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Locating Excellence and Enacting Locality

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer
Science Technology Human Values 2012 37: 241 originally published online 1
June 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0162243911409249

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Enacting Locality

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer1

Abstract
This article notes that research policy and early laboratory studies resonate
in foregrounding the laboratory as an important place and agent in produc-
ing valued research output but tend to gloss over the complex processes by
which laboratories are built and sustained over time as well as the signifi-
cance of non-Western histories. Drawing on multisited ethnography in
laboratories located in the geopolitical East of Europe, it examines the
articulations and tensions between performing laboratories as locales and
as locations of scientific excellence across a range of heretofore underex-
amined online and offline sites, including group seminars and institutional
Web pages. By drawing attention to enterprising modes of performing
achievement and lab organization, the article shows how the laboratory is
also a policy actor and reproduces Westward-oriented knowledge geogra-
phies. Pointing to care as a mode of ordering, it further explores different
forms of material and affective labor that are obfuscated in such perfor-
mances but build and sustain the lab as local–global assemblage. The article
concludes by discussing the policy implications of making this labor visible.

1
Charles University, Husnikova, Czech Republic

Corresponding Author:
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Charles
University, Husnikova 2075, 15000 Prague 13, Czech Republic
Email: d.lorenzmeyer@gmail.com

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242 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

Keywords
labor, representation, accounting practices, space/place/scale dynamics

Introduction
Academic research laboratories are increasingly interpellated as loci and
agents of ‘‘scientific excellence.’’ This is suggested in European research
policies that evaluate research groups and departments in these terms. While
excellence characteristically lacks a fixed referent (e.g., Lamont 2009;
Readings 1996), it is often contextually circumscribed in regard to
‘‘outstanding’’ productivity, output, originality, and internationality. The
relational character of these attributes is illustrated in the quality criteria of
the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) that classify levels of
excellence by which research outputs and environments are evaluated as
‘‘world-leading,’’ ‘‘internationally excellent,’’ ‘‘recognized internation-
ally,’’ and ‘‘recognized nationally.’’ In a more modest way, the Research,
Development and Innovation Policy in the Czech Republic defines ‘‘an
excellent team or excellent workplace’’ as one whose research output and
scientific training are ‘‘recognised by the international community’’
(Government of the Czech Republic 2008, 33), demonstrated by high-
impact publications, international collaborations, and an international
workforce. Becoming excellent here is explicitly framed in terms of ‘‘catching
up’’ with the ‘‘scientifically developed countries’’ (Research, Development
and Innovation Council 2009, 7), that is, with the global West.
What is obfuscated and often explicitly devalued in these policies is the
significance of non-Western histories and knowledge traditions, and the
local labor by which laboratories themselves are established, maintained,
and extended in particular space-times. This move is paralleled in early
laboratory studies (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979])
that likewise considered the laboratory as locus and agent, not of scientific
excellence but of the production of scientific facts: the laboratory was a
‘‘workshop for the instrumental manufacture of knowledge’’ (Knorr-Cetina
1981), a ‘‘workplace and set of productive forces’’ (Latour and Woolgar
1986 [1979], 243) that performed material inscriptions and allowed tracing
how scientific facts were contingently fashioned from the material assem-
blages of materials, technologies, and human actors. In contrast to research
policy, field studies of the laboratory were highly attuned to the micropro-
cesses of laboratory work. But, because they were ‘‘looking for a sociology
of the contents of science’’ (Latour 1983, 159) and ventured into laboratories

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Lorenz-Meyer 243

in scientific centers, they had little to say about how laboratory settings and
research groups were organized, managed, and reproduced locally and in rela-
tion to the differential ‘‘power of different regions in different parts of the
world to make knowledge and to define what is innovative and important
knowledge’’ (Traweek 2000, 36).1 As Henke and Gieryn (2008, 354) have
argued in laboratory studies ‘‘the lab became a natural resource—a means for
deconstructing the ‘view from nowhere’ rather than a topic of interest in its
own right.’’
Taking the example of academic laboratories located in the geopolitical
east of Europe, this article aims to examine distinct spatiotemporalities of
the laboratory across a range of online and offline sites such as seminars and
Web pages. I am particularly interested in exploring articulations and ten-
sions between laboratories as locales or interactive settings and as locations
or nodes of scientific excellence and the material and affective labor
involved. What gets excluded, silenced, or obfuscated in performances of
internationally productive laboratories and what modes of ordering are
enacted? How might we think about laboratories as liveable, inclusive, and
materially and culturally reproduced spaces?
The enquiry of how the lab is enacted, staged, and sustained in ‘‘other
places’’ builds on the methodology of multisited ethnographies (Hine
2007; Marcus 1998) and the geography of science (Greenhough 2006;
Massey 1995, 2004). This literature has argued that the global is consti-
tuted, invented, and coordinated in the local and that analysts should not
assume the boundaries of appropriate field sites, including the labora-
tory, prior to investigation. It has also highlighted the importance of
information and communication technologies and virtual spaces and
times in knowledge production, that affect and extend the subject–object
reconfigurations through which laboratories are constituted as privileged
sites of knowledge production (Beaulieu 2010; Hine 2008; Merz
2006).The study further draws on conceptualizations of hidden background
work and affective labor in technologically mediated and scholarly work
(Star and Strauss 1999; Wyatt, Dormans, and Antonijevic 2010) and the
ways they are implicated in modes of ordering research organizations
(Law 1994).
Against the recent plea of Doing (2008) that future laboratory studies
ought to reinvestigate contingent fact making in the laboratory-as-
experimental-space, the article foregrounds material-discursive practices
involved in the making of the laboratory as a local–global assemblage. It
thereby sketches an alternative future of lab studies that conceptualize the
laboratory as simultaneously epistemic, organizational, and political, and

