologists seem to help chemists reaching dominant positions in the academic field, while their degree of internationality is associated with interdisciplinary collaborations. On the other hand, the biologists who are the most endowed with symbolic capital are more likely to collaborate with the medical sciences

The Internationalisation of Economics and Business Studies : Import of Excellence, Cosmopolitan Capital, or American Dominance ?

»Internationalisierung der Volks- und Betriebswirtschaftslehre: Exzellenzimport, kosmopolitisches Kapital oder amerikanische Dominanz?«. In recent times internationality has become an indicator for scientific excellence arguing that it will create talent, diversity, and inspiration. But what does “internationality” really stand for in science? In order to answer this question we study two of the most hierarchized and internationalised disciplines – economics and business studies – in one of the most internationalised academic labour markets – Switzerland. Based on a historical database of 411 (full and associate) university professors of economics and business studies at three benchmarks (1957, 1980, and 2000), we investigate the evolution of internationality during the second part of the 20th century, and its link to scientific prestige and recognition. For both disciplines we find an increase in foreign professors and internationalisation of Swiss professors due to doctorial and postdoctoral phases spent in the US and other shorter stays abroad. This development can first be observed in economics, but business studies have managed to “catch up.” Using three negative binomial regression models we show that Switzerland imports excellence among professors and that high scientific prestige is linked to stays abroad, especially in the dominant US fields of economics and business studies

Affirmation et transformations des sciences économiques en Suisse au XXe siècle

Cette thèse questionne l’affirmation et les transformations des sciences économiques (économie politique et gestion d’entreprise) en Suisse au XXe siècle. Nous utilisons une base de données biographiques sur cinq cohortes (1910, 1937, 1957, 1980, 2000) de professeurs d’université (N=561). Premièrement nous montrons que les sciences économiques s’affirment institutionnellement et disciplinairement dans l’académie. En particulier le capital académique (positions de recteurs) des professeurs de sciences économiques est le plus important parmi toutes les disciplines dans la période récente. Deuxièmement les professeurs de sciences économiques deviennent les professeurs les plus représentés parmi les élites économiques suisses (les grands patrons). Certains réalisent également des carrières parmi les élites politiques (les élus nationaux) et les élites administratives (les hauts fonctionnaires fédéraux). Nous observons une standardisation des carrières des professeurs entre deux types de profil : purement académique et partiellement extra-académique. Troisièmement nous montrons un processus de « nationalisation » des profils de professeurs après 1918 et de ré-internationalisation après 1945. Nous observons un déplacement d’une internationalité d’« excellence » scientifique des pays germanophones et francophones vers les USA. Finalement nous voyons que le capital scientifique (citations dans des revues prestigieuses) est lié au capital cosmopolite (internationalité) et opposé aux capitaux académique, économique et politique, plus nationaux. Quatrièmement cette opposition est confirmée par l’étude des interactions entre différents capitaux des professeurs. Nous identifions ainsi d’un côté un pôle scientifique et international et de l’autre un pôle « mondain », caractérisé par des capitaux nationaux, académiques, politiques et économiques. Le pôle scientifique utilise de plus en plus les mathématiques, et chacun des deux pôles a ses propres domaines de spécialisation. Nous observons que la dominance parmi les professeurs, outre l’usage de mathématiques et l’étude d’objets particuliers, se traduit également par une interdisciplinarité relativement soutenue, particulièrement avec les sciences « dures ». En conclusion nous affirmons que c’est par cette division du travail entre deux pôles de professeurs, ceux liés à la pratique scientifique et à l’excellence internationale, et ceux liés à l’administration des universités, des entreprises et de l’Etat, et par le renforcement historique de cette division, que les professeurs de sciences économiques sont « partout » et que la discipline a pu affirmer son pouvoir dans la société suisse

Analysing inequalities within the LSE student body: bringing social class into the mix

We report the results of a study of LSE home undergraduate students which addresses the significance of social class background in shaping a range of student outcomes. We explore how class background and other sociodemographic variables affect access (who gets in), study choice (who studies what), attainment (how students perform in summative assessment), and satisfaction (how students rate their programme). We show that parental class background plays a major role across all these dimensions and is a major force shaping LSE undergraduate student outcomes. This is evident from observing raw bivariate associations and remains true when we report linear regression models controlling for numerous other socio-demographic and institutional factors. We also demonstrate powerful intersectional associations, especially with race, and also with declared disability status. Our results underscore the need to take social class seriously in the analysis of the undergraduate experience, both in analytical and in policy terms

