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1.
With this special issue, we would like to promote research on changes in the funding of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Since funding secures the livelihood of researchers and the means to do research, it is an indispensable condition for almost all research; as funding arrangements are undergoing dramatic changes, we think it timely to renew the science studies community’s efforts to understand the funding of research. Changes in the governance of science have garnered considerable attention from science studies and higher education research; however, the impact of these changes on the conduct and content of research has not received sufficient attention, and theoretical insights into the connections between funding practices and research practices are few and far between. The aim of this special issue is to contribute to our theoretical understanding of the changing nature of research funding and its impact on the production of scientific knowledge. More specifically, we are interested in the interplay between funding and research practices: What is the impact of institutionalised funding arrangements on the production of scientific knowledge? 相似文献
2.
Marc Torka 《Minerva》2018,56(1):59-83
Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one that is limited in time, scope and content. This article demonstrates how the public funding of doctoral programs expands this model of project research from experienced academics to the socialization process for the new academic generation. This process of “projectification” underlies funding-driven institutional changes in doctoral training. A multi-level comparative study of German policies, funding mechanisms and organizational frameworks for doctoral training demonstrates the emergence of a specific model of predefined PhD projects. The investigation of doctoral training practices reveals that socio-epistemic preconditions regulate whether research fields adopted or rejected this demanding model. This result contradicts widespread claims about a radical change in doctoral training and suggests focusing on the actual practices of field-specific doctoral research. 相似文献
3.
The emergence of vibrant research communities of computer scientists in Kenya and Uganda has occurred in the context of neoliberal privatization, commercialization, and transnational capital flows from donors and corporations. We explore how this funding environment configures research culture and research practices, which are conceptualized as two main components of a research community. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study utilizing interview, ethnographic and survey data collected in Nairobi and Kampala. We document how administrators shape research culture by building academic programs and training growing numbers of PhDs, and analyze how this is linked to complicated interactions between political economy, the epistemic nature of computer science and sociocultural factors like entrepreneurial leadership of key actors and distinctive cultures of innovation. In a donor-driven funding environment, research practice involves scientists constructing their own localized research priorities by adopting distinctive professional identities and creatively structuring projects. The neoliberal political economic context thus clearly influenced research communities, but did not debilitate computing research capacity nor leave researchers without any agency to carry out research programs. The cases illustrate how sites of knowledge production in Africa can gain some measure of research autonomy, some degree of global competency in a central arena of scientific and technological activity, and some expression of their regional cultural priorities and aspirations. Furthermore, the cases suggest that social analysts must balance structure with culture, place and agency in their approaches to understanding how funding and political economy shape scientific knowledge. 相似文献
4.
The past three decades have witnessed a sharp reduction in the rate of growth of public research funding, and sometimes an actual decline in its level. In many countries, this decline has been accompanied by substantial changes in the ways that such funding has been allocated and monitored. In addition, the institutions governing how research is directed and conducted underwent significant reforms. In this paper we examine how these changes have affected scientists’ research goals and practices by comparing the development of three scientific innovations (one each in physics, biology, and educational research) in four European countries, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. We find that the increased number of actors exercising authority over research goals does not necessarily lead to a greater diversity of interests funding research. A narrowing of goals and frameworks is especially probable when the increasing importance of external project funding is combined with reductions in state financing of universities and public research institutes. Finally, the growing standardisation of project cycle times and resource packages across funding agencies and scientific communities make it more difficult for researchers to pursue projects that deviate from these norms, especially, if they challenge mainstream beliefs and assessment criteria. 相似文献
5.
Kathia Serrano Velarde 《Minerva》2018,56(1):85-107
Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental adjustment of the funder/fundee relationship around a common discursive practice that consists in describing and evaluating research projects: How has the perception of what constitutes a legitimate funding claim changed over time and why? By investigating the normative framework enacted in the justification strategies of applicants, we shed light on the historical coevolution of the increasing competition for project funding, the epistemic culture of applicants, and grant writing rhetoric. To do this, we mobilize a comprehensive data set consisting of archival data from Europe’s oldest and largest funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as a corpus of 80 successful grant proposals written between 1975 and 2005. We find that the 1990s mark an important normative consolidation of what we consider to be a legitimate funding claim: Ensuring the success of the project and the project’s results becomes a major concern in applicant rhetoric. This time period coincides with a substantive rise in the level of competition for project funding. Yet, even though justification strategies might seem to address the same issues in grant proposals across the disciplines under investigation, the normative framework to which applicants refer differs according to the applicant’s epistemic culture. 相似文献
6.
