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This chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow. It describes a series of workshops in which the ATLAS Collaboration was explored with the collaboration's project leaders from a managerial perspective. The idea of these workshops, sponsored by the ATLAS management, was to impart a more strategic orientation to the collaboration's efforts. It did not quite work out that way, and the reasons for this have much to teach about the nature of Big Science. It turns out that the managers of knowledge-intensive organizations may have more to learn from how Big Science projects such as ATLAS are developed and run than the other way round.

ATLAS is a new high-energy physics (HEP) detector built by an international community of researchers and located at CERN just outside Geneva. ATLAS is big, global, and exciting. Together with three other detectors, it forms an integral part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a project that, because of the much higher particle-collision energies and production rates it achieves compared to existing accelerators, opens up challenging new frontiers in particle physics. This chapter presents background material on the ATLAS Collaboration that will help to clarify the chapters that follow. It briefly describes the ATLAS detector and the role it will play in the LHC experiments. It also offers a jargon-free outline of some of the physics that underpins the experiments and the technical challenges that had to be overcome. The history and the organization of the ATLAS Collaboration are also presented, as are its relationships with the host laboratory, CERN, and with the many firms and institutions that helped to build the detector.

This chapter focuses on the inter- and intraorganizational dynamics that characterizes Big Science. It shows, first, that the high stakes associated with a unique, next-generation particle physics experiment will lead actors to collaborate and share resources; secondly, that, given the uncertainties, a loosely coupled institutional framework is essential for the pursuit of such a collaborative approach. The way that the ATLAS Collaboration deals with the collective action problem holds valuable lessons for all organizations — commercial, government, voluntary, and so on — involved in the production of knowledge in the 21st century. The chapter begins by exploring the nature of collective strategies and the varying degrees of collaboration they engender from a theoretical perspective. It then briefly describes the functioning of the ATLAS Collaboration as a collective practice. In a discussion section, it brings theory and description together in order to make sense of such a practice. It concludes with a brief look at the implications of the analysis of Big Science collaborations for the scientific enterprise as a whole and for science-based commercial collaborations in particular.

Drawing on four short case studies of how the ATLAS collaboration selects and works with its suppliers, this chapter highlights some of the issues involved. First it briefly outlines and discusses ATLAS's supplier selection process. It then presents a conceptual framework that helps categorize ATLAS suppliers. Finally, it presents the four cases and interprets them using both the framework and the I-Space. The chapter concludes by asking to what extent ATLAS's experience with its suppliers can be of use to other organizations.

This chapter draws on the results of a survey to look at what external suppliers get out of their interactions with the ATLAS Collaboration. The detector is a source of ‘stretch goals’ for the firms that supply its components, allowing the collaboration to present itself as a ‘lead user’ of innovative goods and services provided by these firms. In short, ATLAS acts as a stimulus to organization learning by its suppliers and helps them to build up the social capital necessary to profit from it.

This chapter examines the ATLAS Collaboration from a leadership perspective. It first looks at how leadership in general may be conceptualized and then at how the concepts play out in the realm of science. Like other Big Science projects, the ATLAS Collaboration operates at the forefront of knowledge creation. The kind of leadership it requires is not vested in a single individual but is distributed throughout the collaboration. ATLAS's project management team has little formal control over the 3,000-plus members of the collaboration. These remain attached to national institutions and are accountable only to them. How, then, does a scientific collaboration as large as ATLAS generate and sustain creative and constructive interactions among several thousand scientists and engineers of diverse cultures, traditions, and habits? And, given the complexity of the tasks involved, how does it align such interactions with its experimental goals while keeping the project's stakeholders happy?

