"As research teams grow, academic career prospects may shrink"

"Sociologists John P. Walsh and You-Na Lee of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wondered what this increase in team size meant for the way that scientific projects are conducted. They found that, today, it is common for research project teams to use practices such as division of labor, task standardization, and hierarchies within teams that make them akin to small factories for knowledge production—and that the size of the team predicts the extent to which such factory-like practices are implemented.

These results have implications for the training of young scientists and for their academic career prospects, Walsh and Lee argue. Consider that many graduate students and postdocs hope to pursue a career as an academic principal investigator (PI), a role that requires a great diversity of skills. If during their training they are part of a team in which work is highly divided and each participant is a specialist rather than a generalist, then “we are failing to train them for the job they are trying to have (PI). And the jobs we are training them for”—essentially research specialists—“are marginalized” in the current academic research structure, Walsh and Lee write in an email to Science  Careers...

The authors next analyzed the effect of team size on the way the projects are organized and found that the larger the team, the more it functions along bureaucratic lines... Traditionally, scientists have been trained using a craft model, under which aspiring scientists learn to become fully fledged scientists through years of apprenticeship under a master craftsman and further exposure to all aspects of research during their postdoc years, Walsh and Lee write in their paper. But, as science shifts toward bureaucratization, trainees may be pushed into premature specialization. "

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2015_08_06/caredit.a1500196

This is really interesting, I am appreciating this framing while I am deciding which labs to enter for my graduate research. How will I be trained, what skills will I walk out with.