A Formula for Recognition: Organizational Knowledge Practices Involve...

Collaborative knowledge production implicates knowledge practices that address the organizational challenges of distributed and highly specialized work. In experimental particle physics, the increasing size and complexity of the apparatus is accompa­nied by the increase in size of multi-national and multi-institutional collaborations. Experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently involve 3,000 people working together over a projected time frame of several decades. In interviews with researchers working at the LHC, we have come across the physicists’ concern that it has become increasingly difficult to identify individual contributions and give researchers proper credit for their work. In this presentation, we focus on the assignment of conference talks in the ATLAS collaboration to investigate the organizational knowledge practices involved in establishing publicly recognizable markers of excellence and recognition that address this concern.