With the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the high-energy physics (HEP) community appears to be putting all its eggs in one basket. The choice is framed by opponents as being between a single uncertain and risky Big Science project and several smaller, less risky, and more immediately useful ones. Many physicists assume that their discipline is in some sense foundational and generative of other kinds of knowledge. In the philosophy of science, this assumption has a name: reductionism. It is by no means universally shared. The stakes are high and getting higher as the scale of physics experiments increases and the competition for scarce research resources intensifies. There is a need for a more nuanced understanding of what the pay-offs of this kind of research might be and for whom. This book offers different perspectives on how these issues play out; not at the broad level of HEP, but at the more concrete level of one of the four major experiments that will use the LHC: the ATLAS Collaboration. A number of management scholars as well as participants in the ATLAS Collaboration came together to explore the different organizational, institutional, and cultural issues confronting an experiment like ATLAS. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Given its institutional setting and its history, the ATLAS Collaboration is inevitably a multidimensional project. In addition to fulfilling clearly defined scientific goals, one of its other related aims is to preserve and promote the open and international character of its scientific ethos. This could be described as a political aim. The birth in the 17th century of scientific institutions such as the Royal Society in England and the Académie des Sciences in France was also in part motivated by a need to allow Europe's emerging scientific culture to cross national, religious, and political boundaries. CERN, and with it ATLAS, are thus defending well-established and core scientific values. How might living up to these values show up in the way that the work of building the detector is allocated to the 174 institutes drawn from different countries participating in the collaboration? This chapter explores the issue by focusing on the participation of one country: Russia.

This chapter describes the contribution that the ATLAS Collaboration is making to the emerging cultures and practices of e-science. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played a crucial enabling role in the development and operation of the ATLAS detector. Beyond making possible the simulation of progressively elaborate models of the detector itself and providing data-processing resources for the detection, recording, and analysis of particle-collision data, the new ICTs have provided the infrastructure needed for the coordination of a complex scientific ecosystem spread around the globe. The chapter looks at how ATLAS and the other Large Hadron Collider experiments, through their roles as lead users of these new ICTs, are changing the way that science is done.

This chapter attempts to place ATLAS in its wider societal setting. Knowledge-for-its-own-sake may be what scientists aspire to maximize, yet knowledge-for-benefits is the constraint that they are required to work under if they are to continue to get funding. Given the rapid growth of investments in science, and the scale of individual projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, it is not enough to show that they satisfy the constraint. They now also have to show that they satisfy it better than competing alternatives. At the energies that the collider will generate, most physicists are expecting to see new particles appear, and these should give theorists enough to chew on for some years to come. But the non-physicist will ask, what are the options created by ATLAS and its associated experiments at the LHC actually worth? What new territory do they open up for the rest of us?

This chapter focuses on the constraints affecting the ATLAS Collaboration's procurement processes. The construction of ATLAS is an industrial-scale undertaking, and the collaboration therefore has to turn to industry for help. In so far as it avails itself of CERN's procurement services to help manage its interactions with external players, it is constrained to follow its procedures, which, unsurprisingly, given that the laboratory is a public entity, are fairly detailed and bureaucratic. The competitive processes presupposed by CERN's procurement procedures, however, do not always square with the more open and cooperative relationships that the ATLAS Collaboration seeks to establish with its suppliers in order to confront the technical uncertainties that it encounters. Through three mini case studies, the chapter explores the issue and puts forward a way of addressing it.

The ATLAS experiment at CERN, having entered the operational phase in September 2008, is designed to run for fifteen to twenty years. In terms of its aims, its sheer size, its complexity, and the number of scientists involved, it is one of the most challenging scientific enterprises ever undertaken. What is the nature of this enterprise? The ATLAS detector itself can be thought of as a giant measuring instrument that interposes itself between the experimenter and the phenomenal world. Much of an experimenter's time is devoted to tending the instrument in collaboration with others. This tending process has been described as care of the self. Such care, when undertaken collectively, is dependent upon the effective flow of information and knowledge between the different groups inside the collaboration that are responsible for the ‘caring’. Since information and knowledge flows constitute the lifeblood of all organizational processes — the focus in this book — this chapter presents a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, that helps with the exploration the nature of these knowledge and information flows in the chapters that follow.