Forms of Patronage

184 Theories of Science in Society

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Latour, Bruno. 1983. Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World. In Science Observed: New Perspectives in the Social Study of Science, ed. by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay. pp. 141-70. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. Beverly Hills: Sage. Merton, Robert K. [1938]1973. Science and the Social Order. In Robert K. Merton,

The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. by Norman Storer, pp. 254-66. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merton, Robert K. 1970. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. New York: Howard Fertig. First published in 1938 as vol. 4, pt. 2, of Osiris: Studies on the History and Philosophy of Science, and on the History of Learning and Culture.

Mullins, Nicholas C. 1973. Theories and Theory Groups in Sociology. New York: Harper and Row.

Nelkin, Dorothy. 1984. Science as Intellectual Property. New York: Macmillan. Press, Frank. 1988. The Dilemma of the Golden Age. Science, Technology, &

Human Values 13:224-31. Price, Derek J. deSolla. 1965. Networks of Scientific Papers. Science 149 (July

30): 510-15. Restivo, Sal. 1988a. Modern Science as a Social Problem. Social Problems 35:

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A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Free Press.

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FORMS OF PATRONAGE

Stephen P. Turner

In the broadest sense, a patron is "one who guards, supports, or maintains . .. the cause, the interests, advancement or advantage of another" (quoted from Richardson's Dictionary, 1862, in Bourne, 1986, p. 4). "Support" is typically given within recognizable patterns of mutual expectation and schemes of social categorization. The particular patterns that have been called "patronage" have sometimes been constitutive elements of political orders. The term itself derives directly from Roman legal usage: In British history it refers to political practices of the eighteenth century and their later survivals; in American parlance, the term refers to practices of urban political machines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the persistent remnants of these practices.

The support of modern science initially used the forms of patronage characteristic of other areas of life. The modes of aristocratic and royal patronage that supported Columbus also supported Galileo. In England during the early eighteenth century, the primary device for raising funds for capital ventures was through subscriptions that were paid in advance (Stewart, 1986, pp. 48-49), and this was also a major device for financing scientific or technical research, voyages of exploration, and literary works. In many books of the era, one finds lists of the patrons of the project. Sometimes the dedications are to a single person, but sometimes there are long lists of contributors (often listing varying sums, some quite modest). In the antebellum United States, the patronage of science was at times indistinguishable from the rest of the spoils system. The scientists who benefited were often well-connected scions of politically prominent families, such as Alexander Dallas Bache and David Dale Owen. The creation of government positions for scientists was criticized accordingly"jobbing for favorites" was the phrase used by President Martin Van Buren (Dupree, 1957, p. 70). Science later developed a variety of additional forms of patronage that were not shared with nonscientists, some of considerable bureaucratic and political complexity.

185


In this essay I propose to present a theory, or more precisely a descriptive scheme, that serves to show how each form of the patronage relation solves a problem I will call "uncheckability." The problem also arises in other areas of social life; in general, it occurs where the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of discretionary power do not match. Rather than attempting to define all these cumbersome terms, I will exemplify them. To understand the patterns in their diversity, and in particular to disentangle the complex relations that presently exist and to understand the process by which these practices were formed, it will be useful to begin with the forms of patronage scientists shared with and adopted from areas other than science. Many elements of these original forms persisted in later science long beyond the era of the forms of political patronage from which they were adapted. The presence of these forms raises a central sociological issue, for it is, paradoxically, in the social structure of sciencethe engine of modernity-that we find some of the most transparent instances of the "persistence of the old regime" of personal authority and discretionary rule. In turn, this suggests that limits to the grand historical forces of bureaucratic rationalization, discussed by Weber, and the rise of the "expert," discussed by Habermas and others, are to be found within the processes themselves.

Distributions of Discretion and Knowledge

The vocabulary of power derives from the law, particularly from the idea of sovereign power, which may be further organized, self-constrained, or codified into legal rules as distinct from pure direct commands. By a simple and common extension of this idea, any form of the organization of authority may be thought of as parceling out chunks of limited discretionary powers. The ideal-typical bureaucracy, as conceived by Weber, is a case in which each of the various officeholders is delegated little or no discretion within a range precisely defined by written regulations. Weber saw that much of the work of the modern state could be made calculable by such arrangements, and he compared bureaucratic systems to machines. This gives us a point of comparison. In general, arrangements of power parcel out discretion in larger packets, giving a wider scope for the exercise of personal judgment. The delegation of powers involving personal judgment creates problems of accountability other than those implied in the notion of adherence to procedures, on which Weber's legalistically conceived type tacitly relies. Modern forms of administration typically employ multiple methods of accountability; ordinarily there will be procedures to govern specific aspects of executive action, such as disbursements, and separate, perhaps informal, means of assessing the individual competence of a manager. The practice of bifurcating authority by separating finance and accounting from

Forms of Patronage 187"

other kinds of authority characteristic of business is a central feature of science as well.

Weber's model also tacitly assumes that the kind of technical knowledge that persons in lower levels of an organization possess is inferior or at least more limited than that of superiors. Perhaps this is another instance of bias toward examples from the law. Subordinates are presumed by Weber to be, like legal functionaries, at the stage of apprentices mastering specialized competencies in a sequential bureaucratic career. Superiors are thus assumed to be in a position to make judgments about the competence of individual performance-especially with respect to adherence to procedures-that are the basis of advancement (see Weber, 1947, p. 334). However well this assumption fits the German state bureaucracies that Weber regarded as the preeminent cases of "rational-legal" authority, it fits neither the modern corporate bureaucracy nor the kinds of organizations that employ advanced technological knowledge.

In such organizations, what we may call "the distribution of knowledge" is not a simple hierarchy in which the knowledge base or cognitive skills possessed by a bureaucratic superior is inclusive of that of his or her subordinates. Indeed, in modern technology-intensive corporations, it is typically the case that the technical skills of the upper managers are obsolescent, that the talents and personal qualities for which they are employed are primarily managerial, and that the distinctive knowledge base they possess is knowledge of the workings, practices, and past experiences of this or similar organizations. In American business organizations, financial decision-making capacities or leadership qualities are usually the determining factors in the selection of senior managers. Managers are often selected on the basis of past performance in corporations using other kinds of technology; they often possess little of the scientific or technical knowledge of their subordinates. Moreover, although formal evaluations involving adherence to rules or meeting numerical objectives are common in such organizations, few careers are made solely on this basis; other factors, including company loyalty, personal loyalty, and the ability to influence or lead, play large roles. The strong persistence of these patterns in business is a point to which we shall return, for here the patterns of patronage in science illuminate patterns in organizations generally.

To support science, the patron must delegate discretion over some of the patron's money. The core irreducible feature of this relationship is that the patron who supports science is not fully capable of judging the adequacy of the science he or she is supporting. The patron's delegation of discretion is an act of trust. The place of trust in a given act of patronage and the intensity of concern over accountability will vary.' In this essay I will be concerned with the variant forms of this general case, where "noninclusive" distributions of knowledge-that is, distributions where subordinates have cognitive capacities to make judgments that superiors do


not possess-are found in arrangements in which superiors delegate decision-making authority or discretion. The key to the discussion is a simple idea: the fact of uncheckability decisively alters the relationship of subordination. Pure patronage, the delegation of funds directly from a donor to a scientist without any mediating structure of organization involving a distribution of discretion, is uncheckability in its simplest form. To put it in a fancier way, it constitutes an extreme case of the disjunction between distributions of knowledge and discretion. Funds are given by individual patrons, who possess discretion over their own money, to individual scientists, who lack money, for purposes that the patrons cannot fully understand, to be spent for reasons that the patrons cannot fully assess. To give here is to trust.

