Research Materials and Methods

For all papers, the core of the empirical material consists of expert interviews that have been supplemented by extensive literature and document analysis. All interviews were conducted within research projects at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs that were funded by the institute’s core funding. Informed consent was obtained before each interview. The fieldwork for the last paper on satellite imagery was challenging because some of the interviewees did not want their institution mentioned and did not allow the conversation to be recorded. Here, access to interview partners was more difficult than with the other papers, sometimes literally, on a physical level, since security checks had to be passed more than once since some interview partners were working with intelligence agencies or on issues that involved classified information. Therefore, these interviews are not directly quoted since this was a precondition for being able to conduct the interviews.

How to deal with the conflicting paradigms of doing science – with the aim of making things publicly known – and the intelligence field – with the aim of keeping things secret –

is a challenge that cannot be dealt with within the scope of this thesis, but I plan to address the topic in my future research.

For the papers presented here, different analytical methods have been applied to analyze the empirical material based on which method best fits the research question. Paper 1 builds on thirteen semi-structured interviews with Austrian STI-stakeholders who had experience with China and were or are in charge of STI internationalization at their respective institutions in the fields of research, business and diplomacy. The interviews were conducted between 2012 and 2013 by the then-project team at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. The interviews were supplemented with an extensive analysis of media articles in Austrian newspapers (published from 2006-2013), policy documents and material on collaboration with China from the Austrian green technologies export sector.

The paper investigates with China. To trace how a national socio-technical imaginary (Jasanoff & Kim 2009) has been formed by multiple Austrian actors involved in STI cooperation a constructivist argumentative discourse analysis, as suggested by Hajer (1995), was chosen as the analytical approach. This approach allows for an understanding of the specific conditions under which a particular narrative becomes the dominant discourse. In particular, his concept of “storylines” as simplified articulations of the discourse’s key elements (Hajer 1995: 47) has proven helpful for understanding why one particular socio-technical imaginary has emerged and not another. This seemed particularly fruitful since it helps to reduce the inherent methodological vagueness of the socio-technical imaginaries concept.

The second paper involved eight semi-structured interviews with staff from science policy and research funding organizations in Germany and the UK as well as Skype interviews with staff in their respective offices abroad, specifically in Russia, Brazil and India, which were conducted by the project team in 2014. Five expert interviews were also conducted with academics in both case study countries, which provided a scholarly perspective on both countries’ internationalization policies. As in the first paper, interviews were supplemented by an extensive document analysis with a particular focus on government strategies published by the different ministries concerned with STI internationalization.

On a conceptual level we were confronted with two main challenges: the respective national techno-political histories, cultures and institutions in both countries are quite diverse, which calls for a context-sensitive analytical framework. Also, the term ‘policy field’ lacks a clear definition (Dunn 2004; Dye 2004). Originally developed in the context

of assessing climate change as an emerging policy field, Massey and Huitema offer a three-pillar model that attempts to grasp the central characteristics that make a policy field, namely substantive authority, institutional order and substantive expertise (Massey and Huitema 2012: 343). A policy field, they suggest, is thus “a unit of governing within the socio-political system of a country where there exist three pillars working in tandem to support each other in the management of a public issues or set of issues” (2012: 343).

These pillar models provided the framework within which the empirical material was then analyzed for each country, allowing for a comparative approach that also takes into account the institutional and political diversity of the cases.

For the last paper, eight semi-structured expert interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2015, in person and via Skype, with active satellite imagery analysts from non-governmental institutions in the US. Further interviews were conducted with staff from intelligence agencies (three interviews) and international organizations (one interview) that use satellite imagery, as well as with staff from a commercial satellite imagery provider (one interview). Due to the confidentiality of the information, only the interviews with non-state analysts will be directly quoted. The interview data has been complemented by a document analysis of official policy documents, international legal code and secondary literature on commercial satellite technologies. Methodologically, we have chosen an open coding process as this seemed to account for the diversity of the interviewees with satellite imagery analysts, policy makers and staff from the intelligence and business sectors.

Here, sensitizing concepts guided both the fieldwork and the analysis of the interview (cf.

Blumer 1954, Chamaz 2006). Initially, these were transparency and secrecy, and state actors and non-state actors, but during the course of the research project, networks and collaboration became central terms. All the interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software, ATLAS.ti. A coding scheme (Miles and Huberman 1994) was created by the project team in order to identify the exchanges and interactions between the different groups of actors involved, their respective notion of transparency, embedded knowledge practices, their role within the network of satellite imagery analysis, as well as the ways that they refer to other actors.

Now the stage is set for the three papers, which investigate the co-production of science, technology and international politics from three different, but interrelated angles.

Following the three papers, a conclusion will integrate their findings and discuss three moments of transformation that became visible during my work.

2. THE ARTICLES