Creating and Sustaining a Scientific Specialty : A Sensemaking Sensegiving Approach

How do scientists create a new scientific specialty and sustain it in a fast changing and complex environment? Research on scientific and intellectual movement (Frickel and Gross, 2005) and on boundary work in science (Gieryn, 1999) are particularly suited to study the emergence of new scientific specialties. However, as highlighted by Granqvist and Laurila (2011), although both of these streams acknowledge the influence of indirect pressures, they further describe how individuals demarcate their activity from religion, state and engineering (Gieryn, 1983) than deeply problematise their role in the emergence of a new scientific field. In their study of the emergence of nanotechnology in the US, Granqvist and Laurila (2011) use a framing approach in order to describe the influence of futurist visions on the emergence of a new field. Frames help events to be meaningful and ‘function to guide to organise experience and guide action (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614). Frames and the very related process of sensemaking (Fiss and Hirsh, 2005) have been used to explain how individuals order their environment in emerging contexts (Granqvist and Laurila, 2011) but little attention has been paid to the full process of ordering and influencing the environment – described by Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) as sensemaking and sensegiving. Although sensegiving is important in the process of boundary shaping (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009), it has been neglected by the literature of emerging scientific fields. In such context, creating and sustaining a new scientific activity, scientists face numerous challenges such as gathering funding, publishing valid scientific outcomes, enrolling (Latour, 1987) and training new PhD students, being visible and recognised towards both the scientific community and the funding agencies, being legitimate and the like.