Description:

JOHN PARKER: Honors College, Arizona State University

"How Theory Groups Die: Emotional and Intellectual Decay in Path-breaking Scientific Groups"

Description: Small, intensely interacting research groups collaborating in opposition to dominant intellectual trends are the primary dynamos of intellectual change across disciples, cultures, and history. These ‘coherent’ groups coordinate research, centralize communication and recruitment, and establish the intellectual foundation of new scientific and intellectual movements. To do so, they must craft a group culture capable of generating both novel ideas and the collective socio-emotional states (e.g., trust, solidarity, flow) required for producing large amounts of creative work and defending it from attack. Examples include the Columbia Skinnerians, Neils Bohr’s quantum physics group, and the Phage group in molecular biology.

Coherent groups exhibit a general developmental pattern: 1. A small group gathers around a charismatic intellectual leader. 2. An organizational leader emerges and a semi-formal group is established with unique ideas and training practices. 3. New entrants join, the network grows, and (if successful) its research becomes institutionalized in journals, conferences, and (more rarely) a new discipline. 4. The group’s influence wanes and its creative work obsolesces. This study focuses on the final ‘stage’ of coherent group development by integrating research in the

sociology of science, emotions, and small groups and applying it to ten years of observations, interviews, bibliometric, and documentary analyses of a contemporary coherent group in ecology. Adopting a micro-sociological focus, it examines how social and epistemological dynamics characteristic of late stage coherent groups interact with the micro-politics of intellectual fields to cause group disintegration. In doing so it characterizes and establishes two interdependent social processes that decrease the group’s capacity to produce novel scientific work and reduce the social value of its intellectual contributions:

1. Emotional decay refers to the loss of the socio-emotional dynamics that allowed the group to produce novel research. Group expansion and diversification makes it increasingly difficult to create interaction rituals of sufficient intensity to create the requisite collective emotions required to pursue, develop, and defend new ideas. Key relationships, roles, and emotional memory are also lost as original leaders retire, while new members develop alternate solidarities that threaten group coherence. Finally, attacks by influential outsiders can split opinions, solidarities, and occasion group fractionation.

2. Ideational decay refers to the loss of value of the group’s ideas for the intellectual field. The ascendency of the group’s ideas invites outside criticism by virtue of their strategic value as an intellectual target, because no theory is ever complete, and because of the micro-politics of inter group conflict in science. Moreover, as the group’s ideas gain currency they are reinterpreted and misinterpreted in ways that lessen their value. Their ideas can also become accepted as essentially true, losing the requisite novelty definitive of scientific work. Finally, the same scientific phenomena can come to be analyzed by others using completely new concepts and terminology, effectively obliterating the group’s research.

Overall, this project advances a more dynamic and holistic conceptualization of change in coherent groups and an enhanced appreciation of the conjoint intellectual and affective mechanisms that structure their social dynamics.

Bio: Dr. John N. Parker is an Honors Fellow with expertise in sociology and science and technology studies. He teaches Barrett’s signature course, The Human Event, as well as classes on a wide range of topics in sociology and social psychology. His research focuses on social dimensions of scientific collaborations, scientific work life, scientific and intellectual social movements, scientific elites, scientific careers, and emotions and creativity. He has also written about scientific leadership, boundary organizations, scientific synthesis, and natural resource governance.

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