Cases of this pur~¥.a.dig.kind-in which scientists are patronized directly by donors-are of limited importance in modern science, but they are of course important in the history of science. Another historically important type may be characterized, in general terms, by the concept of "dual roles": scientists who are also something else, such as courtiers, aristocrats, or, in later eras, political adepts or administrators, who act in ways that depend simultaneously on both roles. The limiting case of dual roles is where a scientist has sufficient personal wherewithal to serve as his own donor, not an uncommon occurrence in science until the last century. Tycho, for example, was a Danish nobleman, and this distinction enabled him to create an environment of scientific work that no commoner could have created. Such figures are also to be found in patterns of patronage of the last century and the present. In the early nineteenth century, William Maclure, who had made his fortune in London, financed his o~n geological work, operating, as a later observer put it, as a one-man scientific foundation (Merrill, 1924, pp. 32-33). Cases of patron-scientist ~yads were common in the nineteenth century. William Farr, the medical statistician, whose early life would have made a tempting story line for Dickens, is an example of the first pattern of pure patronage. He was born to poor parents but had as a personal patron a wealthy, childless country gentleman, who raised him, paid for his education, and bequeathed an income to enable him to attend medical school and establish a career. One might give the relation between Marx and Engels as another instance. Aristocratic patronage in early modern science generally involved single links between patron and scientist. As Westfall observes in his discussion ofGalileo,

The ultimate truth about what I have been calling the system of patronage is that it was not a system at all. It was a set of dyadic relations between patrons and clients, each of them unique. Patronage had "flo institutions and little if any formal strucmte-: It embodied no guarantees. The relation between patron and client was voluntary on both sides and subject always to disintegration. Past performance counted only to the extent that it promised more

Forms of Patronage 189

in the future. A client's only claim on a patron was his capacity to illuminate further the magnificence of the man who recognized his value and encouraged him. (Westfall, 1985, p. 329)

An enormous variety of paths from public patrons to scientists now exist, and the elements of trust that were bound together in these dyadic relations are now separated. They have not, however, disappeared. The general "contract" between the scientific community and its primary patron, the state,' and the individual relations of patronage embodied, for example, in particular grants or particular bureaucrats' personal relations to scientists are both uncheckable. The problem of uncheckability has been solved or managed in a variety of novel ways. Among them are the creation of new intermediary dyadic relations, notably between scientists and foundation officers and between scientist-administrators and politicians. The story of the development of these roles and the establishment of the trust these roles entail is the story of the transformation of the nonsystem described by Westfall into the complex system of patronage under which science is presently financed.

Establishment of Trust

The extensive deiegation of authority to make judgments, which characterizes present patronage in science, and the manner in which funds are awarded, prospectively rather than as a reward for past achievements, are both historically novel. The patronage device that predominated in the eighteenth century and earlier-the awarding of prizes, pensions, and benefices-avoided both. Rousseau's First Discourse was an entry into the competition for the prize of the Academy of Dijon. Johnson's pension, obtained through the efforts of his friends, was a reward for his Dictionary. Even Newton's position in the Mint was intended in part as a reward. In each of these cases the award was for past accomplishments and did not involve any particular expectations about the future contributions of the person receiving the award.

Boswell's recounting of the story of Johnson's pension makes precisely this distinction. Johnson was reluctant to accept a pension because of the implication that such an award was a "political bribe," a fair description of the contemporary practice of political patronage, as Johnson had himself stressed in his Dictionary. Johnson had to be assured by friends "that certainly the definitions in his Dictionary were not applicable to him" (Boswell, 1917, p. 89). His patron, as Boswell recalled, also reassured him: "Lord Bute said to him expressly, 'It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done.' His Lordship, he said, behaved in the handsomest manner. He repeated the words twice, that he might be sure Johnson heard them, and thus set his mind perfectly at ease" (89). Where the rewarded activity is complete at the moment of reward, as in this case or in prize giving, the dimension of expectation vanishes,


and one source of the necessity for trust vanishes. The decision itself, however, may involve delegation of judgment, as in the case of Johnson's friends.

In contemporary science, awards of the retrospective sort still serve a role, but a more modest one. Most of the money that changes hands in science today is given on the basis of promises: promises explicitly articulated in the form of a proposal or contract, the promise of future achievement implicit in past achievement, or, in the case of an institute with a particular applied tradition, the promise of continued service. These "promises" are peculiar in many respects. Their contents are not, strictly speaking, matters within the practical competence of the scientist, as the promise to deliver a rountinized product, such as an automobile, might be. The question of whether a particular line of research might lead to a cancer cure, for example, is thoroughly hypothetical, and while the experience of scientists may bear on anticipating the likelihood of "success" of a line of proposed work to a greater extent than the experience of practitioners or laymen, its bearing is nevertheless limited. Ev~n where it is retrospectively possible to see that a utilitarian result mtght have been achieved more directly or less expensively, it is characteristically not the case that these lessons may be generalized to other than closely related areas of research.' Indeed, retrospective narratives tend to take the adventitious and serendipitous as central to the story of discoveries. To be sure, these elements may be exaggerated for effect, because their effect is to strengthen the researcher's claims for autonomy. • Nevertheless, it is characteristic of science at the frontiers that the researcher faces a maze of research choices, many of which will be blind alleys, and between which there is no routinized means of decision. This large element of nonroutinized choice means that the evaluation of specific research strategies by specialists is difficult and by lay outsiders virtually impossible.

In these contexts, the delegation of judgment becomes a condition for the achievement of the patron's aims. The delegation of elements of discretion, on the basis of the patron's recognition of the uri.checkability of the promises, products, or judgments of scientists, has an important cons~quence. Scientists must sustain the belief on the part of patrons (and m the case of public patronage, of the public) that scientists use the discretion and the resources given them to the best advantage. They must do so by means the patron accepts. Where there are no other means, the patron necessarily relies on those parts of the scientific enterprise that can be most readily assessed, such as the details of bookkeeping, which the scientist regards as peripheral.

Attestation

The promissory character of modern patron-scientist relations alters the problem of trust. The decision to fund is based on prospective judgments, on the credibility of the promises. Credibility can be established, or partially

Forms of Patronage 191 established, in various ways, of which past achievement is only one. In the case of Johnson, we can observe the emerging role of third parties ':ho p~rsuade patrons to give. In time, this becomes elaborately institutionalized m the form of various practices of attestation-writing letters of recommendation or evaluations of projects or manuscripts submitted to journals. Making these attestations is a large part of the scientists' business as is their weighing and interpreting of the attestations of other scientists: In relation to nonscientists, the role of the "community of science" is often in part to attest, directly or indirectly, to the validating scientist!s personal merit or to the value of his or her achievements: for example, by election to professional society offices. The practices of the community may serve to provide benefits that the scientist can earn for his or her patron. Galileo named moons of Jupiter for his patrons and could do so with effect because this nomenclature was enforced within the community. He could not have done so had not the community observed certain internal customs in relation to priority. Galileo was intensely concerned with establishing priority for precisely this reason (Westfall, 1985).

