Thomas Franssen
Biographic Data
| ID | 80913 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Franssen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Franssen |
| SIGNATURE | FRANSSEN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4852-8862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A good drainage economy: The elemental politics of Dutch carbon farming
For centuries, peatlands in the Netherlands have been valued by draining water, shaping a drainage economy. Through drainage, a specific carbon relation, that of carbon-reacting-with-oxygen, enabled turf production and dairy farming. Yet, this carbon relation also resulted in peat oxidation, causing carbon dioxide emissions. In this article, we focus on carbon and trace how its relations become the object of intervention in a carbon market arrang…
Transforming Excellence: From ‘Matter of Fact’ to ‘Matter of Concern’ in Research Funding Organizations
‘Excellence’ is omnipresent in the research ecosystem but the focus on excellence is increasingly controversial. This paper contributes to the excellence debate through an empirical study of how notions of excellence are used in eight research funding organizations. Because research funding organizations are shaped by the excellence regime, and constrained by both governmental policy and scientific elites, funders cannot simply resort to a debunk…
The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignor…
Steering the Direction of Research through Organizational Identity Formation
Public research organizations respond to external pressures from national research evaluation systems, performance-based funding systems and university rankings by translating them into internal goals, rules and regulations and by developing organizational identities, profiles and missions. Organizational responses have primarily been studied at the central organizational level, and research on the steering of research has primarily focused on th…
Katherine E. Smith, Justyna Bandola-Gill, Nasar Meer, Ellen Stewart and Richard Watermeyer, The Impact Agenda: Controversies, Consequences and Challenges
Large-scale identification and characterization of scholars on Twitter
This paper presents a new method for identifying scholars who have a Twitter account from bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) and Twitter data from Altmetric.com. The method reliably identifies matches between Twitter accounts and scholarly authors. It consists of a matching of elements such as author names, usernames, handles, and URLs, followed by a rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of these elements related t…
Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture
This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these ‘orders of worth’ interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum o…
Variation in Valuation: How Research Groups Accumulate Credibility in Four Epistemic Cultures
Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation: Comparing Institutional Affordances and Constraints of Different Types of Research Funding
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use—a literature review
This review of the international literature on evaluation systems, evaluation practices, and metrics (mis)uses was written as part of a larger review commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to inform their independent assessment of the role of metrics in research evaluation (2014–5). The literature on evaluation systems, practices, and effects of indicator uses is extremely heterogeneous: it comprises hundreds of …
The material practices of quantification: Measuring ‘deprivation’ in the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy
The use of indicators and indexes in social policy, as part of evidence-based policy, is understood by governmentality scholars as ‘techniques of governance’. However, we know very little about how the process of quantification is enacted in the material practices that constitute social policy itself. In this article we focus on a particular quantified object: the ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP), used in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy programme…
Making materiality matter: A sociological analysis of prices on the Dutch fiction book market, 1980-2009
This article analyzes determinants of prices in the Dutch fiction book market between 1980 and 2009. It does so on the basis of interviews with editors of large publishing houses and regression analysis of a dataset that contains prices and their determinants of over 80 000 fiction books. We show that material properties such as the size, binding and number of pages of a book are the strongest predictors of price. This is surprising, because the …
Diversity in the Large-Scale Pole of Literary Production: An Analysis of Publishers’ Lists and the Dutch Literary Space, 2000–2009
This article analyses the structure of the Dutch literary space through an analysis of 215 publishers’ lists of Dutch fiction and poetry publishers. Examining the ways in which publishers include different genre-language combinations on their lists offers a novel way to understand the structure of literary spaces. Earlier research has mainly seen analyses of the organisational field and the practices of actors, and until now has neglected the pub…
Sociology of Literature and Publishing in the Early 21st Century: Away From the Centre
Literature is the art form of the nation-state. The written word was at the peak of its influence from the Enlightenment until late in the 20th century. National literatures became central to the development of national identities and the formation of national art worlds. Moreover, they were important vehicles for the exchange of ideas. However, the central position of the nation-state has dwindled due to the centrifugal effects of globalization …
Coping with uncertainty, abundance and strife: Decision-making processes of Dutch acquisition editors in the global market for translations
Coping with uncertainty, abundance and strife: Decision-making processes of Dutch acquisition editors in the global market for translations
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation: Comparing Institutional Affordances and Constraints of Different Types of Research Funding
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Variation in Valuation: How Research Groups Accumulate Credibility in Four Epistemic Cultures
Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture
This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these ‘orders of worth’ interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum o…
Making materiality matter: A sociological analysis of prices on the Dutch fiction book market, 1980-2009
This article analyzes determinants of prices in the Dutch fiction book market between 1980 and 2009. It does so on the basis of interviews with editors of large publishing houses and regression analysis of a dataset that contains prices and their determinants of over 80 000 fiction books. We show that material properties such as the size, binding and number of pages of a book are the strongest predictors of price. This is surprising, because the …
Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
Diversity in the Large-Scale Pole of Literary Production: An Analysis of Publishers’ Lists and the Dutch Literary Space, 2000–2009
