Are Some Nations More Creative Than Others? a Macrosociological

Bibliometrical studies show systematic differences in the scientific impact of nations, as measured in their shares of highly cited publications. They show similar differences between countries’ academic institutions in terms of their bibliometrical impact. Even though creativity cannot be equaled with bibliometrical impact, and high impact not necessarily with groundbreaking research, the systematic differences – even if checked with funding of research per capita – indicate that there are institutional differences that shape the possibilities of both universities and individual researchers and teams to do research that influences the agendas of different disciplines. We argue that there is a systematic relationship between institutional properties and the average creativity of a nation’s academic organizations and their scientists.

 This presentation, based on ongoing research of the interrelations between institutional properties and scientific impact, explores these differences by comparing the institutional set-ups of three Nordic countries: Norway (with low scientific impact), Sweden (medium-high scientific impact), and Denmark (high scientific impact) along the following dimensions: structure of the research system, patterns of recruitment and promotion in universities, the recruitment and powers of academic leadership, composition of academic positions, and national/international mobility of faculty.

 It is concluded that even seemingly similar research systems – as the three under scrutiny – display systematic differences that foster different academic identities as well as search and network behaviors, and that these impact the aggregated level of scientific impact but also the creative environments of their universities and the individual scholar’s capacity for devising and executing research that challenge the frontiers of knowledge.