Attestation, similarly, is a practice intrinsic to scientific work-in the form of endorsements, such as "take a look at this great paper by so and so"-that the patrons and their representatives came to employ. The necessity for attestation derives from the distribution of knowledge within th_e scientific community itself. A hypothetical scientific community so constituted that the role of attestation was minimized-where scientists never or rarely acted on the say-so of other scientists in making judgments of other scientists or their work-would be one in which scientists never relied on the specialized cognitive skills, training, and knowledge of others. The present distribution of knowledge itself precludes this: ignorance resulting from specialization forces scientists themselves to rely on judgments of others. When a scientist relies on the work or the attested judgments of others, this reliance is a kind of substitute for doing the work himself or informing himself sufficiently to make the judgment directly. The nonscientist is forced by even greater ignorance to rely on substitutes which often include such things as impressions of the meaning of position~ or titles in the world of science.

Means of making promises credible that can serve to supplement or substitute for attestation and past achievements may be categorized according to a feature that is characteristic of trust in professionals in various contexts, the property of metonymy. Metonyms are parts that signal something abo~t ':?oles. The "parts" in science are the visible signs of competence, rehabthty, and trustworthiness that make a promise credible. The importance of good bookkeeping has already been noted. The career of John Wesley Powell, whose efforts established the U.S. Geological Survey as a permanent government agency and who directed the Bureau of American Ethnology, was marked by episodes involving not only bookkeeping problems but also scandals. When his enemies in the Coast Survey created


an incident that culminated in a congressional inquiry, not only was Powell vindicated by an audit but the same auditors who praised Powell's books criticized the business practices of his enemies in the Coast Survey, leading to reforms that diminished the discretion granted to the Coast Survey. Scandals are important for similar reasons: they typically concern the wellunderstood part of the ill-understood whole. A scandal involving doctored Indian artifacts led, after Powell's death, to loss of control of the Bureau of American Ethnology by Powell's heir apparent and to tighter supervision of its operations.

In these cases the part, or metonym, that the patron understood was taken as a sign or symptom of the whole. The effects of what to the scientist are minor events, such as bookkeeping errors, are disproportionate because the part is taken by the public to represent the whole. Often the existence of a stable relationship of trust leads to a metonymic code. The relation between physician and patient is a banal instance of ritualized metonymic means of establishing trust in an "expert" relation: the patient cannot judge the adequacy of care or the veracity of the physician, so he or she is compelled to seek visible signs of competence· and concern, which in this case are practiced within the framework of an elaborate set of rituals involving such things as costume and demeanor, bedside manner, and pretended omniscience. These rituals formalize expectations, the violation of which is construed as a sign of untrustworthiness, incompetence, or imprudence: the portion of the physician's conduct which can be assessed is thus a sign of the whole which cannot. Conduct alone is ordinarily not enough, and it is supplemented by attestations to the competence of a physician, such as the diploma on an office wall o~ board certification by experienced physicians. In contrast to cases of bureaucratic accountability, these devices are negotiated-invented or adopted by physicians, but with an eye to the acceptance and use of these codes by relevant publics. Scientists rely on some of these same means, and in the case of science, as of medicine, the relevant metonyms were not simply given. Nor can they be ordained by the holders of authority or funds. The codes had to evolve, and this evolution involved learning both by patrons and by scientists: the scientists learned how to conduct themselves in a manner that satisfied the expectations of their patrons with respect to visible signs; the patrons learned ways of recognizing scientific merit and trustworthiness.

The metonymic code is often complex, with a large number of "dialects" or specialized variants. To know what a particular honor, journal publication, or grant "means" is often an esoteric interpretive skill, but one demanded by the administration of academic organizations and funding agencies. If we consider that the use of visible signs is a substitute for accountability in the senses familiar to us in other kinds of organized modes of the delegation of discretion, the reason for the diversity of codes is evident. Different relations of patron to scientist themselves evolve special systems of signs, the mastery of which is central for aspiring grantsman


and aspiring foundation officer alike. The codes differ across countries and between and within particular agencies.

When crises of accountability arose in the early history of the U.S. Coast Survey, a mixed applied-basic research institution, scientists had no means of assuring their congressional supervisors that they were working productively. The committee appointed to look into the Coast Survey sent a man who, according to the scientist-director, "measured the map with a foot rule, like an undertaker, to make a coffin for a dead body" (Dupree, 1957, p. 53). At a crucial political moment, the survey more or less accidentally discovered a commercially useful pass in the New York harbors, and the production of this kind of result served as the basis of a more successful relationship. Survey scientists learned to produce and exhibit achievements of this sort, as well as to produce a tangible product-usable maps (p. 54). By routinizing the expectations of congressional patrons, in this case by fixing on certain metonyms, objects, and results which were themselves useful and which could be regularly produced, they secured for themselves a significant degree of autonomy and freedom from hostile scrutiny.

In later years, this special relationship led to a failure to attend to the need to reform business practices that in turn created a new crisis of accountability when the auditors examined the books of the Coastal Survey. The phenomenon is not exceptional. Cyclical crises of trust are characteristic of such patronage relations and may lead to changes in their form or in the system of metonyms by which trust is secured. The cancer crusade arose from a crisis over the expectations of a cure, which basic researchers had used to justify their use of discretion. Present crises over the usefulness of science in Britain reflect a similar problem. The naive presumption of an automatic relationship between aggregate technological (and therefore economic) development and investment in basic research on which earlier decision-making was based, as the Japanese case has proven, is false. Scientists have been compelled to search for other, more concrete modes of reassurance.

Personal Relations

Bureaucracy limits the discretionary power of particular officeholders but does not abolish discretion. The bureaucratic machine, as conceived by Weber, is an instrument to be used in accordance with the discretion that has been retained at the top of the hierarchy or in the nonbureaucratic organizations or personages who empower bureaucracies-parliaments, monarchs, or ersatz monarchs. The retention of discretion at the top involves scientists in what C. P. Snow calls "court politics'" (Snow, 1961, pp. 63-66), the politics of personal clientelism. In the coteries of the powerful we encounter the ubiquitous figure of the scientist who is also a member of the world of the patrons. The historical forms of court politics change:


in the 1880s, American scientists went to the White House as friends of the president; today's presidential science adviser, with "access" to presidential aides, is a substitute.

Personal relations may sometimes be quickly formed and kept up quite apart from the established codes and rituals of patron-scientist relations. They may constitute a means by which judgments, ideas, and the like may be conveyed and standards and expectations shared between an expert and a powerful novice. Analogues to court politics may also be found at lower levels, and indeed personal relationships between nonscientist agency administrators and scientists sometimes persist throughout the career of each and to the benefit of both. Weak ties, or personal relations that are little more than mutual acquaintanceships, may be important as well. In Powell's era as director of the Geological Survey, there was a perennial shortage of young men to dance with the daughters of congressmen at social events. Powell's unmarried employees were informally commanded to make up the deficiency, with the expectation that appropriations for the survey would benefit.

