Invisible College Research Articles

The phenomenon of ‘closedness’ in the citation networks of regional scientific events: scientific schools, invisible college, scientific cliques

The phenomenon of ‘closedness’ in the citation networks of regional scientific events: scientific schools, invisible college, scientific cliques

The Invisible Colleges Revisited: An Empirical Review

ABSTRACTThis study undertook an empirical examination of those institutions identified as “invisible” in The Invisible Colleges: A Profile of Small, Private Colleges With Limited Resources. As of 2012 to 2013, 354 of the original invisible colleges continued to operate as accredited private, 4-year institutions. However, 80 of the invisible colleges had closed and 57 had merged with other institutions, lost accreditation, or converted to public, for-profit, or 2-year status. Although understudied, these institutions provide a critical access component in American higher education. Changes in religious affiliation, geographic location, gender of students enrolled, enrollment of full-time and part-time students, and invisible historically Black colleges and universities are examined.

The Declining Status of International Law in the Decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court Concerning the Occupied Territories

This article examines the attitude of the Supreme Court of Israel towards international law in the past decade, focusing on cases concerning the Occupied Territories. The article argues that the status of international law in these decisions has, overall, declined, in compare to the decade between the mid-1990’s and the mid 2000’s. The article argues that while the international law of occupation still operates, officially, as the governing law in the Occupied Territories, the emphasis on compliance with the norms of international law in the Court’s decisions has decreased. Instead of relying on international law, the Court has increased its reliance on Israeli administrative law, and, in recent years, on Israeli constitutional law. The article suggests that the decline in the status of international law is rooted in a different perception of the role of the Court in relation to its international and domestic audiences, and that the change is related, at least partially, to the current attacks on the Court. Between the mid-1990’s and the mid-2000’s, the Court, under former President Barak’s leadership, perceived itself to be part of the “Global Community of Courts”, a transnational legal community of international and national courts engaging in an ongoing dialogue, reading and citing each other’s opinions and participating in what they perceive as a common judicial enterprise. The Court thus directed its decisions not only to the Israeli public but also to the international community and, in particular, to the international legal community, referred to by Schachter as the “invisible college of international lawyers”. The current Court, on the other hand, is struggling to maintain its status in within Israel. It thus focuses on its Israeli audience, addressing in its decisions, first and foremost, the Israeli public. While relying on international law may increase the legitimacy of the Court’s decisions among an international audience, the article argues that it may have the opposite effect on an Israeli audience, in particular in the current political climate. The recent Court thus retreats from the extensive referral to international law in favor of an approach that examines issues that arise in the Occupied Territories as if they were, essentially, internal Israeli matters, in a manner that coincides with the prevailing political discourse regarding the future of the Occupied Territories.

Entering the Invisible College: Defeating Lawyers on Their Own Turf

The fifth volume of the Chilcot Report describes the development of the legal advice provided by Lord Goldsmith to the British government on the legality of the invasion in Iraq. It tracks his change of mind from the view that UNSC Resolution 1441 did not authorise military action, to the ‘better view’1 that no further resolution was needed to authorise military action. Some sixty pages into volume 5 of the Report, a remarkable exchange between Lord Goldsmith, Jack Straw and Sir Michael Wood is described.2 It starts with a memo by Wood, who states there is ‘no doubt’ about the illegality of using force against Iraq, ‘without a further decision of the [Security] Council,...

Yesterday’s giants and invisible colleges of today. A study on the ‘knowledge transfer’ scientific domain

Despite `knowledge transfer' emerged as a separate field of study at least three decades ago, its academic literature remains rather fragmented. To reduce complexity, several journals' special issues have attempted to frame up the literature both in a qualitative way and in a quantitative manner. Although these reviews help to bring some order to a flourishing literature, the theoretical background of knowledge transfer field of study still needs clarification. Who are their foremost scholars? How do they gather in visible or invisible colleges? How far the scientific communities of such domain have evolved over time? Has the knowledge transfer topic gained the status of an independent scientific domain? This article aims at shedding light on the knowledge transfer domain by mapping the invisible colleges on which the discipline is based. Drawing evidence from a network analysis of the backwards citations of the second generation of knowledge transfer studies, the authors point out that although the entire scientific domain has reached a strongly connected international dimension, it still manifests a persistent fragmentation. The paradoxical presence of a popular scientific domain without a proper independent theoretical body is consequently underlined.

