مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The capabilities, organisational modes, and practices of public, private, and non-profit institutions, including universities, national laboratories, and academies, are central to the operation and performance of science and innovation systems (OECD, 1997; Edquist and Johnson, 2000). Understanding the strategies and consequences of adaptation in such institutions and how adaptation processes are informed and in- fluenced is central to the study not only of science and innovation but also of broader societal change. It is reasonable to conjecture that changes in key institutions can have the capacity to transform their systems, while at the same time through feedback loops these institutions may also be changed by transition of the systems within which they are embedded. But how do such changes interactions occur and how can we conceptualise and assess the processes involved? In this paper we address these questions by analysing the dynamics of the interaction between change in the science academies of Russia and China with the respective transformation of the Russian and Chinese science and innovation systems.

Academies of Sciences are typically nationally organised associations that seek to advance science and scientific learning (Hassan et al., 2015). There are science academies in about 100 countries (IAP, 2014), although their roles vary considerably. In many countries, science academies focus on recognising outstanding achievements in science, most prominently in the case of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences which awards the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and economics. In other countries, scientific academies directly carry out substantial shares of national scientific research with government funding and oversight. Historically, the leading example of this model was the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which dominated public research in the Soviet Union from 1925 through to 1991. The Soviet Academy’s legacy is embedded in its successor, the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). It also provided a model replicated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the National Academy of Sciences of Vietnam, the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, and science academies in Eastern Europe, among others. These research organisations oversee functions of scientific knowledge production, accreditation as well as honorary functions of appraisal for outstanding researchers (Graham, 1998).

CAS and RAS are today the largest examples of research-based national science academies. These two academies share a heritage of the socialist organisation of scientific research (Radosevic, 1999, 2003), yet have also undergone transformation in recent decades (David-Fox and Péteri, 2000; Liu and Zhi, 2010; Lu and Fan, 2010; Suttmeier et al., 2006) as both Russia and China pursue large-scale reforms to foster economic modernisation. Prior research that considers change in these two academies has tended to take an individual country perspective. RAS has been discussed as part of work on the influence of state-socialist models in science (for example, Graham, 1998), on the post-Soviet transformation of the entire science system (Radosevic, 2003; Yegorov, 2009), and on broad trends in Russian innovation policy (Klochikhin, 2012). The tangled reform processes of RAS have attracted topical attention, usually as short news reports on the latest developments (Clark, 2013; Pokrovsky, 2013; Yablokov, 2014). For CAS, older studies of historical developments and earlier reforms are available (e.g. Cao, 1998, 1999; Kuhner, 1984; Yao, 1989). A stream of bibliometric work highlights the role of CAS in the recent growth of scientific publishing in China (Fu and Ho, 2013; Yang et al., 2014; Yang et al., 2015; Ye, 2010), while attention has been paid to recent CAS programme initiatives (Lu and Fan, 2010; Zhang et al., 2011).