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244 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

contributes to making the material, social, and affective labor of making the
lab more visible and accountable. The laboratory is not merely a ‘‘policy
object’’ (Webster 2007) but also an actor in remaking what Stöckelová
(IN PRESS) has termed epistemic geopolitics.
Empirically, the enquiry draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a Czech
research institution that I undertook intermittedly between 2006 and 2008
and on individual and focus group interviews conducted in the framework
of the project Knowledge, Institutions and Gender: An East-West Compara-
tive Study.2 The Institute was founded after World War II with an emphasis
on interdisciplinary basic research in the physical and biosciences and is
heralded as a national success story: Registered patents go back to the
1970s and cooperation with a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company started
in the early 1990s. Following recommendations of its international advisory
board, major restructuring and reprofiling took place in 2006, culminating
in an international tender for group leaders. In the posttransformation period
two of the more than twenty-five established or reconstructed research
groups had not passed the newly introduced interim assessment and will
be dismantled.
The article tracks the articulations and tensions of local/global
enactments of laboratories across three sites. The first section presents three
vignettes on how the laboratory was enacted in group seminars and a local
symposium, sites that have remained underexplored in science and technol-
ogy studies (STS) (Mody and Kaiser 2008) and disregarded by research
policies with their focus on recognized international output. I will examine
the material and affective labor and different forms of sociality that were
important ingredients for the laboratory-in-the-making but remained differ-
ently visible and accountable. The second section explores how laboratories
and geographies of knowledge making (Traweek 2000) were performed on
the institutional home page, a site that also has received little attention in
STS (Hine 2008). This analysis draws attention to digital standardization
of lab representations, as well as to activities that could not be recorded
in the enterprising mode of drawing laboratories together. The final section
examines further how excellence was linked to the enterprising lab organi-
zation, set against a seemingly outmoded static laboratory. By focusing on
care as a less visible mode of ordering in the enterprising lab and on three
ironies of the ‘‘local’’ in international performance mechanisms, I seek to
explicate reasons why enterprise as an exclusive mode of achieving
excellence does not work. In conclusion, I reflect on what conceptualizing
the lab as a policy actor and bringing the labor of building and sustaining the
lab into critical visibility may mean for STS.

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Lorenz-Meyer 245

Enacting and Extending the Laboratory in Other

Space-Times
To date, STS have paid only scarce attention to diverse local sites such as
seminars, journal clubs, or colloquia as devices for making and sustaining
the laboratory, and these sites have been also disregarded by research
policies that promote excellence. In this section, I present three vignettes
that explore how different practices fostered internationality and local
collectivity of the laboratory in different sites. I will argue that spaces such
as group seminars and colloquia are not merely workshops for making
particular knowledge claims and acculturating researchers into a commu-
nity of practice (Mody and Kaiser 2008). They are also devices that perform
and demonstrate the ability of researchers to act as international agents (and
replay from one performance to another) and foster different forms of
sociality.

Working Publications
In the posttransformation period all laboratories at the Institute participated
in weekly research seminars in which researchers periodically presented
their work. Group seminars were mandatory for all junior and senior
researchers (but not for technicians) and usually chaired by the group
leader. This vignette examines local/global laboratory performances at a
joint research seminar that brought together members of six laboratories
who were working in a particular specialization. The seminar was held in
the formal meeting room of the Institute and aimed to discuss and showcase
projects of the participating labs that were usually in the process of being
written up for publication. Its organization was mapped onto the format
of a conference session, consisting of two (PowerPoint) presentations
immediately followed by questions and answers.
Internationality was enacted in that presentations and discussion were
held exclusively in English, the global language in which research was
written up and published even though the majority of seminar participants
were Czech. It was also staged by frequent insertions of (self-)references to
work published in Western journals and through the topics presented.
Conversations with lab leaders suggested that conclusions drawn from work
presentations did not primarily concern the quality of a particular researcher
but the laboratory leader; group leaders carefully registered whose team
members appeared to always report on the same research and whose
projects were varied and aligned with ‘‘hot topics’’ in the field. This

