Oscar Swinden: Exploring complex matters at the ESS: Creating a Big Science actor through a legitimising process

Abstract

Large-scale infrastructure projects are interwoven into society. Realising these types of projects from their inception towards materialising them are complex feats, involving several actors and interests. This study looks at the legitimising process for creating a Big Science actor in a business network. Creating a Big Science actor requires mobilising resources from a multitude of different types of actors over time, embedding them into a network surrounding the focal actor being created.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the process of creating an actor from idea towards reality in an interorganisational context. To fulfil this purpose, the theoretical chapter draws on the business network approach to develop a model for realising a large-scale endeavour in an interorganisational context involving science, political, and business actors. The model comprises three concepts including mobilising, embedding as well as legitimising refined into technological, sociopolitical, and economic legitimising. Interplay between pairs of concepts include dimensions involving proposed benefits, framing, path dependency, fit, overlapping networks, and emerging context that deepen the model.

This abductively derived model is used to analyse the process of creating an actor. Drawing on insights from systematic combining and a qualitative research strategy, the thesis uses an in-depth single case study to conduct phenomenon-driven research that looks at the process of legitimising the European Spallation Source (ESS). The ESS is an emerging Big Science actor that gradually appeared on the fields outside the Swedish university town Lund, through a legitimising process starting in the mid-1980s as an idea.

The originality of this study introduces a processual model of realising a large-scale endeavour in an interorganisational context in which each phase is viewed as a layer added upon layers involving idea, investment, and actor that includes idea-generating inside a community, broadening and financing as well as materialising. The study also hones the concept of legitimising, complementing IMP scholarship already addressing the concept to shed light on technological, sociopolitical, and economic legitimising. It is concluded that legitimising is an interactive network process in which the actor being created make internal changes to satisfy external interests.