This article analyses the structure of the Dutch literary space through an analysis of 215 publishers’ lists of Dutch fiction and poetry publishers. Examining the ways in which publishers include different genre-language combinations on their lists offers a novel way to understand the structure of literary spaces. Earlier research has mainly seen analyses of the organisational field and the practices of actors, and until now has neglected the pub…
Sociology of Literature and Publishing in the Early 21st Century: Away From the Centre
Literature is the art form of the nation-state. The written word was at the peak of its influence from the Enlightenment until late in the 20th century. National literatures became central to the development of national identities and the formation of national art worlds. Moreover, they were important vehicles for the exchange of ideas. However, the central position of the nation-state has dwindled due to the centrifugal effects of globalization …
The material practices of quantification: Measuring ‘deprivation’ in the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy
The use of indicators and indexes in social policy, as part of evidence-based policy, is understood by governmentality scholars as ‘techniques of governance’. However, we know very little about how the process of quantification is enacted in the material practices that constitute social policy itself. In this article we focus on a particular quantified object: the ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP), used in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy programme…
The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignor…
Coping with uncertainty, abundance and strife: Decision-making processes of Dutch acquisition editors in the global market for translations
Diversity in the Large-Scale Pole of Literary Production: An Analysis of Publishers’ Lists and the Dutch Literary Space, 2000–2009
This article analyses the structure of the Dutch literary space through an analysis of 215 publishers’ lists of Dutch fiction and poetry publishers. Examining the ways in which publishers include different genre-language combinations on their lists offers a novel way to understand the structure of literary spaces. Earlier research has mainly seen analyses of the organisational field and the practices of actors, and until now has neglected the pub…
Sociology of Literature and Publishing in the Early 21st Century: Away From the Centre
Literature is the art form of the nation-state. The written word was at the peak of its influence from the Enlightenment until late in the 20th century. National literatures became central to the development of national identities and the formation of national art worlds. Moreover, they were important vehicles for the exchange of ideas. However, the central position of the nation-state has dwindled due to the centrifugal effects of globalization …
Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use—a literature review
This review of the international literature on evaluation systems, evaluation practices, and metrics (mis)uses was written as part of a larger review commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to inform their independent assessment of the role of metrics in research evaluation (2014–5). The literature on evaluation systems, practices, and effects of indicator uses is extremely heterogeneous: it comprises hundreds of …
The material practices of quantification: Measuring ‘deprivation’ in the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy
The use of indicators and indexes in social policy, as part of evidence-based policy, is understood by governmentality scholars as ‘techniques of governance’. However, we know very little about how the process of quantification is enacted in the material practices that constitute social policy itself. In this article we focus on a particular quantified object: the ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP), used in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy programme…
Making materiality matter: A sociological analysis of prices on the Dutch fiction book market, 1980-2009
This article analyzes determinants of prices in the Dutch fiction book market between 1980 and 2009. It does so on the basis of interviews with editors of large publishing houses and regression analysis of a dataset that contains prices and their determinants of over 80 000 fiction books. We show that material properties such as the size, binding and number of pages of a book are the strongest predictors of price. This is surprising, because the …
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation: Comparing Institutional Affordances and Constraints of Different Types of Research Funding
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture
This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these ‘orders of worth’ interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum o…
Variation in Valuation: How Research Groups Accumulate Credibility in Four Epistemic Cultures
Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
Large-scale identification and characterization of scholars on Twitter
This paper presents a new method for identifying scholars who have a Twitter account from bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) and Twitter data from Altmetric.com. The method reliably identifies matches between Twitter accounts and scholarly authors. It consists of a matching of elements such as author names, usernames, handles, and URLs, followed by a rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of these elements related t…
Katherine E. Smith, Justyna Bandola-Gill, Nasar Meer, Ellen Stewart and Richard Watermeyer, The Impact Agenda: Controversies, Consequences and Challenges
The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignor…
Steering the Direction of Research through Organizational Identity Formation
Public research organizations respond to external pressures from national research evaluation systems, performance-based funding systems and university rankings by translating them into internal goals, rules and regulations and by developing organizational identities, profiles and missions. Organizational responses have primarily been studied at the central organizational level, and research on the steering of research has primarily focused on th…
Transforming Excellence: From ‘Matter of Fact’ to ‘Matter of Concern’ in Research Funding Organizations
‘Excellence’ is omnipresent in the research ecosystem but the focus on excellence is increasingly controversial. This paper contributes to the excellence debate through an empirical study of how notions of excellence are used in eight research funding organizations. Because research funding organizations are shaped by the excellence regime, and constrained by both governmental policy and scientific elites, funders cannot simply resort to a debunk…
A good drainage economy: The elemental politics of Dutch carbon farming
For centuries, peatlands in the Netherlands have been valued by draining water, shaping a drainage economy. Through drainage, a specific carbon relation, that of carbon-reacting-with-oxygen, enabled turf production and dairy farming. Yet, this carbon relation also resulted in peat oxidation, causing carbon dioxide emissions. In this article, we focus on carbon and trace how its relations become the object of intervention in a carbon market arrang…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (4 works) · Publishing (4 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (4 works)