Managing Big Science in the 21st Century

Big Science is the phenomenon of large-scale and complex endeavor in science. The scale and complexity in Big Science refer to the high number of workers, large collaborations, complex scientific instrumentations, exorbitant cost, and the high public scrutiny involved in a scientific endeavor. A Big Science endeavor aims to answer fundamental questions in science and solve grand challenges in our society. Big Science in the 21st century presents a different environment compared to its previous era. Today, the rationale of economic development and solving societal challenges has become a major driver in the existence of Big Science. Moreover, material science has gained a similar status to the once privileged field of high-energy physics. Stricter accountability and cost efficiency have also been demanded of Big Science endeavors. Collaboration in Big Science has become very large by spanning continents and reaching thousands of collaborators. Lastly, we are witnessing the increased participation of the often-considered smaller countries in Big Science.

Therefore, I argue that our current understanding of how to manage a Big Science endeavor is in need of an update to the evolving context of the 21st century. In this three-article doctoral thesis, I delineate the contours of managing Big Science in the 21st century, encompassing the fields of organization and management and science and technology studies. The case study of interest in this doctoral dissertation is the
European Spallation Source (ESS) project. ESS is a large-scale and multi-disciplinary research facility based on the world's most powerful source of neutrons, currently under construction in Lund, Sweden.

The first article addresses the conundrum of maintaining both cooperation and coordination in the in-kind contribution model prevalent in Big Science. The in-kind model stipulates that collaborating partners may elect to contribute to providing expertise and delivering components rather than contributing cash to a central strategic alliance entity. The in-kind model can cause a conundrum as collaborating
partners need to coordinate project work packages among themselves while needing to maintain the cooperation of all interested parties. The first article addresses this issue of how coordination and cooperation in a Big Science endeavor can simultaneously be achieved by the mix of formal mechanisms involving a competitionbased scientific instrument selection procedure and informal mechanisms through the continuous intervention of ESS as the lead organization in the collaboration. The first article contributes to the discourse of strategic alliance on how cooperation and coordination can be achieved simultaneously, and collaboration mechanisms in largescale scientific collaboration.

The second article investigates the transition between the promotion/planning phase and the construction phase of ESS. The literature in temporary organizing suggests that a transition should be a staged process involving overlapping parts between the different phases, invoking the theory of boundary spanning. However, the organizational context in which the transition takes place is not well taken into
consideration. Legitimacy is one of the most important aspects in the life of a temporary organizing endeavor, as the endeavor seeks support and acceptance from its permanent context or environment. This study focuses on the emergence of ESS as an organization, beset by various legitimacy challenges, as it transitions to a more permanent organization. The legitimacy challenges call for accommodating actions in
the interplay of temporary and emergent organizing, creating coupling in terms of their legitimacy. This article contributes to the literature of temporary organizing by arguing for the coupling of organizational and temporary organizing legitimacy.

The third article addresses the main purpose of Big Science as a phenomenon, the pursuit of science and its related scientific instruments. The interplay between scientific pursuit and scientific instruments has been conceived in different ways. In the “intercalated periodization of science”, scientific instruments and science develop in a separate yet interrelated trajectory, while in another conception, science is imagined in the future with scientific instruments built in the present time. In this article, the notion of how scientific pursuit and scientific instruments interact is expanded. Based on findings in this study, the interaction between scientific pursuit and scientific instruments is conceptualized as iterative and co-evolving, in which developments in science introduce new scientific visions to be solved by instruments, and conversely,
how developments in instrumentation create possibilities and limitations for scientific discovery. This article contributes to explaining a more dynamic view of the co-development of scientific pursuit and scientific instruments.

Big Science is here and will continue to stay in the 21st century and beyond due to the natural progress in scientific endeavors that requires massive scientific instrumentation, cost, and collaboration. To this end, specifically for the European context, this thesis calls for the creation of better formalized guidelines on how to establish a new Big Science endeavor in the 21st century.