Scientists with independent membership in elite groups have been historically important. The rise in esteem of the academic profession in Germany is sometimes attributed to the respectability which von Savigny, an Alsatian nobleman, brought to university teaching by becoming a professor of the history of law in the early 1800s. In England, science was legitimated by the presence of "gentlemen of science," in Morrell and Thackray's phrase (1981), and these gentlemen had a special role in patronage, mediating between the politically important aristocrats and scientists who sought help. In the United States, there were similar patterns; Stephen van Rensselaer, the inheritor of the privileges and the (legally abolished but popularly used) Dutch aristocratic title of patroon of Albany, was a member of the local scientific community, a patron of its schools, and the source of the political influence that turned the State of New York into a significant patron of geology and paleontology; Agassiz married into a wealthy Boston family; the Sheffield School was named for and financed by way of a marriage to the daughter of a railroad magnate. These relationships shade into others. The Indiana geologist David Dale Owen's older brother, a state legislator and later a congressman, was instrumental in obtaining the support on which Owen's early career depended. The early part of the twentieth century saw a new social type, the foundation officer, who served as a trusted intermediary between the wealthy donors and the world of science (Geiger, 1986).

The proportion of prominent scientists whose fathers were wealthy is lower now than it was in the nineteenth century, but in some ways the old regime persists: to get on the first rung of the scientific ladder generally requires the families (parents, more recently wives, and even more recently husbands) to contribute to tuition and living expenses through the some-


times long and uncertain years in which the aspiring scientist is not fully self-sufficient. In the United States, by the sixties, this burden had partly shifted to government patronage, fellowships and assistantships, which were mediated by universities and lab chiefs. Private support became infra dignitatem at levels beyond graduate school. One reason for this is the role of competitive awards in the process of attestation. Having been the recipient of previous awards is a form of certification and is treated as such by scientists, who give past awards a prominent place in those contexts in which they display other certifications of scientific accomplishment.

The laundry list of devices l have included under the heading of "the establishment of trust"-attestation, metonyms, and the extrascientific relations to which scientists are sometimes party, such as kinship, friendship, and gentlemanly conduct-are not mutually exclusive; they occur historically in various combinations. Sometimes they are intersubstitutable, as when friendship helps establish the same result as attestation. Sometimes they assist one another, as, for example, an appointment at a prominent university has the effect of certifying the attestations of a scientist. Attestation, the most pervasive device in U.S. science, often parallels and reinforces other devices. Retrospective awards play their primary contemporary role in serving to underwrite attestations or promises. The recommendations of a Nobel laureate, paralleling or certifying the promises of a young scientist, together with the visible signs of the young scientist's own prowess, give a patron grounds for deciding to patronize one scientist or project rather than another. Sometimes the various means of establishing trust support one another in series: the grounds for trust in, for example, the promise of a postdoctoral student depends on attestations of a mentor, and the attestations of the mentor are believed because the mentor has visible signs of quality or has been attested to by some peer process, such as election to an academy, which in turn has procedures that give a particular meaning to the fact of election, and so on. A curriculum vitae is a microcosm of the lower levels of the world of trust establishment which scientists inhabit. The world of high-level patronage, of court politics, is of course not wholly separable from this, but differs; personal impressions and other codes play a larger role.

The Bias toward Mixed Institutions

A large proportion of science funding reflects purely utilitarian aims, which the sponsor has determined can best be achieved through the delegation of some discretion to scientists or to "mixed" institutions, such as universities, that are patronized because it is believed that this kind of patronage is a better means of producing a desired outcome (Finn, 1976-77; Turner, 1987). Investment in "basic" medical research and in institutions that are partially concerned with such research, for example, may be believed to


be a better means of achieving given goals, such as cures for dread diseases, than direct investment in clinical research. Smaller donors, faced with a choice between extensive investment in information necessary to give money in a way that assures some set of utilitarian aims-for example, by a direct grant to a cancer therapist-and a direct investment in a trusted institution, such as a medical school, will prefer the institution. The beliefs on which these judgments are made must be sustained, and they may be more readily sustained where the so-called mystery element of science is presented in relation to the larger purposes of an institution with less mysterious products or consequences. University press officers know that pictures of patients being treated by fancy medical equipment are worth any number of scientifically significant experiments in raising funds from the public.

In the history of U.S. government support for science, the "contract" between science and government has usually involved a variety of purposes. Legislators have primarily had utilitarian motives. To get financial support, scientists promised or encouraged politicians to believe that funding science would produce useful results. The fundamental "contract" between science and its largest patron, then, has always involved a problem of trust over the validity of these promises. American national political and administrative traditions give this problem a specific form: the direct delegation of decisions, as in the ideal bureaucratic system Weber describes, is rare as a result of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. Considerations of value for money are ultimately the responsibility-and perhaps the primary responsibility-of legislators. Executive conduct normally can be checked more or less adequately by checking expendit!Jres; science cannot be adequately assessed in this way, particularly with respect to quality and competence. Moreover, scrutiny of decisions to spend money on one project in science rather than another is extremely difficult. Only for a few technical decisions, such as major weapons systems decisions, is there a sufficiently diverse community of technical opinion that public discussion by competitors and adversaries is possible, and here the relevant information may be secret. ln a typical area ofresearch science, the relevant community is too small, its members too intimately bound, to produce the same sort of adversarial discussion, although in exceptional circumstances it may occur. j

Legislators are torn with respect to direct interference with funding. On one hand they want clear policy, because only with clear policy can the conduct of agencies (and therefore the delegation of executive authority and funding for which Congress is primarily responsible) be monitored. But they would prefer that scientists themselves develop such policies (Fuqua and Walgren, 1982). ln the absence of such policy, legislative monitoring of science typically focuses on the checks legislators can· best use: the paperwork devices that bureaucracies create to check the conduct of


t~eir emp~oyees ~nd ~he t~s~imony evaluating the activities of science agencies that IS pubhcly mtelhg1ble and oriented to consumer audiences such as science education, or activities that involve smaller consumer co~munities, such as the community of medical therapists, the military, or industry. In the latter ~ases •. the familiar adversarial relationships of liberal politics replace techmcal disputes between experts or at least transform them into policy disputes by bringing the practical consequences of decisions and the affected persons into the discussions. Legislators generally prefer to avoid technical disputes, and this is one reason for legislative willingness to finance research and development through tax expenditures (i.e., deductions and credits), which constitute an enormous but generally ignored portion of present-day science and technology funding.

For these same reasons, the university was converted into a major vehicle of patronage. The university was and remains a vehicle for patronage with a self-policing character. It is governed by purposes other than pure research, and it can be at least crudely assessed by these purposes. To be sure, scientists have often found the larger tasks of universities to be burdensome. Gauss complained of his lecturing duties in nineteenth-century Germany. University scientists in the United States established from the start a pattern of exceptionalism, in which the burden of lectures that fell on the rest of the faculty would be lightened. But "lightened" is not "eliminated," and the university did not become a satisfactory vehicle for the patronage of scientific research until the creation of research universities.

Nevertheless, research universities, with scientific training among their mixed aims, were dependent on consumer demand. They could not have justified their expenditures for the training of scientists had there been no opportunities for scientific employment. The connection between the two was evident from the beginnings of government science. The patron of the earliest American institution to concentrate on scientific training, Stephen van Rensselaer, was also eager to promote public research projects. The New York geological survey in fact provided employment for a large proportion of the early graduates of his school.

Other kinds of mixed institutions have absorbed the bulk of science funding within the federal government itself. The U.S. Naval Observatory, the primary government research institution in nineteenth-century American astronomy, was typical of early patterns of military authority and funding for science. It mixed routine astronomic work of a military kind with "pure" astronomy done in the spare time available to its scientists. Here, the pace and character of routine work permitted some original scientific work of distinction. The Army explorations of the West provided many geologists access to new domains and publication support as part of the official publications of the expeditions. The Coast Survey and later the Geological Survey were the first large civilian scientific mission agencies.