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246 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

suggests that lab leaders were also engaged in persuasion work, specifically
in what Wyatt, Dormans, and Antonijevic (2010) have termed reputation
and position work, defined as demonstrating the ability to produce research
that meets accepted academic quality criteria and, I would add, international
excellence, and as confirming and preserving this status through reiterative
performances.
The lab was also evoked as local collectivity, representationally through
the characteristic use of the first person plural (‘‘we used . . . ,’’ ‘‘we observed
. . . ’’), and the obligatory acknowledgment of collaborators, often by way of
a lab group photo. In the seminar performance, this ensemble was contracted
in the hierarchical dyad of junior researcher and lab leader. While it was com-
monly a PhD student or postdoc who gave the presentation, it was mostly the
assertive group leader who answered questions in the discussion and was
often directly addressed by other lab leaders who dominated the discussion.
These enactments were part of the reputation work of the proverbial ‘‘head’’
that simultaneously positioned the junior researcher as ‘‘lab hand’’ (Doing
2004). They reproduced a division of labor predominant in experimental
spaces and in writing, where the lab leader often wrote the introductory and
concluding parts that situated research in the wider field. This ordering was
materialized in the ordering of authors—and was geared to sustain the
reputation of the laboratory leader not directly the junior researcher.

Work in Progress
The second vignette examines lab performances at a weekly seminar of
another group that was comprised of lab members and a few collaborators
from other teams. While likewise held in English and organized around
work presentations, seminar performances were more wide-ranging and
more closely interwoven with the social life of the lab.
Internationality in this forum was enacted less through referencing inter-
nationally published work than through ubiquitous preparation for and
reports back from professional meetings abroad that embedded the lab in
a wider net of international contacts and fostered sociality. As one PhD stu-
dent explained:

You don’t really go [to a conference] just for yourself, you go for the team.
Each of us tries to choose a conference he or she is interested in and then tries
to collect data for the whole team. Like when I go to a conference and I know
that Matej3 is working on something, I will look around for somebody who is
doing that kind of thing, so I can discuss his problem with others (Interview).

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Lorenz-Meyer 247

Reports about international conferences or work carried out at collaborating

labs abroad customarily included photographs of specific venues, friends,
collaborators, and former lab members whom the presenter had met as well
as other places she had visited. In other words, the task of researchers to
share experiences included the articulation of a network of collaborations
as well as personal travel reports. This process of sharing contributed to
building sociality and the lab’s identity beyond its present members.
Sociality was extended by communally celebrating personal events such
as birthdays and other turning points which were thereby incorporated into
laboratory life. This occurred also viscerally when members of the labora-
tory brought culinary gifts, produce from their garden or wine which were
shared ‘‘to feel a taste of’’ the places they had been (lab leader).
A principle way of enacting the laboratory locally as an epistemic
community was the collective working through a particular research
problem. Presenters were generally frank about things they only partially
understood and discussions over the interpretation of data often punctuated
presentations. As in the joint seminar the group leader had a dominant role
in leading and structuring the discussion, providing the ‘‘larger picture’’ of a
particular piece of research or collaboration, and guiding junior researchers
in what to highlight and what to omit for particular conference audiences.
While still oriented toward producing output there was a lot of active
participation on the part of junior researchers, women in particular, who
were forthcoming to make practical and methodological suggestions to
advance the knowledge projects of their peers.
The group seminar on occasion also included discussion about the distri-
bution of practical lab maintenance and housekeeping, the purchase of
equipment, and other institutional matters. The management of emotions
was an integral part of this with the group leader intent on preempting neg-
ative emotions and frustration, for example, by apologizing for frequent
absences and renewing his commitment ‘‘to spend more time with you
guys.’’ Affective labor and experience-sharing thus intertwined with foster-
ing researchers’ well-being and the laboratory’s vitality and (international)
productivity but remained implicit, invisible to the institution and the wider
community, and unaccounted for. Some groups did not run any seminars of
their own.

Working Personal Lives

The final vignette turns to a local symposium that was initiated by labora-
tory leader Petr Marek who had invited four group leaders from other Czech

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248 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

institutions, their students and postdocs, and myself. The event was held in
the Institute’s country-house retreat and organized on a specific topic around
tutorials held by group leaders and lectures given predominantly by junior
researchers. The symposium was cast as a possibility for exchange from which,
Marek told me later, collaborations could arise that were also necessary for
some forms of international cooperation such as networks of excellence.
From the outset much emphasis was given to possibilities for socializing.
Most notably, the symposium reversed or rendered more permeable the spa-
tial, temporal, and epistemic boundaries of work and personal life. Whereas
everyday lab work tended to enact ‘‘a highly specialised envelope of space-
time, into which the intrusion of other activities and interests is unwarranted
and limited’’ (Massey 1995, 494), at the symposium such intrusions were
explicitly welcomed. Just as it was ordinarily common practice for lab lead-
ers to bring work home and enact ‘‘a capsule of ‘virtual’ time-space of work
within the material place of the home’’ (ibid., 493), here material aspects of
home where brought into space-times of working together. Researchers’
children, for example, were allowed to be present during presentations.
And, whereas in everyday practice leisure or family time was arranged
around core working hours, at the symposium work time was scheduled
in the mornings and late afternoon around a core time for socializing. Activ-
ities usually done in domestic spaces, such as cooking were done commun-
ally. These practices slowed down the sense of frenzy and speeding up of
work often associated with academic conferences (Pels 2003).
On this occasion, the laboratory was enacted as a thematic clustering of
presentation topics and speakers. At the same time effort was made to inte-
grate presentations from different laboratories into these clusters. Hence,
emphasis was put not so much on establishing boundaries but on creating
openings and fostering shared interests. At the end of the first day, Marek
gave a ‘‘moonlight special’’ lecture that crossed boundaries between sci-
ence and fiction by casting the principles of the field in the register of sound,
adding an audio-sensory register to the predominance of the visual—to
comic effect. The lecture was positioned at the boundary between work and
leisure time and meant to ‘‘stimulate an entertaining evening’’ (Marek).
Over the course of the symposium, different kinds of social activities
such as singing together and hiking brought together different participants
and build or deepened relationships within and across laboratories. In the
language of management theory, researchers were engaged in a form of per-
suasion work that works by establishing communality. As Cialdini (2001,
74) has argued ‘‘managers can use similarities to create bonds with a recent
hire [or] the head of another department . . . because [a bond] creates a

