ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a qualitative shift in the ways in which epistemic communities and their networks are configured, in general, and specifically in the field of health-related research and practice, building on earlier work in the sciences. The UK Higher Education system conducts an evaluation exercise every five years to determine the quality of research activity in universities, on the basis of which the subsequent allocation of government research funding is determined. A significant characteristic of the science system today is the growth of large-scale platforms that support and align national and international networks, and might be seen as the defining feature of contemporary research infrastructures. The chapter provides a very useful account of the range of views held by bioscientists and clinicians in regard to the value of social science, principally of qualitative research. Standardisation is driven by and configures the scale and utility of integrative technology platforms that characterise large-scale science.
