Organizational Complexity in LHC Experiments: Distributing Conference...

At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, ‘collaborations’ involve 3,000 people working together on a single experiment. LHC collaborations are characterized by a factor of ten increase in membership compared to the earlier LEP experiments. Physicists perceive of this sharp increase as giving rise to novel organizational challenges. We analyze how collaborations handle organizational complexity with a focus on how they balance the interests and needs of the collaboration with those of their individual members by considering a case study: the question of how and according to which selection criteria the collaboration distributes a large number of slots for conference talks annually among its members to ensure, both, a fair distribution and a competent representation of the collaboration. Based on qualitative interviews, we analyze the associated organizational strategies and means; the rationales, criteria, and algorithms for selection; the unexpected problems and challenges that arise in practice.