Collaboration patterns in the German political science co-authorship network.

Research on social processes in the production of scientific output suggests that the collective research agenda of a discipline is influenced by its structural features, such as “invisible colleges” or “groups of collaborators” as well as academic “stars” that are embedded in, or connect, these research groups. Based on an encompassing dataset that takes into account multiple publication types including journals and chapters in edited volumes, we analyze the complete co-authorship network of all 1,339 researchers in German political science. Through the use of consensus graph clustering techniques and descriptive centrality measures, we identify the ten largest research clusters, their research topics, and the most central researchers who act as bridges and connect these clusters. We also aggregate the findings at the level of research organizations and consider the inter-university co-authorship network. The findings indicate that German political science is structured by multiple overlapping research clusters with a dominance of the subfields of international relations, comparative politics and political sociology. A small set of well-connected universities takes leading roles in these informal research groups.

The globalization of research highlighted through the research networks of management education institutions: the case of French business schools

Research has become a key success factor for academic institutions in a growing and increasingly globalized market. In the past, many business schools appear to have had little involvement in research, but are now strategically positioned in international rankings. In this study, we investigate some of the mechanisms that appear to have helped these schools increase their faculty’s research productivity in order to face strong competition. We investigate in some depth the case of French business schools, and explore their research networks, focusing on the relationships between academic institutions. We use bibliometric and clustering techniques. We find that, during the last decade or so, French business schools have significantly broadened their research network—at not only the national but also the international level, meaning they have participated in the globalization of research. Exploring the structure of the research networks of these business schools, we highlight two core structuring mechanisms: status and competition. First, the schools we investigated tend to link to other institutions depending on the latter’s status—i.e., their level of prestige. Second, it appears that they tend to prefer to collaborate with foreign partners on the international scene rather than with other institutions with which they are in direct competition in their home country. The article discusses the strategies implemented by business schools to help and motivate their professors to enter some existing communities of established scientists (invisible colleges), and the consequences of these trends for the organization of business education.

What if the global city was postcolonial?

Michiel van Meeteren, Ben Derudder and David Bassens’ essay asks whether the alleged ‘straw man’ of ‘global cities research’ (GCR) can speak in response to its postcolonial critics. Their intervention takes aim at the style of critique that postcolonial urban scholarship has employed and in particular the ways in which GCR has been framed as homogeneous, normatively charged and entangled in the neoliberalization of urban life. My response centres on two key issues that emerge from this intervention. Firstly, I reflect on their troubling account of routinized or rehearsed critique and suggest that this may be indicative of wider trends as academic work is increasingly accelerated, intensified and made measurable. Secondly, I invert the authors’ invitation to join the putative ‘invisible college’ and explore what postcolonial GCR might look like, its heuristic capacity to develop new meaning and the comparative potential of starting elsewhere. Together, the response addresses not just the practical problems of critique but also the ethics of different scholarly manoeuvres to assemble and deploy knowledge.

Doing global urban studies

By way of rejoinder to commentaries by members of the invisible college of postcolonial urbanism, we further develop issues of praxis regarding engaged pluralism and plead for its usefulness. Engaged pluralism when doing global urban studies depends on a research culture where both deconstructive and reconstructive moments are encouraged. Deconstruction benefits from the provincialization of all knowledge. Reconstruction can occur when we bracket ontological and epistemological incommensurability and focus on the cognitively enriching research praxis of frame switching, where research perspectives constitute nonexclusive, temporary, or alternating entries for research.

La producción científica en la Facultad de Lenguas de la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

The objectives of this research were, on the one hand, to measure and to quantify the production of teachers and researchers of the School of Languages ​​of the National University of Cordoba between 2008 and 2011; and, on the other hand, to qualitatively analyse and to interpret production within a critical hermeneutical approach. The research was exploratory-descriptive, and was carried out through a mixed methodological approach, quantitative and qualitative. Among the findings, it can be mentioned that the field of the institution is in a moment of self-awareness and reflexivity, that there is a predominance of a professional university model that is in conflict with the production model of knowledge, and that scientific-academic university policies have an impact on the field of the School. There were also several observable issues, namely the academic transformation of the teaching role into teacher-researcher; the absence of a strategic policy of priority areas, the existence of a genuine place for research (infrastructural, academic, economic); the detection of closed groups as invisible colleges or scientific schools organized around insular research projects; and the personalization of the areas and lines of research according to the historical process of the field. Key words : production, publication, knowledge, National University of Cordoba, Faculty of Languages.

