Charisma, Recognition, and the Motivation of Scientists

Desire for recognition is a theoretically and empirically indadequate key to the motivation of scientists. A large proportion of the scientific community publishes very little. The elite, prolific scientists are neither dependent on nor rewarded for the publication of their research, and most work by average scientists is hardly ever acknowledged, much less rewarded, with citations and prizes. Charisma is proposed as a complementary basis for an explanation of scientific motivation. Its function in the stratification system, linked to the relationship between the published literature and informal mechanisms of scientific communication and the cumulative pattern of growth of scientific knowledge, is outlined.