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Any account of the impact of changing authority relations on scientific research must consider differences between fields of research. Three kinds of variation can occur. First, authority relations themselves can vary between fields. For example, actors with commercial interests have little or no authority in fields that are remote from applications such as ancient history, pure mathematics, or high-energy physics. Ethics committees exercise considerable authority in fields researching human subjects but not in others. Second, field-specific instruments for exercising authority may be used. The proposal to assess science, engineering, and medical fields by using quantitative indicators but to keep peer review for the humanities and social sciences in future rounds of the British Research Assessment Exercise is a case in point. Third, authority relations may have different effects in different fields depending on the practices of a field’s research, as for example demonstrated by Chapter 8.

Such field-specific modifications of authority relations and their effects have been common knowledge in science studies for a long time. The differences between research practices and social structures of scientific disciplines have been explicitly addressed in several influential theories (Whitley 1977, 2000; Rip 1982; Bohme et al. 1983). However, the role of these epistemic conditions is rarely taken into account when governance instruments are designed or investigated. Most instruments for the