Métrica de la literatura sobre los indígenas de México

Se analizan las características demográficas, crecimiento y productividad de la literatura publicada sobre los pueblos indígenas de México e indizada en Web of Science y Scopus. Se encontraron 2,457 trabajos publicados, sobre todo en revistas académicas (94%) y reseñas de libros (25.5%) en idioma inglés (89%). 732 títulos de revistas que publicaron un total de 1,642 artículos y se identificaron 9 títulos de revistas en la zona núcleo, entre las cuales están Ancient Mesoamerica, Latin American Antiquity, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Journal of Archaeological Science, Economic Botany y Science, entre otras. Se encontraron 2,905 autores (80.6%) que publicaron un único artículo, mientras que 392 autores (11%) publicaron dos artículos. La literatura sobre este asunto crece exponencialmente con una tasa anual de 4.4% y con una tasa de duplicación cada 16 años. Las palabras clave más frecuentemente utilizadas para especificar este tipo de literatura son “Indians of North American”, “Human”, “México”, “Adult” y “American Indian”. Se encontraron 11 grupos de autores o colegios invisibles.

Our Invisible College.

Our Invisible College.

Environmental management control systems: a conceptualization and a review of the empirical evidence

The integration of sustainability in general and environmental aspects in particular into management control systems (MCS) are now being addressed in MCS research. We argue that the concept of environmental management control systems (EMCS) provides a promising approach for integrating presently fragmented lines of inquiry concerning the internal drivers and managerial processes that may foster firms' environmental performance. Addressing the apparent fragmentation of research on EMCS, we develop a ‘positioning framework’ to locate EMCS within the topic of sustainability and to show how EMCS relates to other subsystems of management, especially to environmental management accounting (EMA) and to environmental management systems (EMS). Second, applying the ‘invisible college’ approach, which delivered responses of 22 eminent scholars, we analyze scholarly perspectives on useful conceptual frameworks for EMCS. Third, we specify the concept of EMCS and elaborate its elements by drawing on the general MCS framework of Malmi and Brown (2008), which we integrate in our ‘positioning framework’ to structure instruments and concepts that have been discussed in the literature. Finally, we summarize current empirical research on EMCS by means of an integrative literature review. The integrative literature review allows us to summarize the existing empirical evidence and to outline what we know and do not know about EMCS. Our findings suggest different avenues for future research: Exploring interfaces between the different dimensions of our ‘positioning framework’ (e.g., different configurations of EMCS elements; combinations of design and use of EMA instruments and EMCS elements; intergenerational controls; potential trade-offs between the dimensions of sustainability), addressing so far neglected aspects of the EMCS framework (e.g., clans; organizational and corporate governance structures), and focusing on more profound theoretical foundations, construct validation, and potential associations of EMCS with innovativeness, capabilities, and organizational learning.

Highways of light to the invisible college: linking data on seventeenth-century intellectual diasporas

In the summer of 1644, a physician and former imperial official by the name of Cyprian Kinner moved to Elbing (Elbląg) to collaborate with the leading pedagogical theorist of his day, Jan Amos Come...

Perspective: New Service Development: How the Field Developed, Its Current Status and Recommendations for Moving the Field Forward

New service development (NSD) is a growing innovation discipline. Despite the growth of articles about NSD, several authors have criticized the lack of attention paid to NSD, compared with new product development (NPD), and the lack of consensus across NSD findings. At the same time, others have proclaimed that NSD is a sophisticated, mature field of research. This paper tries to resolve these issues by analyzing 230 empirical articles on NSD, published over a period of 30 years. It investigates the content of NSD research articles, the authors contributing to the field, and the research methodologies employed. It finds that, despite its growing popularity, the field has not moved forward substantively. NSD is a subject specialty but lacks an “invisible college” of researchers addressing the topic. This has resulted in a body of research that fails to provide managers with consistent answers to basic questions about how to most effectively manage NSD processes.One of the main causes for the lack of coherence in the knowledge on this topic may stem from the fact that, rather than initially approaching research in the domain without ingoing bias and using grounded theory approaches to create initial understanding, many of the early researchers applied the concepts, frameworks, and methods used to understand NPD to the NSD domain. To correct this problem, it is proposed that the field of NSD needs to move forward in a significantly different manner. This paper provides several recommendations for attracting more academics to the field, elevating the visibility and status of NSD as a research domain, and also presents a research agenda that may help reorient future research in this area so that a more complete and coherent body of knowledge is generated that both advances the field and helps practitioners manage NSD more effectively and efficiently.

