In Search of Lost Facilities

This article examines the characteristics of large-scale facilities and their increasing role in scientific activity, while sociologists, for some decades, have rather focused on texts and objects. As (partially) highlighted by the institutional definitions, there are five criteria that can be used to define large-scale facilities: their central role in scientific research, their size, rarity, their partially closed-off nature and the service activity they deliver. However, these institutional definitions, for political and financial reasons, tend to conflate facilities with scientific infrastructures and instruments. To distinguish between them leads us to open up avenues of analysis that have too often been neglected by researchers, such as input from the professions, concern for the territorial impact of facilities, analysis of temporalities and the outputs and outcomes of policy actions.