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Lorenz-Meyer 249

presumption of goodwill and trustworthiness in every subsequent encoun-

ter.’’ In other words, by mobilizing a range of boundary incursions between
science and socializing, work and personal lives, the local symposium
combined epistemic work with the labor of cultivating social relationships
which appeared to enhance researchers’ well-being—and might lead to
future collaborative and international work.
To conclude this section, the three vignettes exemplify some of the ways
in which the lab was sustained both as a locale and a location of interna-
tional excellence in seminars and colloquia. Practices of building location
and locale were both explicit and implicit: thus, internationality was per-
formed in ubiquitous reputation work, most visibly through demonstrating
international output. It was also performed in more integrated ways of articu-
lating work done at home and abroad, and as a prospective horizon for present
activities. The laboratory was enacted locally as a hierarchical unit of lab
leader and junior researcher, as well as a collective working through a prob-
lem and sharing experience, including a range of temporally limited bound-
ary incursions between personal life and work life. While the partiality of
observational opportunities as well as the differing specializations and time
lines of research in different groups made it difficult to trace how group soci-
ality was translated into performance output, sociality was considered impor-
tant by many junior researchers as a means to advance epistemic projects and
to ease tensions around the need to share space and equipment. It was also
positioned as a value in its own right. Yet, in the organizational move to shift
resources and responsibility for laboratory performance to group leaders,
there was no collective reflection on what constitutes a viable group seminar
or colloquium also for junior members, and how relevant practices could be
institutionally shared and supported as part of research excellence.

Performing Laboratories Online

Like those of commercial enterprises, the home pages of research institu-
tions have become important representational and organizational tools that
‘‘aim to create positive beliefs about the organisation and its products’’
(Singh and Dalal 1999; Meyer 2008). Home pages are performed and per-
formative (Hine 2008). Designed and managed by Web professionals to
appeal to an imagined audience, relevant information needs to be updated
by research scientists to enact timeliness and ongoing achievements. In this
section, I want to examine how institutional Web pages performed the
laboratory as locality and location—even though regrettably I did not dis-
cuss these constructions and their uses with research participants for whom

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250 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

the home page as outward representation did not appear to be salient in their
day-to-day work.
A cursory look at the home pages of internationally renowned research
institutions shows that Web sites are increasingly digitally standardized,
technically (through the use of hypertext and rotating imagery), categori-
cally (through classifications of ‘‘research,’’ ‘‘open positions,’’ and so
on), and visually (through institutional logos, technoscientific imagery, and
representations of architectural features). At the institution under study, a
new home page was launched in 2007 that replaced a black-and-white
sketch of the building by a color photograph and a rotating header of artful
imagery of lab equipment which invoked physical location and high-tech
performance. The default home page was run in English with a possibility
to switch to a (partially translated) Czech interface. Sections on outstanding
results, press releases, and more recently on a technology transfer office and
science communication were added to perform the institution both as an
attractive physical locale and an innovative international location in the
scientific field. The new Web site also standardized the presentation of
research laboratories (accessed by clicking on the name of the laboratory
leader as a passage point to the lab) through uniform sections on projects,
people, publications, collaborations, and grants.
The key performative mode of the laboratory-online was a detailed list-
ing of lab resources and outputs in ways which emphasized (international)
achievement and selectively visualized and obscured evocations of the
‘‘local.’’ For example, in project descriptions research was framed in
relation to ‘‘universally’’ relevant research questions and accompanied by
scientific imagery that represented specific findings or models by disem-
bedding them from technoscientific practice (Lynch and Woolgar 1990).
Information on researchers and instruments combined the evocation of local
and global through photographic imagery and text. Emplacing actors in
the institution, researchers were portrayed in a group photograph in front
of the building that visualized collectivity and the labor power of a lab;
instruments were photographed inside the lab. Both kinds of visualizations
were hyperlinked to categorical information about performance of these
actors by way of listing educational achievements, awards, and technical
prowess, respectively. Unsurprisingly, publications were the most visible
form of output. Web design required that laboratories listed all output
by calendar year, which differentially visualized and displayed productivity
both through volume and through the location of journals (and patents)
as conventional indicators of quality, impact, and prestige of research
activity.

