This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

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Studies on ‘Big Science’ have shifted our perspective from the complexity of scientific objects and their representations to the complexity of sociotechnical arrangements. However, how scientists in large-scale research attend to this complexity to facilitate and afford knowledge production has rarely been considered to date. In this article, we locate organizational complexity on the level of organizing practices that follow multiple and divergent logics. We identify three strategies of managing organizational complexity, drawing on existing literature on large-scale research as well as own empirical research. The three strategies are: segmenting research infrastructure, introducing elements of bureaucratic governance, and implementing standards and standardization. We illustrate these strategies with examples from our empirical case study on experimental particle physics research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. While the strategies we identified help to cope with the complexity of some organizational tasks by dividing, ordering, or mediating between divergent organizational logics, we find that organizational complexity overall is not reduced but rather displaced. We argue that dealing with complexity is a dynamic and ongoing process, which inevitably generates novel organizational complexity.

Many young scientists are trained in research groups, yet little is known about how individual doctoral dissertations are carved out of collaborative research projects. This question is particularly pronounced in high-energy physics, where thousands of physicists share an experiment’s apparatus, data, and the authorship of publications. Based on qualitative interviews with researchers working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, this paper analyses what makes a PhD dissertation ‘doable’ in this context. Describing the levels of work organisation, the challenges, and the actors involved in constructing ‘doable’ dissertations in collaborative research, I argue that doctoral dissertations are the emergent product of alignment work performed throughout the PhD. Individualisation is achieved by temporally, qualitatively and formally distinguishing dissertations from work on collective publications. I discuss how these processes shape the roles of students and advisors, and the content and value of dissertations in collaborative research.

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