In the autumn of 1851, on the occasion of the American Institute of New York's annual fair, the Boston chemist and geologist Charles Jackson chose as the subject of his address the ‘Encouragement and Cultivation of the Sciences in the United States’. Playing on popular enthusiasm for science and technology, Jackson rehearsed the wondrous progress of the arts and the role of science in that progress. Science was the ‘Hand-maiden of the Arts’, and most assuredly the ‘maid of honor’, he (...) declared, for science was the ‘progressive power’ which inspired new inventions. These were commonplace assumptions of the time, and surely no one in his audience would have disputed them. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the emergence of the research laboratory as an organizational entity within the company structure of industrial firms. The thesis defended is that, after some groundwork by British and French firms, the managements of several of the larger German dye companies set up their own research organizations between the years 1877 and 1883. The analysis of the emergence of the industrial research laboratory in the dyestuffs industry presented here makes clear that both the older study (...) on the subject by John J. Beer and a later paper by Georg Mseyer-Thurow contain some serious defects. Beer, like so many other authors of the 1950s who studied the ‘marriage’ between science and industry during the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, incorrectly correlates the engagement of university-educated chemists with the rise of industrial research. The appointment of academic chemists by BASF and Hoechst at the end of the 1860s, for instance, was described as ‘the…acquisition of a research staff’. This reveals a misunderstanding of the roles of chemists within the nineteenth-century chemical industry. University-trained personnel were, in fact, working in industry as early as the start of the nineteenth century. However, they were employed as managers, works chemists and analysts, and only exceptionally in research. (shrink)

This is another paper about science and her powerful companion , to use A. W. Hofmann's colourful phrase. Whereas most papers on the interaction of science and technology deal with the transfer of knowledge from academic science to industrial technology, this paper is about the contribution of an industrial researcher to academic chemistry. The boost Reppe's research gave to the study of aromaticity parallels the impact of the early synthetic dye chemistry on structural organic chemistry. This case study suggests that (...) we cannot draw a clear distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ chemistry, in the laboratory at least. (shrink)

Historical Science Studies Today. Thoughts about a History of the Knowledge Society. The article explores theoretical and historiographical approaches in the field of historical science studies, while focusing on the history of the knowledge society. It argues that a straightforward transfer of the concept of knowledge society into the past has to be pursued with care, favorably with an extraction of some analytical key concepts. This extraction is termed ‘decontextualization’ while a second approach, ‘contextualization’, is applied to the study of (...) the knowledge society in its own time, namely the second half of the twentieth century. The latter approach needs to be combined with a history of science studies, especially a history of the concepts explaining and constituting the knowledge society itself. Furthermore, it is proposed to study the operative concepts of innovation and regulation in order to analyze the coupling processes of science, economy, technology, and government. (shrink)

: This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties which derives from recent lines of work in science and technology studies, and which entails a decentering of the social relative to the material and the conceptual, in terms (...) of both objects of analysis and explanatory formats. In order to display the direct sociological relevance of this approach, I move to the macro level, developing the conceptual apparatus of a decentered social theory via the discussion of a historical example of major sociological significance—the systematic gearing together of scientific research, technological innovation and industrial production that originated in the synthetic dye industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the interest of the topic itself, the aim is thus to exemplify in some detail what a decentered sociology might look like, both empirically and conceptually. (shrink)

In this essay laboratories are dealt with as symbolic spaces that structure social relationships and ways of knowledge in chemistry. The spatial vicissitudes of the nineteenth‐century research laboratory reflect, and at the same time direct, the way chemical knowledge is being produced, transmitted, and perceived.

The history of the Greenlandic mineral cryolite is outlined from its discovery in late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, when its potential for industrial use was first recognized by the Danish chemist Julius Thomsen. During the 1850s, several attempts were made to exploit cryolite for the production of soda and/or aluminium, of which only the soda process became implemented on an industrial scale. The main part of the paper examines the early cryolite soda manufacture, its chemical basis as well as (...) its industrial significance. The focus is thus the intersection of chemical science and technology. It is argued that Thomsen's process depended intimately on current chemical knowledge, and that, with regard to the science-technology relationship, the cryolite soda manufacture signified a new kind of industrial chemistry. (shrink)

Universities have long been involved in knowledge transfer activities. Yet the last 30 years have seen major changes in the governance of university–industry interactions. Knowledge transfer has become a strategic issue: as a source of funding for university research and (rightly or wrongly) as a policy tool for economic development. Universities vary enormously in the extent to which they promote and succeed in commercializing academic research. The identification of clear-cut models of governance for university–industry interactions and knowledge transfer processes is (...) not straightforward. The purpose of this article is to critically discuss university knowledge transfer models and review the recent developments in the literature on research collaborations, intellectual property rights and spin-offs, those forms of knowledge transfer that are more formalized and have been institutionalized in recent years. The article also addresses the role played by university knowledge transfer organizations in promoting commercialization of research results. (shrink)