Abstract:

The so-called knowledge society and knowledge economy can be interpreted as a meta-narrative or as a governance tool to accomplish European integration. A chronological analysis of the emergence of knowledge society/economy as a governance tool remit us to the Lisbon Council and to the subsequent creation of the European Research Area (ERA) at the level of the scientific research system. Science and innovation policies in the European context are defined as a way to foster European integration around the idea of competitiveness (Chou & Gornitzka, 2014).

Although this issue has been addressed in the literature, there are still some doubts on what the phenomena of Europeanisation of Science and Innovation means and how it is identified and interpreted. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting the results of a systematic literature review, showing how the literature approaches the Europeanisation of Science and Technology, what are the main themes that are being addressed and, more importantly, which are the disciplinary areas or scientific fields that sustain the analysis.

The most popular sources for bibliometric data at present are: Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), Elsevier’s Scopus, and Google Scholar. As only the first two restrict their coverage to peer-reviewed-only material and to avoid potential bias the research was carried out using the Elsevier’s Scopus database. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and it contains the most important journals in terms of our research topic (namely it indexes 50% more journals in the social sciences than WoS). Moreover, Scopus tends to cover less traditional topics, such as Europeanisation, as well as more interdisciplinary publications (Klavans & Boyack, 2007; Meho & Rogers, 2008).

Having defined the goals of the research, we searched for the combined expressions ‘Europeanisation’, ‘European Research Area’, ‘Science and Technology’ and ‘Policy’ in articles searched in the subject areas of “social sciences”; “arts and humanities” and “business, management and accounting”.

The literature was analysed by distinguishing the main issues discussed. Europeanisation is commonly associated with the way national Science and Technology policies converge or diverge within European guidelines. Four main themes or topics immediately emerge in the literature: Innovation; Governance; Collaboration; Internationalisation and Careers, and mobility of researchers in Europe. The theoretical background used in the discussion of the topics is mainly focused on political science and management theories.

To our knowledge, this is an innovative study in the field, considering that although it is possible to find some systematic literature review on knowledge society, the same does not hold true for Europeanisation and science and technology policies.

Keywords:

Europeanization, European Research Area, Science and Technology policies, Innovation, knowledge society, Collaboration, Internationalisation.