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Lorenz-Meyer 251

Importantly, this mise-en-sce`ne of the laboratory anticipates and enacts a

dominant managerial version of research policy that is ‘‘evidence-based’’ in
insisting on describing and constructing relationships between inputs and
outputs. Lab pages do not contain evocations of processes of knowledge
production aside from the rotating header on lab equipment. Drawing on the
Latin root of evidence (e-videre), Nowotny (2007) reminds us that what is
admitted as evidence for (lab) productivity is what can be visibly counted,
and therefore measured, valued, and compared.
At the same time, the online staging of the laboratory also reproduced a
geography of knowledge making where relevant epistemic contexts were
located in the global West (cf. Traweek 2000). Instruments listed on labora-
tory Web sites, for example, were exclusively manufactured in North
America or Western Europe; researchers’ CVs indicated that these were
also places where group leaders (and an increasing minority of international
researchers) had spent periods of training and/or employment, and the cur-
rent destinations of those listed as ‘‘former members.’’ Publication data sug-
gested that laboratories published overwhelmingly, often exclusively, in
refereed Anglophone European and American scientific journals. Aside
from (English) publications in a Czech journal located at the Institute, only
a handful of articles listed since 2007 had been published in journals
geographically located further east.
There was a range of (in)activities in the doing of science (Garforth
IN PRESS) that could not be documented in the evidenced-based mode
of performing the lab online. To give a few examples, lab pages did not talk
about instruments that could not be acquired, despite grant support, because
of the lack of physical lab space. Researcher CVs did not indicate that some
of the most successful Czech scientists had not been allowed to supervise
and employ students under state-socialism (an activity restricted to people
who followed the party line); they did not list activities such as outreach
work and periods spent outside of academic science. Similarly, publication
listings did not include popular science publications, or other writings
such as letters to the editor of international journals that commented on
Czech research policy. In other words, activities and outcomes that were
not deemed sufficiently international and/or expressed social as well as
scientific engagements were omitted in virtual performances of the lab—the
latter ironically in contrast to many ‘‘excellent’’ western organizations that
explicitly flag ‘‘societal relevance’’ or ‘‘engagement,’’ which are increas-
ingly becoming obligatory components of funding and evaluation
schemes.4 In the intense focus on productivity the past could only be told
in terms of global achievements, as in rare statements that a specific

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252 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

discovery had ‘‘promoted the Department [in which a group originated] to

one of the world centres in the area of X.’’ Local knowledge traditions as
well as indications of the non-Western geopolitical past of state-socialism
and its local manifestations could not be talked about.
To conclude, enactments of laboratories online tell of aspirations to
international excellence, both explicitly in mission statements and the
showcasing of research in high-impact western journals, and through the
digital standardization of these representational and performative devices
that enroll scientists in managerial forms of monitoring and accounting
demanded by research funding and evaluation schemes. Locality is never
simply absent but selectively evoked in terms of physical environment and
lab community that are, however, always complemented and superimposed
by performance data. Although there are certainly differences in the degree
to which science–society relations are evoked on the Web pages of western
institutions, their very absence in the first versions of the new home page
can itself be considered as a mark of locality.

The Enterprising Laboratory and its Others

While scientific excellence of research labs both in internal seminars and on
institutional home pages was directly related to publications in high-impact
journals, achieving this output was often linked to a particular form of labora-
tory organization that I will call after Law (1994) the enterprising laboratory.
Law has identified four modes of ordering told and embodied in nonverbal
practices and materials by which research organizations and actors are recur-
sively performed: enterprise, vision, administration, and vocation.5 Organiza-
tion is the intersecting performance of these ordering logics that can combine
or clash in different situations. In this section, I want to critically examine the
hegemonic performances of enterprise and what gets obfuscated or devalued in
the enterprising mode of telling the lab. I will start by exploring how the enter-
prising laboratory was tied to excellence and set against a seemingly outmoded
version of the vocational laboratory. I will then point to some tensions and iro-
nies in the enterprising denigration of the local and vocational, and examine the
unacknowledged role of care as a more implicit mode of ordering (Hinchliffe
2007) in enterprising lab organization.

Enterprise and Excellence

A strong version of the enterprising laboratory was enacted by group leader
František Svoboda. Svoboda was by his own account a ‘‘global player’’ in

