Workshop 1: Torino, 14-15 July 2008
Workshop 2: Torino, Fall 2008
In the last decades, the world of science and research has undergone dramatic changes on several different levels. For example, specialization of tasks in teamwork has radically increased, requiring larger teams and extensive collaboration between people with different levels of responsibility and independence in research. At the same time, because of the complexity of calculations in many fields of science and the inexorable shrinking of the realm of what is directly observable through the human senses resulting from the uncovering of more and more facts of nature, research in almost all disciplines is becoming more capital-intensive. It is not so long ago that research that now requires powerful hardware and software and expensive infrastructures, was paper-based. On the side of national governments and funding agencies, new measures and policies are being extensively discussed. Organization of research into universities vs. Public Research Organizations (PROs), junior vs. senior scholars, principal investigator funding vs. funding of research groups or departments, and portability of funds, labs and people across institutions are just some of the hot topics on the political agenda. Mechanisms to support the efficient allocation of funds and fairness of job market competition are being discussed and experimented with across countries. These radical transformations, together with the massification of higher education, are transforming the world of academia and claim for a radical rethinking of the ways universities and PROs are structured, funded and organized.

Call for papers

In recent years the community of scholars interested in understanding the changing governance of universities and PROs has grown significantly. However, so far, most works have focused on understanding the process of knowledge diffusion, and little attention has been given to the organization and its constituent parts (researchers, teams, centrer, management staff, etc.). These two workshops aim to provide a locus for the presentation and discussion of research that tries to fill this gap.
Submission of contributions is encouraged from both junior and senior scholars interested in understanding the changing governance of universities and other PROs from an economics, historical, organizational and managerial perspective. A group of about 15 papers will be selected from the open submissions for presentation in the first workshop; the second workshop will include presentations from a subset of the scholars of improved versions of their work. A special issue in an international journal is envisaged.
Some of the topics that would be worth exploring, include (but are not limited to):

• organization of research activities in academia
• scientific careers and path to independence
• portability of funds
• principal investigator/centre funding
• funding of large scale facilities/big science
• university management of human resources
• teaching and research interactions
• scale and scope economies in academic production
• organization and funding of public research centres vs. universities

Important dates:

• 11 April 2008. Deadline for submission of full paper or extended abstract (minimum 3 pages)
• 12 May 2008. Notification of acceptance.
• 14 June 2008. Deadline for submission of full papers
• 14-15 July 2008. Workshop 1

Fall 2008. Workshop 2 (invited contributions selected from presentations in Workshop 1.
To submit a contribution and for further information contact: Aldo Geuna - a.geuna{at}sussex.ac.uk replace {at} with @
Organisers: Cristiano Antonelli, Chiara Franzoni, Aldo Geuna