Uncertain Futures of Scientization? Global Mega-Science and the University-Science Model, 1900–2025

• In Event: Higher education, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Peace: Protest, Democracy, and Global Change in Historical Perspective

Proposal

While not everywhere noticed, science insiders take it for granted that each year will bring millions of new STEMM journal articles, reflecting the exponential growth and flourishing of global mega-science gaining speed since 1900. Yet, the implications of this expansion for the current and future state of science necessitate a critical reexamination of science as a social institution. In the presentation, extending our previous book (Baker & Powell, 2024) and recently accepted paper in Minerva (Baker, Powell, Adeel & Marques, 2025), we argue that the maturing education revolution—driven by public and private investment in higher education across all regions—has cross-subsidized the rise of mega-science, fundamentally transforming the university’s role in knowledge production.
Drawing on revitalized institutional theory, we trace the historical development and global diffusion of the university-science model, which embedded research, academic freedom, and teaching within the university’s core. Since 1900, this model has enabled enrollments and teaching to subsidize the costly infrastructure required for scientific research but also provided the platform for global collaborations of ever great scope and importance, resulting in the internationalization of scientific capacity. Our comparative historical analysis utilizes comprehensive data on 3.3 million (weighted) scientific papers from the major peer-reviewed journals, spanning the first year of each decade from 1900 to 2015, augmented by contemporary bibliometric platforms (Web of Science, Scopus) and global university enrollment data. The analysis reveals the spread and intensification of higher education and research from Western Europe and North America to Southeast Asia and beyond.
We identify three institutionalizing processes facilitated by university expansion that have underpinned global science capacity over the past 125 years: (1) the global spread and structural isomorphism of the university as both institutional entrepreneur and corporate unit for science, (2) the unprecedented growth in the scale and complexity of scientific collaboration, and (3) the hegemony of the peer-reviewed journal article as the dominant symbolic medium of scientific value and exchange. These processes, while historically rooted, have intensified in synergy, driving greater scientization and challenging recent claims of scientific stagnation, declining innovation, and inflation of low-impact research.
However, the future(s) of scientization are far from assured. Emerging threats—including demographic shifts, political resistance to academic autonomy, and uneven global access to advanced education—raise questions about the sustainability of the university-science model and the continued expansion of scientific capacity. Will the “collaboration dividend” and institutional resilience of universities be sufficient to overcome these barriers? Or are we approaching new limits to growth, quality, and innovation in science? We argues that, rather than a crisis of scientific decline, we are witnessing an ongoing evolution in the institutional dynamics of discovery—one whose trajectory remains open and contested. The uncertain futures of scientization demand renewed attention from both sociologists and historians of science, as well as policymakers and educators worldwide.

Authors

• Justin J.W. Powell, University of Luxembourg

• David p Baker, Pennsylvania State University