Beyond Private and Public Research: The Legal and Organizational Reality Behind Industrial Research Institutes in Interwar France

Krasnodębski, Marcin

doi:10.1007/s11024-018-9345-5

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is important to note that decentralization is not the same as disintegration, even though the center no longer exists as an administrative unit. In my previous studies, I showed that a research center could be a virtual institution made of different partially overlapping organizations, and yet its existence is not in doubt (Krasnodębski 2018). Which approach is more efficient: research centers as autonomous units with their own agenda, or research centers as bundles of organizational, spatial, and research trajectories that co-exist but respond to different hierarchies?…”

Section: -2020mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Rethinking Research in the Chemical Industry: Organizational History of Centre de Recherches d’Aubervilliers (1953‒2020)

Krasnodębski

2022

Stud. Hist. Sci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Solvay’s Centre de Recherches d’Aubervilliers (CRA) is one of the oldest active private-sector research centers in industrial chemistry in France. During the seventy years of its existence it collaborated with some of the most significant French and European chemical companies. Established in 1953, the center’s research and development organization around huge discipline-oriented laboratories proved itself remarkably resilient. Not merely reflecting the R&D policy of the company that owned it at a given moment, the evolution of the center’s research organization followed its own particular path. The research priorities in any given moment were always a place of encounter between top-down requirements of the company’s directorship, and bottom-up thematic trajectories. The CRA’s organizational history gives us unique insights into broader tendencies in chemical research in the second half of the 20th century, such as specialization of laboratories, introduction of market-driven research as well as decentralization and multiplication of hierarchies. The case study can be of interest to historians of science, due to the fact that the history of private research centers remains largely understudied, and to science policy scholars who want to understand the interconnectedness of factors that influence the organization of R&D structures in an institution.

show abstract

Section: -2020mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hahn 1993;Seitz 2007;Tinniswood 2019), institutes of industrial research (e.g. Paul 1980;Fonteneau 2010;Krasnodębski 2018), and all sorts of laboratories (e.g. Pestre 1990;Leland and Schaffer 1994;Holl 1997) is perhaps the most classical approach in these disciplines.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%