Each provided employment to scientists and enabled many of them to make contributions to "pure" science. The differently structured system of federal agricultural research afforded similar opportunities.

Authority and Autonomy

As Price (1984) observed, preexisting political practice, such as the separation of powers, is perhaps the ultimate source of the contrast between British and American civil services in respect to the fashion in which discretion is exercised. Such practices determine quite different possibilities for scientists and the manner in which they can be patronized. The contrasting histories of the Ordnance Survey, which began as a gentlemanly favor and continued to resemble one (see Rudwick, 1985), and the U.S. Geological Survey, which John Wesley Powell made into a small political empire by constructing alliances with a number of diverse constituencies (Turner, 1987), are a case in point.• But scientists themselves contribute to the organizational traditions under which they operate, primarily by contributing to the creation of what I will call "nodes" of delegated discretionary power. To describe this process, it will be necessary to introduce some descriptive categories. The categories may be thought of as dimensions of the distribution of discretion. Consider Fan's Dickensian boyhood patron. He might have granted money to the schoolmaster to give to a promising boy and delegated the decision of whom to choose. Instead, he reserved the power of decision to himself. In contrast, complex systems parcel the power of decision into a great many parts, some of ~hich are very small. One dimension of the parcelization of decision-making discretion may be called delegation. The transfer of funds or decision-making power from patron to scientist is ordinarily in stages in which a particular office or person holds a particular set of funds or powers which are in turn delegated to other offices or persons. The term division may be reserved for cases where aspects or parts of the power of decision are separated, so that a decision at any level requires the consent of other persons or offices.

The decision to judge a proposal meritorious on scientific grounds is part of a long sequence of stages between the ultimate patron, such as the taxpayer, and the scientist. A peer-review committee is charged with the task of rating proposals and thus has power, but of a very limited sort. In the first place, it is power delegated from the limited set of powers that has been delegated to some office of a funding organization. In the second place, the power is divided: each member of the committee has only one vote or one voice among several. In addition, there is a division between aspects of a decision at the same stage: the budgetary details of a grant proposal or the financial operations of an institute may be subject


to the scrutiny of an auditor or contract officer who makes assessments and decisions apart from any consideration of scientific merit.

Centralization and Its Discontents

Patronage arrangements vary enormously in the ways in which they delegate and divide decision-making. The practice of many countries is to fund institutes, charge them with goals that are loosely articulated, and grant decision-making authority to the head of the institute, who is then held politically responsible. The head in turn grants discretion and with it particular amounts of funds to individual employees who pursue research topics approved by the head; to subheads who delegate discretion or grant funds to other individuals or subunits; to a procedure of evaluating competing proposals by committees, sometimes composed of outsiders; or directly to persons employed by the institute who are given the discretion over the uses to which the funds are to be applied. Grants of discretion that allow someone who is patronized to patronize others in turn (for example, by hiring other researchers) are now common. These relations may be called "subpatronage."

Centralized forms of patronage have generally been regarded with suspicion in liberal regimes. In 1884, the congressional commission charged with looking into the organization of scientific work of the federal government had this lesson held up before them by Senator Hilary Herbert, whose views in turn reflected those of certain influential scientists, such as Alexander Agassiz. By the device of centralized public patronge, according to Herbert, "Louis XIV stifled independent thought, and repressed the spirit of individual enterprise; ... science and literature were put in bondage, and reduced to a state of abject servility" (U.S. Senate Report, 1886, p. 95).

The specific object of Herbert's criticism was the position held by John Wesley Powell, the Bismarck of nineteenth-century science funding. The legal position Powell occupied as head of the Geological Survey did in fact centralize authority in his hands, as Powell himself stressed:

The statute provides that "the scientific employes [sic] of the Geological Survey shall be selected by the Director, subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, exclusively for their qualifications as professional experts." The provisions of this statute apply to all those cases where scientific men are employed who have established a reputation, and in asking for their appointment the Director specifically states his reasons, setting forth the work in which the person is to be employed, together with his qualifications, especially enumerating and characterizing his published works. On such recommendations appointments are invariably made. Young men who have not established a reputation in scientific research, are selected through the agency of the Civil Service Commission on special examination,


the papers for which are prepared in the Geological Survey .... It will be seen that the Director is responsible for the section of the employes, directly for those whom he recommends for appointment, and indirectly for those selected by the Civil Service Commission, as he permanently retains in the work. If, then, improper persons are employed, it is wholly the Director's fault. (Powell, 1885b, pp. 101-12).

Herbert called this a "geological dictatorship" and expressed the fear that this concentration of authority would eliminate "individual enterprise" in American geology:

The Director of our Geological Survey has a corps of topographers, geologists, paleontologists, chemists, &c., numbering over 150 in regular employment; all, no doubt, to use a phrase well known to Bureau officials, "loyal to their chief." Besides these he has the 69 aides above catalogued, scattered about over the Union. When all these are sustained by the Government treasury, is there any room in this field for individual enterprise?

If not, then all American geology must be under one man, whose favor must be retained, whose theories must be sustained, and so there can be no independent thought. Monopoly that gives absolute control, that puts in the hands of one the power to say who and who only shall pursue geology profitably, will most assuredly put science in bondage, and its votaries, ~n the language of Buckle, to "scrambling in miserable rivalry for the morbtd favors of a court.'' (U.S. Senate Report, 1886, p. 95).

Many scientists shared Herbert's anxiety over this concentration of power. But many more of them also accepted it because power was concentrated in the hands of a scientist. For many scientists, this solved a problem of the delegation of authority by institutionalizing a wall separating science from the medding of politicians.

The most extreme pure science advocates of the era tended to stress the issue of "control by a scientist" to the exclusion of considerations of the problems of centralization. They held that "the ideal appropriation for a scientific bureau would be granted as a lump sum, marked simply 'for research,' and its expenditure would be entrusted to a professional scientist in charge of the bureau" (quoted in Daniels, 1967, p. 1704). Propaganda for such a bureau tacitly assumed that the evils of the present system were solely the result of not having a scientist in charge who would be free to spend money and subpatronize as he saw fit. Such a model was of course open to all the objections made against Powell's directorship, and it had the additional difficulty that Congress would not at that time have entrusted a significant amount of money to such a bureau. Moreover, scientists did not agree on this organizational idea, and their objections raised in contemporary discussions about patronage proposals show why. In the late 1870s, scientists of the Naval Observatory hoped to build a new observatory, better equipped and better located. To their chagrin,


the National Academy of Sciences began propagandizing for a change in the authority under which the observatory operated, a change that would give control to "those who have made astronomy their life work" (quoted in Dupree, 1957, p. 186). Scientists in the Naval Observatory asked the nonscientist head of the observatory, John Rodgers, to respond to this proposal, and he made plain their objections. The proposal, he said, might "mean that the professorships are to be thrown into the arena of politics, to be contended for by the political athlete" (Rodgers, 1878, p. 1). This was, so to speak, the view from below: to be subordinated to a scientist who had managed to obtain the position by political means was not necessarily better than supervision by a nonscientist, and was perhaps worse. The "political athletes" they had in mind were indeed unpleasant characters, and their fears were well justified.