Personality disorders and the DSM-5: Scientific and extra-scientific factors in the maintenance of the status quo.

The aim of this study was to review and discuss the evidence for dimensional classification of personality disorders and the historical and sociological bases of psychiatric nosology and research. Categorical and dimensional conceptualisations of personality disorder are reviewed, with a focus on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-system's categorisation and the Five-Factor Model of personality. This frames the events leading up to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, personality disorder debacle, where the implementation of a hybrid model was blocked in a last-minute intervention by the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees. Explanations for these events are discussed, including the existence of invisible colleges of researchers and the fear of risking a 'scientific revolution' in psychiatry. A failure to recognise extra-scientific factors at work in classification of mental illness can have a profound and long-lasting influence on psychiatric nosology. In the end it was not scientific factors that led to the failure of the hybrid model of personality disorders, but opposing forces within the mental health community in general and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, Task Force in particular. Substantial evidence has accrued over the past decades in support of a dimensional model of personality disorders. The events surrounding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group show the difficulties in reconciling two different worldviews with a hybrid model. They also indicate the future of a psychiatric nosology that will be increasingly concerned with dimensional classification of mental illness. As such, the road is paved for more substantial changes to personality disorder classification in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision, in 2017.

Invisible Colleagues: The Informal Organization of Knowledge Production in Criminology and Criminal Justice

This study seeks to shed light on the informal process of knowledge production in criminology and criminal justice by examining acknowledgements in journal publications. Studying the structure of research collaboration among scholars may enhance our understanding of the discipline’s organization. We test hypotheses derived from prior research by analyzing acknowledgements in 786 articles from five journals in criminology and criminal justice over the last five years. As anticipated by the “invisible college” hypothesis, criminology and criminal justice scholarship contains a small group of individuals who receive a disproportionate share of acknowledgements. Additionally, we find that higher ranked and more productive scholars are awarded more acknowledgements than their lower ranked and less productive counterparts. Integrating acknowledgements as an unofficial assessment tool may improve the collective endeavor of contemporary science in our field. Overall, the influence of the “invisible colleagues,” measured by acknowledgements, demonstrates the value of collaboration in the process of knowledge production.

Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.

Doing Life Is That Which We Must Think

Declaration of belief:Performance Philosophers seek to think anew, not only for the fun of it but also to destroy (or at least artfully ignore) the well-tended perception that thinking must unfold in a certain way, through specific channels, and with the legitimacy bequeathed to thought (i.e., commodified thought; a kind of thought that might be trademarked) through validated keywords and slogans. For these reasons, Performance Philosophers seek to think the doing of life, with the expectation that to do so would mean to live a life worthy of the name. This manifesto elaborates on these claims and calls for the creation of an Invisible College through which we might express the potential of performance philosophy.

Current dynamics of scholarly publishing.

Scholarly publishing is an essential vehicle for actively participating in the scientific debate and for sustaining the invisible colleges of the modern research environment, which extend far beyond the borders of individual research institutions. However, its current dynamics have deeply transformed the scientific life and conditioned in new ways the economics of academic knowledge production. They have also challenged the perceived common sense view of scientific research. Analytical approach to set out a comprehensive framework on the current debate on scholarly publishing and to shed light on the peculiar organization and the working of this peculiar productive sector. The way in which scientific knowledge is produced and transmitted has been dramatically affected by the series of recent major technosocietal transformations. Although the effects are many, in particular the current overlap and interplay between two distinct and somewhat opposite stances-scientific and economic-tend to blur the overall understanding of what scholarly publishing is and produces distortion on its working which in turn affect the scientific activities. The outcome is thus a series of intended and unintended effects on the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The article suggests that a substantial transformation characterizes science today that seems more like a thrusting, entrepreneurial business than a contemplative, disinterested endeavor. In this essay, we provide a general overview of the pivotal role of the scholarly publishing in fostering this change and its pros and cons connected to the idiosyncratic interplay between social norms and market stances.