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Lorenz-Meyer 253

his field and strongly endorsed the internal restructuring and assessment
procedures at the Institute that he considered following the implementation
of more competitive and productive research systems in the United States.
He described his laboratory as ‘‘a one-man show.’’ Its workforce was made
up of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers on short-term contracts and
relied on the constant influx of researchers and a steady stream of outputs
that helped sustain the lab through new grants. Only he and the lab techni-
cians had longer term contracts. Svoboda put a premium on performance,
output, efficiency, and autonomy of the lab. Research work was distributed
and ostensibly aligned with researchers’ preferences, career requirements,
and the benefits of the group as a whole. Thus, PhD students worked on
basic research that generated possibilities for publication needed to com-
plete the PhD (commonly based on three coauthored publications) while
postdocs worked on industry-related research where publications were
often delayed because of confidentiality agreements. Publications in high-
ranking journals but also monetary bonuses for first-authored articles were
key performance incentives. According to Svoboda, too much (outside) col-
laboration ‘‘was not efficient’’ because it created dependencies on the work
of others and made it more difficult to attribute the work to the laboratory
leader who in the one-man show was usually the corresponding author.
Svoboda set the successful enterprising laboratory in direct opposition to
the ‘‘old-style’’ vocational laboratory. A key characteristic of the ‘‘other’’
laboratory was a high number of staff scientists employed on renewable
contracts funded by the Institute with a corresponding lack of (international)
postdoctoral researchers and students financed by grants. Proponents of the
enterprising lab often intimated that staff scientists were not only costly but
also second-rate researchers since they continued to work ‘‘on somebody
else’s ideas’’ or on niche topics rather than establishing their own group.
Instead of managing performance and writing grants, vocational lab leaders
still worked at the bench. This implied that in their devotion to the processes
of science they lacked the capacity to recognize and drive what was most
important and tended instead to get stuck in detail, unable to write up work
in a timely manner. For these reasons, vocational laboratories did not pro-
duce a steady output of international high-impact publications. For Svo-
boda, they were remnants of the pretransformation period, and would
‘‘die out’’ with the retirement of older group leaders or as a consequence
of research assessment.
Discursively, these contrasting models of the vocational and the
enterprising laboratory were mapped on and mobilized binary opposites
of East and West, local and global, static and dynamic that buttressed the

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254 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

superiority of the Western enterprising laboratory by equating it with

outstanding international performance and excellence. The enterprising lab
was normatively and organizationally cast as the only way of running a
successful lab—even when a group leader humorously flagged its potential
amorality: ‘‘When you are a terrible group leader for your people but the
output is great you will be supported [institutionally]; you will get more
people to terrorise’’ (focus group). Who could be against excellence?
This kind of boundary drawing between successful (lab) organization
and failure has parallels with the modernization story of public sector
reform in the United Kingdom as a shift from ineffective bureaucracy and
administration to dynamic enterprise. As du Gay (2003, 664) notes, these
epochalist terms set up ‘‘a periodizing schema in which a logic of dichoto-
mization establishes the available terms of the debate in advance . . . leav-
ing no ‘way out’ from their terms of reference.’’ Unsurprisingly, practices
and stories about lab organization and international performance were more
complex than the periodizing schema of vocation and enterprise.

The Local in International Performance Mechanisms

of Enterprise
I want to briefly draw attention to three kinds of ironies that problematize
the equation of enterprise and excellence. A first irony concerns the fact that
there appeared to be little relationship between the form of organization of
the enterprising lab and the markers of excellence valued by enterprising lab
leaders. Thus, there was no apparent relation between the presence of staff
scientists and the volume of international publishing or patenting. One of
the laboratories with the highest number of staff researchers also was
ranked top in the internal assessment, and another lab where the group
leader still worked at the bench ranked first in terms of income generated
by trademarked drugs. In many cases, senior staff scientists had their own
students and were corresponding authors, pointing to a more distributed
allocation of epistemic labor than in the one-man show.
A second irony was expressed in the observation that the Institute’s
internal scientometric rankings of researchers and laboratories were not
conducted in ‘‘excellent’’ research organizations in the global West. Indeed,
the intensity and short timescales of these internal assessments were
sometimes considered symbolically as a marker of peripherality. Referring
to the complicated formula of internal impact assessment—which effec-
tively penalized (international) collaboration, since points were subtracted
for articles coauthored by several teams—one lab leader commented,

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Lorenz-Meyer 255

‘‘My colleagues from the US are sometimes smiling when they look at how
we evaluate everything, how we calculate everything and try to make a
ranking of people which is rather funny for them’’ (focus group). Thus, the
process of ‘‘innovation-imitation’’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 152) where
‘‘organisations tend to model themselves after similar organisations in their
field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful . . . [rather] than
on any concrete evidence that the aspired models enhance efficiency’’ was
upheld even in the face of doubts whether such practices really existed in
the West.
A third irony concerned the enterprisers’ knowledge that despite their
unqualified endorsement, submitting to the Western idea(l) of impartial
peer review often meant that scientists got entangled with particular
tensions and conflicts. This concerned not only experiences of local
Western bias toward manuscripts submitted by researchers from Eastern
European laboratories but also conflicts of interest between authors and
referees: reviewers of some of the highly ranked journals were found to
have rejected work for publication that contradicted their own views or
‘‘inspired’’ work that they subsequently published under their own name in
another journal.
These ironies make explicit some of the reasons why enterprise does not
work as a way of managing scientific excellence and show how perfor-
mance mechanisms were inevitably marked by the local. This was further
corroborated by narratives that drew attention to local and embodied labor
of care that sustained the enterprising laboratory but remained usually tacit
in accounts of the enterprisers.