Supervision by an appropriate nonscientist who would rely on the advice of scientists was a solution to the problem of the self-interest of rival scientists. Referring to the distinguished work of scientists in his own agency, Rodgers asked:

Was Professor Newcomb directed to make his investigations of the moon, and to do work for which he was elected to the French Academy? Was Professor Hall directed to see the satellites of Mars. for which the Lalande prize has been awarded by the French Academy? Evidently professional astronomers, viz., themselves directed their valuable researches to the ends reached. Would these gentlemen have done better under a scientific superintendent, possibly a rival? (Rodgers, 1878, p. 2)

Other difficulties are created by the fact that the qualities necessary for good science and good administration are not the same. To the NAS proposal that "the superintendence of the institution shall be assigned to the ablest astronomer who will accept the position,'' Rodgers responded:

This is begging the question. Scientific men are not agreed among themselves that they make the best administrators. In any event, their science is lost in their new way avocations, and thus these new avocations, when accepted by men of the highest talent, may be an injury to the world and to themselves. (Rodgers, 1878, p. 3) ·

Rodgers accepted part of the reasoning of the NAS: the idea of a Board of Visitors to supervise the institution. But he considered this to be sufficient to ensure the scientific quality of the work of the institution, which was governed by other constraints that arose from its applied mission.

The scientist who is simultaneously a "political athlete" was a familiar model to scientists of the day. The history of American science in the thirty years preceding the observatory dispute was filled with conspiracies by well-connected scientists and self-serving cliques. The idea of control of science by scientists was frequently a shield for these cliques. But there


were other politically successful scientists. F. V. Hayden, University of Pennsylvania geologist, had great success in financing geology through government patronage.

Hayden and Rodgers agreed on two key organizational issues: that the centralization of government authority in the hands of single scientists was deleterious to science because it limited the scope for individual initiative, and that the funding of pure science in the fashion envisioned by the NAS was politically unrealistic. Rodgers pointed to the successful precedent of mixed practical and pure astronomic institutions. "Research is not the purpose of Greenwich. To research it does not owe its useful~~ss nor its hold upon appropriations which are made to meet the necessities of England's commercial greatness" (Rodgers, 1878, p. 2). The proposal in the NAS circular, in contrast, "would not obtain the funds necessary to carry it out" (Rodgers, 1878, p. 2). The geological work under Hayden similarly included a great deal that was immediately comprehensible to congressmen and highly useful to the public. Hayden pointed to the tradition of state geological surveys, the sources of some of the earliest American scientific successes, which were also useful.

A place for personal initiative was preserved both in Hayden's and Rodgers's practice. For Hayden, the locus of autonomy was in the relation between the field scientist and Congress. In survey geology, he believed, quality work could be done only "where the leader of the survey is himself an ardent worker in geology and science generally, as he is better able to judge of the work to be performed, and as he urges forward all his scientific assistants by the force of his example and enthusiasm" (U.S. House Report, 1874, p. 7). Field geology demanded that a high degree of authority be delegated to survey chiefs. The leader "must of necessity go upon the ground, and, to be successful, must organize his own corps, distribute the work, from his own plan, and have full control of the entire operations" (p. 8). Hayden's insistence· on the de facto centrality of the field leader led him to reject any structure that would constrain him, as a field leader, and specifically to reject the superficially appealing idea of a single bureau devoted to geology. The scientist should be able to create and propose projects that could be presented to politicians in competition with other expenditures of the government. These would be decided, as all expenditures were, on their merit. No single scientist should decide who could present proposals to Congress.

In practice, few scientists were "political athletes"-or scientist-politicians of Hayden's political caliber-and this meant that much of the actual employment of scientists was a matter of subpatronage. In Hayden's case, he served as the scientist directly accountable to Congress. Yet any other scientist could go to Congress for funding, and several did so successfully. The various western geological surveys of the 1870s competed for funding in this fashion. If a geologist was able to obtain sufficient funds, he too could create a structure in which other scientists could be subpatronized.

Forms of Patronage 203 In the Naval Observatory, the scope for personal initiative was secured

by the practice of the administrator himself, who dealt personally with the senior scientists, accepted their advice, and reconciled their differences over decisions affecting the observatory. The observatory's success depended on the ability of the administrator to work with his scientists, and in this crucial but de facto sense he was accountable to them. Individual initiative was possible because any astronomer could go to the administrator and present his ideas and request time to work on them. Where resources were insufficient, this was impossible, and in the case of many observatories constructed in the United States during the nineteenth century, original investigation was impossible (Miller, 1970). The record of the Naval Observatory was a good one in this respect, but as Rodgers pointed out, the resources were available only because the primary mission of the observatory-practical astronomy-commanded the interest of the Navy Department and was funded as part of its needs.

Powell had a more subtle resolution of the potential conflicts that arose from delegation to a centralized authority. Powell had argued for the necessity of delegation on the ground of special knowledge:

A scientific institution or bureau operating under government authority can be controlled by statute and by superior administrative authority but to a limited extent. These operations are practically carried on by specialists, and they can be controlled only in their financial operations and in the general purposes for which investigations are made. Their methods of investigation are their own, originate with themselves, and are carried out by themselves. (Powell, l885b, p. 93)

But he argued that the necessity for de jure autonomy of a bureau vis-a-vis higher authorities did not produce de facto dictatorship. The power of the director, he argued, is limited by the distribution of knowledge within the bureau and the redelegation of discretion that this distribution necessitates. The role of the director, as Powell put it, cannot be to "lay out the work for his assistants in detail" (1885a, p. 25), because

the plans of the work prosecuted by an organization for scientific research must originate with the experts and specialists who are themselves engaged in the investigation, and the most important function which the director of such an institution has to perform lies in the selection of the proper men, the specialists who have a genius for research. (Powell, 1885a, pp. 25-26)

Powell cited another de facto constraint that served to make him, as director, accountable to

an unofficial authority which, though not immediately felt, ultimately steps in to approve or condemn, viz: the body of scientific men of the country; and though their authority is not exercised antecedently and at every stage of the work, yet it is so potent that no national scientific institution can


grow and prosper without their approval, but must sooner or later fall and perish unless sustained by their strong influence. (Powell, 1885b, p. 93)

Thus for Powell the directorship was not a dictatorship but a concentration of specific limited powers, such as the power of selecting personnel. These powers were subject to two constraints: the de facto necessity of delegating much of the authority to specialists and the necessity of securing the approval of the national scientific community.

Nodal Points

The Powell case illustrates some basic features of patronage structures. Powell was a dual-role figure, a scientist on good personal terms with politicians, including President Garfield. His seizure of discretion was accepted, although not without objections and anxiety on the part of some geologists, as a solution to a more serious evil: the quasi-feudal system of subpatronage that had developed in the Hayden era. The older system vested enormous discretion in politically adept survey heads, who competed by inventing whole surveys-each defining different territory, methods, objectives, and administrative details, including departmental sponsorship-and who appealed directly to congressional or bureaucratic allies for appropriations. But these arrangements were prone to corruption, for they were dependent on alliances with powerful academics and politicians. It is not surprising that several government scientific institutions had been caught making sloppy disbursements, as the Coastal Survey had, and using appointments as political patronage, a tactic of Hayden's. Powell, by defining appointments and disbursements as the primary powers of the director, took personal responsibility for these politically sensitive areas of decisionmaking. He also put himself at the mercy of potential critics in the sCientific community. Powell had to gain the trust of the scientists with whom he dealt, something he did by his visible personal rectitude and by avoiding partisanship in scientific disputes. The one rivalry he could not avoid contributed to his downfall as director of the survey.

