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In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers’ opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany and the Netherlands, which enables comparisons both between organisational settings and between properties of innovations. Comparing the development of three innovations in the two types of organisations enables the identification of links between patterns of authority sharing at these organisations and the opportunities to develop innovations. On this basis, the distribution of opportunities to change research practices among researchers in the two countries can be established.

Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is found that Germany and Sweden, due to more advantageous financing and weaker communities of generativists, had a faster adoption of CCL than the other two countries. A particular late adopter among the four was Switzerland, which did not take up CCL until foreign professors had been recruited.

The aim of this article is to explain commonalities and differences in the responses of four national educational science communities to the same external stimulus, namely international comparative large scale student assessments that offered vastly improved comparability of national results from the beginning of the 1990s. The comparison shows the epistemic traditions of educational research in the four countries and properties of the data produced by the international comparative studies to be the central explanatory factors for commonalities and differences of responses to the new studies.