Care as a Mode of Ordering in the Enterprising Lab

In the laboratory, care was not only articulated as a mode of working with
materials and machines but also located in the relationships between lab
leaders and junior researchers—particularly in accounts of the latter. This
concerned visible and accountable forms of ‘‘trajectory care’’ when lab
leaders helped students to access international journals, enabled the timely
completion of degrees, and above all placed members of the laboratory in
relevant networks so that they could in Mody and Kaiser’s (2008, 388)
terms ‘‘market their adopted home’s practices’’ in other places. Given that
trajectory care was aligned with enterprise and usually recognized and
valued—so that candidates for excellence grants of the European Research
Council are commonly asked ‘‘How many important students have you
produced and where are they now?’’(Nowotny 2010)—this care was readily

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256 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

acknowledged by group leaders and is also well documented in STS

(e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1981; Slaughter et al. 2002).
But care practices also included patience, persistence, attuned attentive-
ness, and more mundane and embodied engagements with and immersion
into knowledge objects and the projects of junior researchers. A postdoc-
toral researcher of the Svoboda laboratory put it as follows:

František really knows what we are doing, because he cares . . . . He has

patience in what he is doing, and he can share that patience with you and
he can make you better, more efficient by helping you and making you feel
comfortable. He shows you more in science than his own work . . . . He puts
much of himself and much motivation to do it well, to get it working
(Interview).

While not denying that Svoboda pressed for efficiency and performance this
postdoc maintains that he also cared in the sense of engaging with others.
Care here is not a personal characteristic but ‘‘is produced with and as oth-
ers, and is neither selfless not only about the self’’ (Hinchliffe 2007, 181).
Building on Hinchliffe’s analysis of urban ecologies, I want to suggest that
care is another often less visible mode of ordering in the laboratory—even
though immersive activities of caring about and caring for knowledge
objects and subjects and creating well-being were not the terms used by
entrepreneurial lab leaders. While actually or potentially entangled with
increasing performance, care practices contradicted the idea of self-
sufficiency and independence of the one-man show.
Like sociality and experience sharing in internal group seminars, the
ethos of care tended to remain invisible and unvalued by the institution.
On the contrary, becoming a successful entrepreneurial laboratory leader
was often imagined in terms of no longer caring and getting rid of nonper-
formers, as in the suggestion of a group leader ‘‘that perhaps the Institute
should send us to some course for managers because I’m always doubtful
whether I’m a good boss and I’m sure a strong boss would kick out people
who are not productive’’ (focus group). Obscuring care practices also meant
that this work remained invisible and unacknowledged when it was dele-
gated to and carried out by senior PhD students and postdocs, often women,
as labs grew in size and lab leaders were frequently absent or unavailable—
sometimes to the detriment of the career trajectories of these articulation
and care workers (Kerr and Lorenz-Meyer 2009).
To conclude, it seems clear that enterprising forms of lab organization
are on the rise, both as a discourse and as practices of enabling and

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Lorenz-Meyer 257

demonstrating scientific performance and ‘‘excellence.’’ This was visible,

for example, in the hiring of short-term postdoctoral researchers rather than
staff scientists and promoting internal assessments and rankings. By its pro-
ponents enterprise was self-consciously perceived not just as form of micro-
politics in the lab but also as a mode of enacting (policy) change in terms of
making science more merit-based and competitive. It was a move for, and
indeed an enactment of, scientific excellence and ‘‘the Westernisation of
Eastern-bloc science’’ (Schiermeier 2008), forcefully set against the inertia
of the past and a relentless vocationalism and ‘‘localism’’ embodied in
vocational labs. Bringing into visibility the taken for granted background
work of care, attuned attentiveness, and ‘‘drudgery’’ (Linková 2009) and
other manifestations of the local in enterprise and its performance mechan-
isms casts doubts on enterprise as a superior or exclusive way of managing
science and refuses to exclude these practices from the remit of excellence.
Rather, it flags the necessity of science policy and research organizations to
institutionally value and enable care practices and support scientists who
take on this work that ‘‘will be increasingly important for collective perfor-
mance’’ (Hackett 2005, 817) but as Garforth and Kerr (2010) have argued
‘‘can be seen as a liability in relation to the production of visibly individual
excellence.’’

Conclusions
The starting point of this article was the observation of a resonance between
research policy and early laboratory studies in STS: both foreground the
laboratory as an important agent and place in producing visible and valued
research outputs but largely disregard the complex local processes by which
laboratories are built and sustained as locales and locations of excellence.
A multisited exploration of enactments of laboratories in the Czech Repub-
lic drew attention to the social, symbolic, material, and affective textures of
laboratories and to different care practices and other forms of the local that
were often invisibilized by scientists themselves in their quest of demon-
strating international excellence across a range of different sites such as
seminars and Web sites.
Two findings are particularly noteworthy for refiguring the laboratory
beyond taking it as a ‘‘natural resource’’ for knowledge making (Henke and
Gieryn 2008). First, the exploration of how laboratories were enacted in
other places suggested that laboratories are also epistemicopolitical actors.
In a broader sense, this has long been suggested by laboratory studies in
their insistence that in extending knowledge objects to other localities,

