Inside regular lab meetings: The social construction of a research team and ideas in optical physics.

Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members' activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements.

Unconventional ideas conventionally arranged: A study of grant proposals for exceptional research.

Exceptional research involves exceptional, rather than established, approaches, theories, methods and technologies. Nevertheless, to gain funding for such research, scientists are forced to outline unconventional ideas in ways that still relate to recognized concepts and findings, as well as adhering to the conventional requirements of relevant fields of research. Surprisingly, we know very little about the approaches scientists take to overcome these obstacles.

Felt stigma and obesity: introducing the generalized other.

People with a big body are tainted in western societies. Although most research on obesity occurs in the medical context, few studies investigate characteristics and effects of feelings and fears related to the fat stigma in the absence of overt discrimination. By linking Norbert Elias's and George H.

[The constitution and attribution of government research agencies. A matter of need for science-generated policy knowledge?].

Government research agencies are a form of extra-university research institutions. In contrast to other extra-university research facilities they are subordinate to and financed by respective German governmental departments. As their mission they provide science-generated information, services, and monitoring to support the governmental departments.