Powell's person was interposed between the decision-making of the patrons (who judged surveys on their promised benefits) and scientists (who judged geologists on their competence). To the patrons he said, in effect, "I will take discretionary power over appointments," while to the scientists he said, in effect, that he would use this power fairly. This is a simple but crucial case of the creation of division in one link in the chain of discretionary power. Acknowledging that the director de facto divided his discretionary authority with, or rested it upon, the judgment of the scientific community meant that he based his position on the collective assent of scientists, assent that could be withdrawn. The concession was simple Realpolitik. The patrons' trust in Powell's use of this discretion and the trust on which the delegation of discretion was based could be undermined

1 Forms of Patronage 205

or preserved by scientists outside the bureau. The scientists could, as they had in the course of earlier disputes, attest to Congress or the executive for or against him.

Powell had, and implemented, an expansive interpretation of the concept of a survey. The discretion he maintained depended on the ability of the survey to produce visible results, which satisfied his patrons that the money was not misspent; to account precisely for the expenditures in the face of scrutiny; and to command the attestations of scientists. But he lost funding when he came into conflict with western politicians over a policy dispute having to do with the arid lands. The scientific part of the dispute was over the idea that cultivation would cure aridity, that "rain follows the plow," and the hope that extensive irrigation, relying on artesian wells, could make the arid regions cultivable. Powell ultimately was proved correct scientifically and largely correct on the point of policy. But politics is lived in the short term. Hostile politicians punished him by reducing appropriations to the survey. The lesson was not lost on later scientist-administrators, who saw that self-imposed limits on their policy role would protect their agencies.

In the history of patronage, the concentration of discretionary power in particular individuals or in particular relationships of trust and delegation has persisted, although the locus of discretion has varied. In what follows I will call the points at which significant discretion may be exercised "nodes." In the case of Powell, the directorship was a node in which a great deal of discretionary power resided. The peer-review system exemplifies a later stage in the historical process of redistributing discretion. Powell's authority was personal; peer review is a means of delegating discretion that is accepted by scientists as a policy. The policy does not force administrators to defend decisions personally (something Powell's position compelled him to do). Discretion is delegated, not only de facto but also de jure, to lower levels. The analogue }o Powell in the grant proposal-lab chief system of present American biomedical research is the lab chief. The lab chief is patronized, and subpatronizes in turn. The great figures in the lab chief system have considerable powers-they subpatronize by hiring assistants and postdoctoral students and they have-considerable abilities, including political abilities within the system of patronage, for which such terms as grantsmanship have been devised. Often they have more straightforward political talents, such as the ability to present themselves and their work to the publics with which they must deal, including science writers, foundation officers, even individual donors. Of all the persons in the chain of delegation, the lab chief exercises the greatest discretion. His or her de facto autonomy flows from the fact that there is no single person or office to whom appeals must be made. Patronage supporting the lab chief flows from multiple sources-the university, where it may primarily take the form of legitimation and guarantees of employment and other practical support, and various governmental and private agencies


and grant programs that support projects. No individual, among either the patrons or the subpatrons, has comparable powers, as a result of division: the peer review system means that no single person in the agency decides on a proposal. That grants go to specific principal investigators rather than to departments or institutions means that the institutions have a strong interest in the grant-getting success of the lab chief. Not surprisingly, biomedical scientists cling to the proposal-peer review system. It is the source of their discretionary power; to abandon it would be to shift discretion to chairs, deans, presidents, or institute heads.

There is perhaps no intrinsic reason why delegations of discretion requiring trust should be concentrated in nodes. If we consider those historical instances of bureaucratic organization in which a great deal of discretion has existed in the hands of minor officials, such as the Prussian bureaucracy, some practical reasons become evident. If in the Prussian civil service the discipline of formal administrative accountability was limited, it was replaced by the informal discipline of the shared culture of the class that staffed the bureaucracy and by the special political culture of the Junkers who held these positions. In science, the character of the shared culture is, as a consequence of specialization, necessarily far more diffuse. The strength of the culture of science is in its local disciplinary or subdisciplinary settings.

Trust is usually given first to persons and later becomes routinized. Powell's nodal role was transitory. His authority expanded as a result of the expansion of the projects under him, while the office he occupied retained the degree of freedom exercised by field party leaders such as Hayden. His successors operated under additional bureaucratic constraints, imposed as a consequence of specific events, as in the case of Powell's foray into irrigation policy. In any event, Powell was so successful that it was impossible to find a successor who could wear his many hats. One condition for maintaining a node is the reproducibility of the relationships and of the combinations of traits needed by their occupants.

The list of nodal relationships may be readily extended. In the older agricultural experiment station system, there always was a person who had the responsibility of directly dealing with legislative patrons and also held the power of appointment and of selecting projects. Several of them were larger-than-life personages who managed to move simultaneously in political and scientific worlds securing both comfortable funding and considerable freedom of action. From 1891 to 1907 the University of Wisconsin was blessed with an Agricultural School dean, William A. Henry, who, as professor in 1881, had persuaded the state legislature to give the first appropriation for research in the history of the university (Curti and Carstensen, 1949, pp. 378-79). This gave rise to perhaps the most successful American agricultural research center. As dean, Henry was a fabled lobbyist. He appeared before legislative committees and farmers in his work


garb of boots and overalls. As a subpatronizer he was also adept. He possessed an "uncanny gift for making the right appointments" to positions in the school (Curti and Carstensen, 1949, p. 380). The best of these, Stephen Babcock, provided the basis of what was perhaps the most important American scientific achievement of the early twentieth century: Elmer McCollum's discovery of vitamins, which grew out of work on cattle feed that McCollum had done as a young scientist at the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station.

The Groves-Oppenheimer relationship and the Lindemann-Churchill relationship (Snow, 1961) were both nodal relations that had enormous historical significance. The personal element in both relationships resolved many problems of uncheckability. Churchill recognized explicitly that personal relations solved problems that arose when the distribution of power and money did not match the distribution of knowledge. Professor R. V. Jones recalled that

Sir Winston Churchill once remarked to me that Socrates had said that there could be good government only when kings were philosophers and philosophers were kings. Sir Winston regarded his wartime relations with scientists as achieving this end: his was the power and ours the philosophy. (Quoted in Shils, 1962, p. 103)

Churchill was right about the structure of the problem but wrong about Lindemann's merits,' and that is why the relationship was not reproduced with other prime ministers. In both of these cases, as with Powell, the relationships proved transitory and they were replaced by more complex structures. In the case of nuclear weapons research, the replacements included dual-role figures, such as a large number of military officers trained as nuclear scientists (a type that had not previously existed) who were distributed at various levels of the organization of weapons work.

