Subproject 3: The Alliance of Science Organisations: Corporativism in German Science between Cooperation and Competition
- Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Helmuth Trischler
- Researcher: Vanessa Osganian, M.A.
The Alliance of Science Organisations (Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen) brings together the leading science and research organisations in Germany. It is a leading advisory body for research policy-making and a lobby group at the same time, representing the federally funded research organisations and allowing these organisations to speak collectively. The Alliance negotiates the most important aspects of policy-making for academia. This subproject examines the practices of corporativistic negotiations in historical perspective.
As an intermediary, drawing together the diverse interests of research organisations and harmonizing them during political decision-making processes, it offers a unique opportunity to study the inextricable interconnections between cooperation and competition in science.
Firstly, the project will study the Alliance of Research Organisations’s development since the 1960s and how it contributed to a academic landscape that underwent rapid change on a national level. Secondly, the subproject will ask to which extent the corporatic political traditions of a "German model" influenced science policy-making, and how this German model is different from developments elsewhere in Europe. Thirdly, our subproject will examine the epistemological effects of corporatistic science policy-making. Case studies on space research, microelectronics, and biotechnology will study the interconnections between cooperation and competition at different member organisations of the Alliance.
