TY - JOUR

T1 - Inside regular lab meetings

T2 - The social construction of a research team and ideas in optical physics

AU - Philipps, Axel

AU - Paruschke, Laura

N1 - Funding Information: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant number 16PH20004].

PY - 2024/4

Y1 - 2024/4

N2 - Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members’ activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team’s research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research.

AB - Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members’ activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team’s research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research.

KW - forms of presentation

KW - lab meeting

KW - optical physics

KW - participant observation

KW - research implicature

KW - research team

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85169590844&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/03063127231188132

DO - 10.1177/03063127231188132

M3 - Article

C2 - 37606215

AN - SCOPUS:85169590844

VL - 54

SP - 257

EP - 280

JO - Social studies of science

JF - Social studies of science

SN - 0306-3127

IS - 2

ER -