Third party funding, publications in pertinent journals, top spots in rankings or excellent PhD students: these are some of the rewards for which scientists and scientific institutions strive and compete. Often, the dynamics of modern science—which we understand in this introduction in the broad sense of the German term Wissenschaft—are reduced to an all-out competition. This view, however, tends to conceal the fact that scholars are in numerous ways part of cooperative structures. More often than not, they pursue their research goals as part of a larger group, share their insights and results with colleagues, and exchange ideas at conferences. Without cooperation, Wissenschaft would be unthinkable, be it the deciphering of the human genome, the proof of existence of the Higgs-Boson or the edition of ancient Latin inscriptions, such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

Contrary to the widely held view, cooperation and competition are not antonymous modes of interaction: non-collaborating scientists are not necessarily competitors, and vice versa. Neither are these modes mutually exclusive. In fact, in the sciences cooperation and competition seem to be closely connected. In order to successfully compete with others, scientists have to be firmly embedded in collaborative structures; and they have to comply with norms and conventions of mutual support and acknowledgement (e.g. Felt et al. 1995: 70–83). These structures, norms and conventions are historically and culturally contingent. The prevailing mode of interaction depends on circumstances and historical setting, and is constantly under negotiation, because neither all-in cooperation nor all-out competition results in stable final configurations: collaboration partners can quickly become rivals; while groups in sharp competition can change into collaborative hunting packs. In Germany, we have had in recent years ample opportunity to observe such processes in the course of the Exzellenzinitiative between German universities and research clusters.

However, the phenomena themselves are all but new, and neither is the diagnosis. As early as 1942, the pioneer in sociology of science, Robert Merton, described “competitive cooperation” as typical of the sciences, and referred to scientists as “compeers” (that is, competitive peers), to signal that science is as much competitive as collaborative. Merton thus emphasised the entanglement of the two modes of interaction in the pursuit of knowledge and other rewards. But he was convinced that the interplay was stabilised by a system of norms, the observance of which was ensured by mutual social control (Merton and Robert 1973; Hagstrom 1965). This rather optimistic view of science was completely reversed in the 1970s when Pierre Bourdieu described the scientific field as a site of relentless competition for power and profit (Bourdieu 1975). This new assessment was confirmed by the first anthropological laboratory studies (Latour and Woolgar 1979). And it was not until the late 1980s that doubts about this rather bleak view were voiced, stating that particularly in experimental fields of science more often than not immediate competition was avoided as far as possible. In fact research themes were chosen according to the rationale that they were “sufficiently close to mainstream concerns to ensure recognition, but sufficiently distinct to prevent duplication” (Edge 1990: 214).

Around the same time, philosophers began to explore the possibilities of a “social epistemology of science” acknowledging the importance of social interactions for the production and stabilisation of knowledge (for an overview see Goldman and Alvin 2010). In some cases these approaches were applied in a highly promising manner to the analysis of scientific practices in research collectives, referring, for example, to “social empiricism” as both, a practice as well as a norm (Kitcher 1990; Kitcher and Philip 1993; Solomon 2001; see also Strevens and Michael 2003; Strevens and Michael forthcoming). These approaches deserve further elaboration and ask for a fruitful cooperation between historians and philosophers of science. In the meantime, an analysis of the unwritten rules of cooperation and competition can also draw on philosophical and sociological theories of social norms (e.g. Bicchieri 2006; Bicchieri et al. 2011). These often tacit norms and conventions typically help regulating social dilemmas: sometimes the pursuit of individual interests over a certain period of time leads to worse results for everyone than a cooperation of all actors involved. But this only applies if the actors meet more than once. Just as competition only becomes an accepted mode of interaction in a given society if it is constantly repeated, actors can only build up trust in cooperative interaction if it is regularly rewarded.

Conceptually, competition can be understood as a regulated contest of at least two actors for a reward that is given to the winner by a third party which also ensures that the rules are observed. According to Georg Simmel’s sociology of the “third”, the competitors try to win the favour of the third party, adapt to its norms and make them their own, which may have a strong impact on communities or society as a whole (Simmel 1903, 1992 [1908]; see also Werron and Tobias 2009). Despite agreed-upon rule systems, the competitive situation is often unstable: the losing parties tend to question both the adherence to the rules among their competitors as well as the validity of the rules as such; whereas the winners strive to keep the reward permanently and end the competition (e.g. Münch 2011). Thus it is particularly instructive to study these constantly re-negotiated systems of rules and regulation from their codification in the legal sense to shared values and norms as well as the reactions to breeches of these rules.

Yet as indicated above, especially in science one can hardly hope to win a competition without being part of cooperative structures. Despite rhetorical efforts that suggest otherwise in large parts of the sciences, actors tend to act cooperatively and minimise competitive situations without being able to avoid them completely (Edge 1990; Graßhoff 1998; Nickelsen 2014, 2015). Cooperation here is understood as a rule-regulated interaction of two or more actors, who pursue a goal that they cannot reach on their own (or only with a much greater effort). Configurations along these lines are characterised in social psychology by the term “positive interdependency”: actors can only succeed if others do so too—“either we swim together, or we sink together”. Competition, on the other hand, implies negative interdependency: actors can only achieve their goals if others fail to achieve theirs—“when I swim, you sink; when you swim, I sink”—(Johnson et al. 1981; see also Deutsch 1949; Johnson and Johnson 1989). Cooperative action may or may not occur in shared working environments; if it does, we usually speak of “collaboration” (for instance Maienschein and Jane 1993; Hackett and Edward 2005). Much like competition, situations of cooperation are unstable: as soon as one of the parties involved gets the impression that it may be able to reach its goal without the help of others, partners can swiftly turn into competitors.

Currently there are only few studies that analyse how cooperation and competition are interrelated in specific contexts of science. So far research on these two modes of interaction in science has largely concentrated on only one of them—that is, either cooperation or competition—and analysed the form it took in specific case studies. It is remarkable that given the increased interest in the analysis of cooperative structures in recent years there are still only comparatively few historical studies on competition (beyond simple priority disputes that is).

This is where this special issue comes in. In September 2014 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik (DGGMNT) devoted its annual meeting in Munich—the largest history of science meeting in Germany—to “Cooperation and Competition in Medicine, Science, and Technology”. Three of the essays in this volume (Meunier, Nye and Wiesenfeldt) go back to/result from this conference; the others were specifically written for this special issue (Link, Vermeulen). Together they cover the seventeenth up through the twentieth century and examine diverse disciplinary fields and contexts. They show that Wissenschaft—again: in the broad, German sense—is frequently marked by a concomitance of competition and cooperation; and the resulting processes of negotiation, tension and ambivalence are well-worth exploring.