Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Creating And Sustaining A Scientific Specialty: A Sensemaking-Sensegiving Approach, Nicolas Battard, Paul Donnelly, Vincent Mangematin

Conference papers

In this paper, we argue the community of nanoscience and nanotechnology is a loosely-coupled community as the sensemaking and sensegiving processes are incomplete. Policy markers poured massive amounts of money into this area to enable scientific researchers build infrastructure and buy equipment in order to conduct research at the nanoscale. However, scientists coming from diverse backgrounds do not make sense of nanotechnology in the same way and tend to publish in their own community or in an already existing one. By giving sense back to different communities, they hinder the creation of a common sense that would have facilitated the …