Anatoly Oleksiyenko 《Minerva》2013,51(1):49-69
Cross-border academic collaborations in conflict zones are vulnerable to escalated turbulence, liability concerns and flagging support. Multi-level stakeholder engagement at home and abroad is essential for securing the political and financial sustainability of such collaborations. This study examines the multilayered stakeholder arrangements within an international academic health science network contributing to peace-building in the Middle East. While organizational forms in this collaboration change to reflect the structural, epistemic and political expectations of various support groups operating locally and globally, the legitimacy of the international research and its contribution to the peace-building process last as long as institutional norms of academic enterprise – integrity, impartiality and collegiality – are sustained. This paper analyzes the reconciliatory strategies used by the collaborating health scientists to mitigate organizational turbulence, reduce resource asymmetries and continually build and rebuild bridges across stakeholder communities. 相似文献
7.
The tension between equity and excellence is fundamental in science policy. This tension might appear to be resolved through
the use of merit-based evaluation as a criterion for research funding. This is not the case. Merit-based decision making alone
is insufficient because of inequality aversion, a fundamental tendency of people to avoid extremely unequal distributions.
The distribution of performance in science is extremely unequal, and no decision maker with the power to establish a distribution
of public money would dare to match the level of inequality in research performance. We argue that decision makers who increase
concentration of resources because they accept that research resources should be distributed according to merit probably implement
less inequality than would be justified by differences in research performance. Here we show that the consequences are likely
to be suppression of incentives for the very best scientists. The consequences for the performance of a national research
system may be substantial. Decision makers are unaware of the issue, as they operate with distributional assumptions of normality
that guide our everyday intuitions. 相似文献
8.
Minerva - With the rise of an innovation agenda in science policy, previous studies have identified a shift in how the state delegates responsibility to funding agencies in order to change the... 相似文献
9.
This article explores local variations in scientific practice through the lens of scientists’ international mobility. Its aim is twofold: to explore how the notion of epistemic living spaces may be mobilised as a tool for systematically exploring differences in scientific practice across locations, and to contribute to literature on scientific mobility. Using material from an interview study with scientists with experience of international mobility, and epistemic living spaces as an analytical frame, the paper describes a set of aspects of life in science that interviewees described as being different in different places. These axes of variation were: embodied routines of research; resource levels and salaries; daily or longer-term rhythms of scientific life (and their relation to rhythms of home or family); ‘efficiency’ and how work time is used; degree of hierarchy; the nature of social interactions between colleagues; the purposes of research; the social and interpersonal organisation of knowledge production; and the scale or ambition of research. In presenting an exploratory overview of these variations, the article points the way for future comparative investigation of epistemic cultures through studies of international mobility.
相似文献10.
Kaare Aagaard 《Minerva》2017,55(3):279-297
This article outlines the evolution of a national research funding system over a timespan of more than 40 years and analyzes the development from a rather stable Humboldt-inspired floor funding model to a complex multi-tiered system where new mechanisms continually have been added on top of the system. Based on recent contributions to Historical Institutionalism it is shown how layering and displacement processes gradually have changed the funding system along a number of dimensions and thus how a series of minor adjustments over time has led to a transformation of the system as a whole. The analysis also highlights the remarkable resistance of the traditional academically oriented research council system towards restructuring. Due to this resistance the political system has, however, circumvented the research council system and implemented change through other channels of the funding system. For periods of time these strategies have marginalized the role of the councils. 相似文献
11.