From integrated to fragmented elites. The core of Swiss elite networks 1910–2015

This article focuses on historical elite dynamics and investigates elites' integration over time. We describe the changing relations and composition of the central circles in Swiss elite networks at seven benchmark years between 1910 and 2015 by relying on 22,262 elite individuals tied to 2587 organizations among eight key sectors, and identify for each year the most connected core of individuals. We explore network cohesion and sectoral bridging of the elite core and find that it moved from being a unitary corporate elite, before 1945, to an integrated corporatist elite, between the 1950s and 1980s, before fragmenting into a loose group, with an increased importance of corporate elites, in the 1990s onwards. The core was always dominated by business and their forms of legitimacy but, at times of crisis to the hegemony of corporate elites, after the Second World War and (only) shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, elite circles expanded and included individuals with delegated forms of power, such as politicians and unionists. In the most recent cohort (2015), the share of corporate elites in the core is similar to the one before the First World War and during the interwar period. This return to the past echoes findings on wealth inequality and economic capital accumulation by a small group of individuals organized around the most powerful companies

Complex Network Visualisation for the History of Interdisciplinarity: Mapping Research Funding in Switzerland

In Switzerland, the panorama of scientific research is deemed to be deeply affected by language barriers and strong local academic identities. Is this impression confirmed by data on research projects? What are the factors that best explain the structure of scientific collaborations over the last forty years? Do linguistic regions (Switzerland is divided into three principals) or local academic logics really have an impact onto the mapping of research collaborations and to what extend are they embedded in disciplinary, historical and generational logics? We focus on the very large database of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the principal research funding agency in Switzerland, which lists all the 62,000 projects funded between 1975 and 2015. While scientometric studies generally focus on measuring work – and financial – performance, we aim to raise awareness on pursuing a socio-history analyse of Swiss academic circles by crossing the SNSF data with a prosopographic database of all Swiss university professors in the twentieth century provided by the Swiss Elite Observatory (OBELIS). Beyond the interest for the history of science and universities, we explore the noteworthy technical challenge of a network analysis of nearly 88,000 researchers and more than a million of collaborations. By combining those two databases, we measure the temporality and spatiality of academic collaborations, i.e. to define a way to deal with the volume of information in order to provide not only a global vision but also to enable a fine processing of personal trajectories

Characterization of Type I and Type II nNOS-Expressing Interneurons in the Barrel Cortex of Mouse

In the neocortex, neuronal nitric oxide (NO) synthase (nNOS) is essentially expressed in two classes of GABAergic neurons: type I neurons displaying high levels of expression and type II neurons displaying weaker expression. Using immunocytochemistry in mice expressing GFP under the control of the glutamic acid decarboxylase 67k (GAD67) promoter, we studied the distribution of type I and type II neurons in the barrel cortex and their expression of parvalbumin (PV), somatostatin (SOM), and vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP). We found that type I neurons were predominantly located in deeper layers and expressed SOM (91.5%) while type II neurons were concentrated in layer II/III and VI and expressed PV (17.7%), SOM (18.7%), and VIP (10.2%). We then characterized neurons expressing nNOS mRNA (n = 42 cells) ex vivo, using whole-cell recordings coupled to single-cell reverse transcription-PCR and biocytin labeling. Unsupervised cluster analysis of this sample disclosed four classes. One cluster (n = 7) corresponded to large, deep layer neurons, displaying a high expression of SOM (85.7%) and was thus very likely to correspond to type I neurons. The three other clusters were identified as putative type II cells and corresponded to neurogliaform-like interneurons (n = 19), deep layer neurons expressing PV or SOM (n = 9), and neurons expressing VIP (n = 7). Finally, we performed nNOS immunohistochemistry on mouse lines in which GFP labeling revealed the expression of two specific developmental genes (Lhx6 and 5-HT3A). We found that type I neurons expressed Lhx6 but never 5-HT3A, indicating that they originate in the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE). Type II neurons expressed Lhx6 (63%) and 5-HT3A (34.4%) supporting their derivation either from the MGE or from the caudal ganglionic eminence (CGE) and the entopeduncular and dorsal preoptic areas. Together, our results in the barrel cortex of mouse support the view that type I neurons form a specific class of SOM-expressing neurons while type II neurons comprise at least three classes