Pricing the Priceless Scientific Originality: How Institutions Shape Morals of Authorship in Chinese Universities

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Ideas, Morality, and Social Organization

Abstract

Normatively scholars put great stock in authorship as professional recognition for scientific originality. In reality, scientists don’t work in a vacuum of ideas: they make decisions about whether money and what it can buy should be accredited in authorship and how. Yet despite accounts of various authorship practices across disciplines and countries, authorship have rarely been studied from an institutional perspective. This paper fills in this gap by looking at the case of China. Following a global trend of metric measurement of research output, China has been characterized by its recent surge in scientific publications and a “publish-or-perish” evaluation scheme. Based on qualitative case studies in three Chinese universities and in-depth interviews with 47 life-scientists, this paper describes four ideal typical morals of authorship. Then, the formations of two unique morals are compared across cases. Institutions shape morals of authorship by setting incentive structures and framing the way people think: 1) Pricing authorship in market: the morality of market exchange thrives only when the lack of certain resources is fatal. Overtime a merit credit system of evaluation has been institutionalized so that scientists regard different positions in authorship as interchangeable and quantifiable. 2) Negotiating authorship like in a “clan”: in a clan, authorship is distributed in the long run in the same way as material benefits. The mentor-student type network is an ideal setting for a clan to emerge. However, it only becomes a clan when there is clear prospect for collective benefits and a loose organizational evaluation scheme.

Author

• Xirong Subrina Shen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong