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This chapter examines the connection between extravagant state-funded scientific megaprojects—known as Big Science—and international prestige by focusing on the Transits of Venus (TOVs). It first provides an overview of the international reaction to China's 2003 launch of the spacecraft Shenzhou V and whether it raised the prospects for a renewed space race before discussing Big Science projects such as space programs and ambitious biomedical projects like the Human Genome Project as examples of conspicuous consumption. It then considers Big Science in relation to prestige and three primary utility-based alternatives that explain Big Science as strategic investment, as a promoter of knowledge, and as pork-barrel politics, arguing that conspicuous consumption is a necessary complementary component for the analysis of Big Science. It also describes the international race to observe the TOVs of 1761, 1769, 1874, and 1882 as a case study of conspicuous consumption.

Recognizing that US taxpayers would not cover the entire SSC cost, the Bush Administration began trying to internationalize the laboratory by seeking large foreign contributions. But the only serious prospect was Japan, which was initially hesitant to commit to such a partnership. In 1990, before the extent of the cost overrun was fully recognized, the US House of Representatives capped the federal SSC contribution at $5 billion while requiring at least 20 percent foreign contributions. When estimated total costs grew to $8.25 billion, this stipulation meant that a total of $1.7 billion was needed from other countries. That summer, amendments to terminate the SSC were defeated by comfortable margins in both House and Senate despite worsening public perceptions of the project. But thus chastened, high Administration officials redoubled their efforts that fall to secure a billion-dollar Japanese commitment but obtained only a promise to consider partnering in the SSC laboratory.

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.

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?

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.

Big Science (and Big Humanities) were invented in the nineteenth century. Two huge, expensive, and long-lived projects, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) of the classical philologists and the Carte du Ciel of the astronomers, created disciplinary archives intended to serve future researchers for centuries and even millennia to come. The CIL would transcribe and publish all known Latin inscriptions from the length and breadth of the ancient Roman empire before they succumbed to the depredations of time. The Carte du Ciel would use the new methods of astrophotography to create a photograph of the sky as seen from the earth circa 1900, which future astronomers could use to detect phenomena that unfolded on a superhuman timescale. Both projects involved international cooperation, industrial-style organization, state funding, and disciplinary stamina on an unprecedented scale. Both raise questions about the investment of resources: why create the archives for future research instead of channeling energies and funds into present inquiry, especially when the topics of future research are uncertain? The answer lies in the melancholy realization of second-wave positivism that the price of progress was ephemeral scientific knowledge. Only the archives seemed to promise permanence.

The collective effort required to develop, build, and run the ATLAS detector has been structured as a ‘collaboration’, a distributed problem-solving network characteristic of Big Science, itself a relatively recent kind of enterprise involving big budgets, big staffs, big machines, and numerous laboratories. While ATLAS is an archetypical example of this type of enterprise in high-energy physics (HEP), similar endeavours can be found in basic physics, astronomy, and the life sciences. This chapter presents research that investigates the development and construction of the complex technological system that makes up the ATLAS detector.

In a very personal reflective essay, Marzio Nessi, the technical coordinator of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, recounts Max Boisot’s work and interaction with the particle physics community at ATLAS and CERN, whose research on the Higgs particle, the famous “God particle”, has attracted a lot of media attention. Boisot was interested in the creation of knowledge at ATLAS and studied its unique organization, characterized by collaborative behavior, a bottom-up approach, and a consensus-driven management style, which has enabled this Big Science institution to create a new way of dealing with extreme complexity. Boisot was fascinated by how a scientific collaboration as large as ATLAS generates and sustains creative and constructive interactions among thousands of researchers from diverse cultures, traditions and habits. He believed that the self-organizational capability of the collaboration was the key to success. Boisot’s research also laid the ground for studying how scientific and technical progress is made and how the value of basic research can be captured for society.

This concluding chapter presents the vision for a global biogeography, arguing that biogeography is a Big Science which deserves the attention and resources given to other large-scale, global scientific efforts. Global projects can accelerate species discovery, taxon and area descriptions, and cybertaxonomy, and can set a standard for collaborative scientific research in the twenty-first century.

In this chapter we review some of the ideas Max Boisot developed about the organizational and strategic aspects of big science projects and their application to the understanding of big science projects like ATLAS. First, we will look at some fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge and its differentiation from the concepts of data and information. Second, we have a look at Boisot's published research on big science, represented mainly by the article "Generating knowledge in a connected world: The case of the ATLAS experiment at CERN", reproduced in this book, and the book "Collisions and Collaboration". Issues in this part range from learning, culture or leadership to new management research models or e-science. Finally, we overview some of the ideas on which Boisot was working in the last months of his research about big science, and that may constitute avenues for future research.

This book examines the role of prestige in international relations through an analysis of conspicuous consumption. Drawing on the economic literature on Veblen effects, it argues that states pursue prestige by engaging in conspicuous consumption and that this quest for prestige is similar to the quest for power as a motivating force in international affairs. According to Veblenian theory, actors use consumption as a signal to indicate their social station and are willing to pay more in the hope that the additional expense may buy them prestige. The book also explores the logic of status symbols in international relations and demonstrates the dynamics of conspicuous consumption using three international “luxury commodities”: aircraft carriers, prosocial policies, and Big Science projects. This chapter elaborates each of these themes.

The introductory chapter outlines Max Boisot’s Information-Space (I-Space), a conceptual framework that facilitates the study of knowledge flows in diverse populations of ‘agents’. As one of Boisot’s most fundamental innovations, it enabled him and other researchers to study and advance understanding of the emerging knowledge-based society and the implications of the information revolution. The chapter also reviews Max Boisot’s life and achievements and reflects on how his career path and the international collaborations he formed helped to shape the development of his work. Boisot’s mode of knowledge creation that made him an extraordinary organization scholar and management visionary is described. Finally, the chapter reviews the five core sections into which the book is structured and which cover the main areas in which Boisot forged new understanding, among them Analyses of the Chinese System, Organizational Complexity, The Strategic Management of Knowledge, Knowledge in Big Science, Innovations in Education.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of cosmology. The starting assumption for cosmology, as in all branches of natural science, is that nature operates by kinds of logic and rules that one can discover by careful examination of what is observed, informed by past experience of what has worked. But despite the many demonstrations of its power, physics, along with all the rest of natural science, is incomplete. Research in cosmology in the twentieth century usually was done in small groups, often an individual working alone or maybe with a colleague or a student or two. In the twenty-first century, ongoing research in cosmology grew richer and called for larger groups to develop special-purpose equipment for data acquisition, which in turn called for groups of comparable size to reduce the data and interpret it. Big Science has become important to this subject: One has to get used to gathering data in vast amounts, analyzing these data, and employing massive numerical simulations that help bridge the gap between theory and observation. This book provides an account of how cosmology grew, presenting histories of six lines of research that were developing more or less separately.