Institutional enterprise as a compromise: the national organization of science in France

Abstract

Institutional entrepreneurship implies the capacity of actors to mobilize resources to create institutions in which collective action is embedded. Its historical analysis may consider it as a long-term process involving the role of different generations of actors and highlighting such phenomena as transmission and competition. Inspired by institutional analysis, this paper examines these temporal dynamics of institutional change by focusing more particularly on the nature of competition between different institutional enterprises in the early twentieth-century French scientific field. It highlights also the role of the State, which plays a particular role by ensuring stability. Part 1 examines the efforts of several institutional enterprises to shape the Caisse des recherches scientifiques, one of the first national organizational reforms of French science. Part 2 focuses on World War I, which provided opportunities to lay the foundations for a new organization of science. Part 3 examines the subsequent reorganization of science during the interwar period. It presents the creation of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1939 as a new compromise resulting from a long cumulative process. The last section sums up the different theoretical issues and insists on the specificity of institutional change within the scientific field.

Keywords:

• France
• scientific research
• competition
• cumulative process
• collective action
• ratchet effect

Acknowledgments

I thank Anna Guagnini, Joris Mercelis, Dan Wadhwani and the two referees for their comments and Clare Tame and Chad Langford for the translation of the text.

Notes

1. French National Archives (AN), F 17 17432, technical committee, first section, meeting of 16 January 1904.

2. Journal officiel de la République française, 14 November 1915, report to the President of the Republic and Decree of 13 November 1915, 8200.

3. Journal officiel de la République française, 21 April 1917, Decree of 14 April 1917, 3163.

4. Journal officiel de la République française, 16 September 1917, Decree of 14 September 1917, 7732.

5. French Academy of Sciences Archives, AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 22 November 1915. In 1911 the industrialist Auguste Loutreuil died and bequeathed over 7 million francs to various scientific institutes three of which under the aegis of the Academy of Sciences.

6. AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 17 January 1916.

7. AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 22 May 1916.

8. AS, DG 46, Committee of External Action, meeting of 16 June 1916.

9. AS, DG 46, letter of 19 February 1917 from the Minister for Education to the President of the Academy of Sciences.

10. AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 22 May 1916.

11. AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 14 January 1918.

12. AS, Secret Committee, record n. 7, meeting of 6 May 1918.

13. Work of the Interministerial Commission set up by the Interministerial Decision of 7 December 1918, 398 AP 23, National Archives.

14. Journal officiel de la République française. Lois et décrets, 30 December 1922, 12,462.

15. Journal officiel de la République française. Débats parlementaires. Chambre des députés, 24 February 1925, 1177.

16. Journal officiel de la République française. Lois et décrets, 15 April 1933, 3871.

17. Journal officiel de la République française, 24 October 1939, 12,594.