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258 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

society is transformed ‘‘according to laboratory experiments’’ and that

inside laboratories ‘‘future reservoirs of political power are in the making’’
(Latour 1983, 167, 168). The analysis of organizational and online perfor-
mances of the lab suggests more narrowly that in mundane actions and deci-
sions of laboratory scientists on what positions to create, what language to
speak, where to publish, with whom to cooperate, what societal engage-
ments to pursue, and what to highlight and what to omit in public represen-
tations, laboratories also remake a geography of knowledge that is
Westward oriented—even though distinctions of East and West, center and
periphery are reinscribed in attempts to distinguish oneself as Western or in
emulating practices that may not exist in the West. In a societal and scien-
tific context, where the laboratory of the past was associated with stasis,
localism, and a lack of merit-based rewards this was often an explicit aim
of many scientific leaders. Enterprise as a mode of ordering that valued
opportunism and performance (measurement) was considered as a principal
prerequisite for achieving excellence but also went together with outward
devaluation of vocationalism and the local.
Second, conceiving the research laboratory as an actor in ‘‘epistemic
geopolitics’’ (Stöckelová IN PRESS) has also implications for where STS
scholars locate policy-relevant decisions aside from the ‘‘many policy
rooms’’ (Nowotny 2007) in research councils, funding agencies, and inter-
mediary bodies, and how they may think of the nature of their own interven-
tions. Here, the analysis has shown that practices that constitute the
laboratory as a location of excellence are inevitably tied to practices that
make it as a locale. Laboratories are continuously made and sustained in
many local sites, not only by demonstrating internationality but also
through the labor of integrating international and personal experiences into
the common stock of the lab’s experience, spending time together infor-
mally, creating bonds and trustworthiness and practices of care. Pointing
to care as another less visible mode of ordering not outside but inside the
enterprising laboratory is an attempt to sense and intervene in those prac-
tices that tend to be less visible and valued by senior researchers, institu-
tions, and evaluation schemes (cf. Star and Strauss 1999). Mol, Moser,
and Pols (2010, 7) have admonished that ‘‘if care practices are not carefully
attended to, there is a risk that they will be eroded. If there are only talked
about in terms that are not appropriate to their specificities, they will be
submitted to rules and regulations that are alien to them.’’
Enterprise cannot tell about dreams, love, and ethics unless they are
dressed up as opportunism (Law 1994, 178). At the Institute under study,
there were no collective reflections on or mechanisms for sustaining

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Lorenz-Meyer 259

research collectivities as a whole, owing largely to the assumption that

excellent labs naturally follow from hiring excellent individuals (e.g.,
Zagrovic and Dikic 2008) and that constantly training up novices was eco-
nomical and vindicated by enabling juniors to make use of their skills when
they move on.
While it may be neither possible nor desirable to bring all aspects of
material and affective labor under the remit of bureaucratic accountability,
making the work of sustaining lab sociality visible is important if we want
to think of laboratories as entities that are actively sustained through multiple
processes, and that are perhaps also sustainable. Borrowing this term from
environmental discourse, where it implies the physical and ethical interrela-
tionships between environment and society is not without its problems. Propo-
nents of enterprise would presumably argue for sustainability in the sense of
the lab’s social and economic viability through devising robust research pro-
grams that attract funding and researchers. However, the notion of sustainabil-
ity also draws our attention to questions of the prudent use and maintenance of
human and intellectual resources. Hinchliffe (2007, 186) has suggested that
practicing sustainability is attentive ‘‘to the interrelations that exist within and
between multiple practices, modes of ordering and materialities’’ by which
collectivities such laboratories are assembled and to those matters and prac-
tices that have been temporarily obscured by the requirement to make things
happen. As the ‘‘politics of inter-connection’’ (Bullen and Whitehead 2005),
sustainability requires thinking even further about how these practices affect
more distant others in other places and times. Conceiving the laboratory as sus-
tained and sustainable therefore begins to (re)open questions of what counts as
productive, and what counts as (and in) a laboratory that is good for objects and
subjects of knowledge production.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lisa Garforth and the anonymous referees for their helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article:

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260 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

This article is based upon a research that was funded by the European Commission
(see note 2).

Notes
1. Traweek (2000) also draws attention to the temporalities of making knowledge
geographies: when regions become powerful, they erase their humble origins and
specificities and become ‘‘unmarked categories’’ and timeless standards.
2. The project was funded under the 6th Framework Program’s Science and Society
Program (SAS-CT-2005-017617) and investigated contexts and cultures of
knowledge production practices in the social and natural sciences from a gender
and geopolitical perspective in five European countries (cf. http://www.knowing.
soc.cas.cz).
3. In order to protect the anonymity of research participants pseudonyms are used
throughout the text.
4. This is not the case in Czech research policies where science–society engagements
and notions of accountability have remained largely restricted to collaborations with
industry while neglecting engagements with civil society actors, prompting
Stöckelová and Linková (2006) to refrain from using the notion of Mode 2 in the
Czech context.
5. In a nutshell, enterprise is a mode of ordering that values and enacts opportunism,
means–end relations and performance; vision or charisma enacts inspiration and
charm but also elitism and a disregard for mundane activities and orderly proce-
dure; administration performs regulation, due process, and defined procedures;
and vocation enacts embodied expertise and skill, self-motivation, and diligence
(Law 1994).

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Bio
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer teaches Gender Studies at Charles University in Prague
and is currently Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala
University in Sweden. Her recent research focuses on de/gendering practices in
science, epistemic communities, and intersections between STS, gender studies and
the material sciences.

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