Institutional enterprise as a compromise: the national organization of science in France

Institutional entrepreneurship implies the capacity of actors to mobilize resources to create institutions in which collective action is embedded. Its historical analysis may consider it as a long-term process involving the role of different generations of actors and highlighting such phenomena as transmission and competition. Inspired by institutional analysis, this paper examines these temporal dynamics of institutional change by focusing more particularly on the nature of competition between different institutional enterprises in the early twentieth-century French scientific field. It highlights also the role of the State, which plays a particular role by ensuring stability. Part 1 examines the efforts of several institutional enterprises to shape the Caisse des recherches scientifiques, one of the first national organizational reforms of French science. Part 2 focuses on World War I, which provided opportunities to lay the foundations for a new organization of science. Part 3 examines the subsequent reorganization of science during the interwar period. It presents the creation of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1939 as a new compromise resulting from a long cumulative process. The last section sums up the different theoretical issues and insists on the specificity of institutional change within the scientific field.