Some Implications

The delegation of discretion creates distributions of discretion in which different persons have discretionary powers of different kinds and to different extents. In patronage, the delegation of discretion or funds flows primarily from patron to scientist, but it flows in other directions as well. Scientists delegate discretion to decision-makers such as Powell and to decisionmaking processes such as peer review, which they legitimate by their consent and participation. When Powell publicly recognized the approval of the larger community of scientists as a central de facto constraint on his actions, he recognized the delegative character of this relationship. The complex modes of distributing authority in the "system" of patronage in science reflect and exhibit a central sociological phenomenon: the match and mismatch between the distribution of discretion and the distribution


of knowledge. The ways of patronized science include its reliance on committees, attestations, metonymic codes for assessing scientific or technical merit, and nodes of discretion far from sources of funds. In these social relationships, checkability cannot be assumed by the delegator of discretion, and trust must be substituted. The kind of trust, however, is specific to relations which are themselves highly specialized: they vary according to discipline or scientific specialization, local bureaucratic or academic traditions, and the particular place in the chain from patron to scientist.

Systems of patronage are resolutions of the mismatch between the distribution of discretion and the distribution of knowledge. The discrepancy itself results from prior distributions of power and funds in the hands of nonscientists; specialized knowledge is distributed among a large number of specialized scientists whose work can be best judged in small and often very intimate intellectual communities. A series of acts of delegation, some of which will be largely uncheckable, must take place to redistribute funds and discretion to these scientists. The system of patronage regularizes these delegations and makes for results that are, from the point of view of the aims of the patron, more predictable or successful. Success and the incidental creation of new utilities create new or stronger motives for the patrons to delegate.

f In the case of science, the mismatch is made visible by the absence ! of specialized scientific knowledge on the part of patrons and political I authorities and by the absence of independent authority and funds on the i part of scientists. But a less visible form of this mismatch is characteristic

of modern technology-dependent organizations generally. This essay began with a tacit assumption of Weber's about the distribution of knowledge"knowledge" construed· in the fashion of the new sociology of .science, to include not only information but cognitive skills and tacit knowledgeand noted that this assumption failed to fit many modern business organizations. Our conclusions about science can be extended to these organizations. If, in the patronage of science, the tendency to replace personal relations with rationalized bureaucratic structures found limits, we may suppose that these limits are shared with other organizations in which the delegation of authority must, as a consequence of the distribution of knowledge, rest on trust.

Habermas's anxiety about the political implications of trust in "experts" presupposes that the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power can be collapsed one into the other. The society Habermas fears is one that the Saint-Simonians regarded as necessitated by modern technology and regarded as the emergent polity. But both the ideal and the nightmare are an illusion. "Expert" is not a homogeneous social category. The utilization of special expertise is a matter of special and complex social and organizational forms, which often, as we have seen, must be filled by persons with special combinations of personal traits and cognitive skills.


Not uniformity but diversity, reinforced by the diversity of preexisting political traditions, characterizes the patterns that have emerged. No variety of sociological reductionism fits these patterns: knowledge is not power, and power as it appears in a technologically sophisticated world cannot be fully exercised without heavy reliance on forms of human relations that do not reduce to relations of power but to trust.

The successes of Japanese technology and of the highly personalized forms of organizational relations in which this technology has developed suggest a different historical conjecture. Some organizational cultures, political cultures, and perhaps national cultures may lack the traits that enable people to sustain these relationships. Some cultures may prove to be uncompetitive in a world in which the relevant knowledge takes the form of rapidly changing specialized cognitive skills. Among the most familiar manifestations of conflict between authority and knowledge are those that arise when the possession of new skills, such as computer skills, are concentrated among younger persons whose authority is limited. Such conflicts are not easily resolved. In particular, they cannot be resolved by granting authority to those with "the skills," for there are also "managerial" skills, which these persons may not possess. Indeed, they are certain not to: command of the cognitive and political skills of traditional hierarchical management is acquired slowly and as a result of practical experience.

American business today underinvests in research and development by an extraordinary margin, preferring less profitable forms of investment where management can be done by the numbers or through similar impersonal modes of control. This suggests that we may be observing a triumph of rationalization over rationality. Weber taught us to appreciate such ironies and to expect them as incidents in the larger process of rationalization, but not to expect them to slow the process itself. In this he may have profoundly erred. Some modes of rationalization may be irreproducible without a large element of the personal. The invention of new rationalizing devices themselves may require forms of personal relations that are impossible to rationalize, and specialized forms of rationalization, such as those of science and those of management and finance, may require fundamentally different kinds of personal and intellectual culture.

NOTES

I. Discussions of trust may be found in Barber (1983) and Luhmann (1979). My discussion of trust is generally consistent with these treatments but is not dependent on the specific theses advanced in either text.

2. The use of this concept of a contract is discussed by Prewitt (1982). 3. There are systematic reasons for this arising from the distribution of knowledge


itself, as I have pointed out elsewhere. The larger uses to which science is put ordinarily involve practical and administrative conditions that scientists are likely to be less cognizant of, and therefore make more serious errors about, than others (Turner, 1989).

4. Examples of this use can be found in Rettig ( 1977; e.g., p. II). 5. Even when accounts of these disputes do appear in the press, it is rarely

the case that the public can decide the disputes. The accounts of the disputes tend to take on standard literary forms, typically embodying appeals to underdog sentiment or focusing on the themes of snobbery and elitism rather than the form of policy disputes on which the wisdom of public traditions may be brought to bear. See, e.g., Weingarten (1982).

6. Rudwick also shows the constraints under which de Ia Beche was placed by his vulnerability to the withdrawal of this support-a threat utilized in extenso by the influential aristocratic scientific peers, who could not be threatened in return.

7. The lesson that may be drawn from the case and that fits with other cases, such as the National Laboratories, is that where formal organizational structure does not match the distribution of knowledge, the difference is resolved in the realm of informal social structure and personal influence (see Mullins, 1984, p. 210).

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Science, Technology, and Society Ronald N. Giere and Thomas F. Gieryn, General Editors

THEORIES OF SCIENCE IN SOCIETY

SUSAN E. COZZENS

AND

THOMAS F. GIERYN

EDITORS

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington and Indianapolis

© 1990 by Indiana University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American

University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of

Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theories of science in society I Susan E. Cozzens, Thomas F. Gieryn, editors

p. em.- (Science, technology, and society) ISBN 0-253-31471-2

I. Science-Social aspects. 2. Science-Philosophy. I. Cozzens, Susan E. II. Gieryn, Thomas F. III. Series.

QI75.T486 1990 306.4'5-dc20

I 2 3 4 5 94 93 92 91 90

89-45476 CIP

CONTENTS

Introduction Putting Science Back in Society Susan E. Cozzens and Thomas F. Gieryn

A Social Worlds Research Adventure The Case of Reproductive Science Adele E. Clarke

15

Structuration Theory, Constructivism, and Scientific Change 43 Rob Hagendijk

Ingredients for a Theory of Science in Society 0-Rings, Ice Water, C-Clamp, Richard Feynman, and the Press 67 Thomas F. Gieryn and Anne E. Figert

Boundary Work and Science The Relation between Power and Knowledge 98 Donald Fisher

The Social Roots of Pure Mathematics 120 Sal Restivo

Scientific Malpractice and the Contemporary Politics of Knowledge 144

Daryl E. Chubin Autonomy and Power in Science 164

Susan E. Cozzens Forms of Patronage 185

Stephen P. Turner Environments for Innovation

Calculative and Generative Rationality in Technology 212 Ron Westrum

Organizational Constructs for the Assembly of Technological Knowledge 235

Wesley Shrum and Joan Morris

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

259 261

Forms of Patronage

Documents

Transcript of Forms of Patronage