Michael Rushton 《Journal of Cultural Economics》2000,24(4):267-282
In 1990, the Act governing theUnited States' National Endowment for the Arts wasamended requiring the Chairperson to ensure thatjudges of grant applications should take intoconsideration ``general standards of decency andrespect for the diverse beliefs and values of theAmerican public'. This provision has been widelydebated, and was challenged on the basis of whether itviolated the right of freedom of expression. But arecent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court found theprovision to be constitutional. This paper examinesrationales that have been put forward by philosophicalliberals, economists, and communitarians in support ofpublic funding of the arts. It finds that for each ofthese rationales the decency-and-respect provision onfunding is justifiable. The paper concludes with aspeculative discussion of the economics of the``artworld'. 相似文献
12.
In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications,
but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct
excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments
in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which
academic chemists work have changed since 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source
of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial
applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental
chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to
earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly
oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful
upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits. 相似文献
13.
Luciano Kay 《Minerva》2012,50(2):191-196
Inducement prizes have been long used to stimulate individuals and groups to accomplish diverse goals. Lately, governments have become more and more interested in these prizes and sought to include this kind of incentives within the set of policy tools available to promote science, technology, and innovation. To date, however, there has been little empirically-based scientific knowledge on how to design, manage, and evaluate innovation prizes. This note discusses aspects of the prize phenomenon and the opportunities and challenges related with the use of innovation prizes as a government policy instrument. Compared to other incentive mechanisms, prizes are likely to present advantages to, for example, accelerate the development and commercialization of technologies that are held back for diverse reasons and help to leverage public money with external ideas, collaborative efforts, and the participation of diverse individuals and organizations. Still, despite these advantages and other interesting features of prizes, there are key questions that policy-makers and scholars must address to better understand this kind of incentives and further improve prize designs and implementations before governments move forward to a more widespread use of innovation prizes in science and technology policies. 相似文献
14.
This article explores the crucial moments of scientists’ research activities when they decide to shift to a radical new domain or to perpetuate a project. We introduce what we have called the “respiration model” which describes and analyses key cognitive components which occur in this complex process. Respiration either privileges epistemic expectations which are rooted in socio-cognitive metrics of “concentration” or in a functionality-multiple horizon context which we refer to as “extension”. The respiration model accords particular attention to the elements curiosity and synergy in science. 相似文献
15.
The role of competitive funds as a source of funding for academic research has increased in many countries. For the individual researcher, the receipt of a grant can influence both scientific production and career paths. This paper focuses on the importance of the receipt of a research grant for researchers’ academic career paths utilizing a mixed methods approach that combines econometric analysis with in-depth qualitative interviews. The analysis has novel elements both in terms of its subject (impact of funding grants on individuals’ academic career paths) and approach. The results of this study indicate that while research grants have a positive impact on the research performed under the grant itself, there are very important secondary effects on research performance through positive effects on academic career advancement. The probability of obtaining a full professorship for grant recipients is almost double that for rejected applicants, 16 percent compared to 9 percent. The probability for career advancement in general is about 9 percentage points higher for grant recipients. Qualitative interviews support these quantitative results by providing insights into how grants impact research careers, through heightened status, recognition, networking and other factors. 相似文献
16.
Many countries have introducedevaluations of university research, reflectingglobal demands for greater accountability. Thispaper compares methods of evaluation usedacross twelve countries in Europe and theAsia-Pacific region. On the basis of thiscomparison, and focusing in particular onBritain, we examine the advantages anddisadvantages of performance-based funding incomparison with other approaches to funding.Our analysis suggests that, while initialbenefits may outweigh the costs, over time sucha system seems to produce diminishing returns.This raises important questions about itscontinued use. 相似文献
17.
This paper examines the impact of the National Endowment for the Arts on private donations to the arts. The aim of the analysis is to assess whether public funding generates a crowding effect on private giving. We distinguish between institutional and sectoral crowding phenomena and discuss their possible implications.We used both a qualitative approach and an econometric model to estimate the effect of NEA introduction and appropriations on donations. Our results suggest that at the institutional level NEA grants do not generally induce donations to recipients while at the sectoral level appropriations and private giving are independent. The introduction of the agency appears to have caused a decrease in donations. 相似文献
18.
In the following pages we discuss three historical cases of moral economies in science: Drosophila genetics, late twentieth
century American astronomy, and collaborations between American drug companies and medical scientists in the interwar years.
An examination of the most striking differences and similarities between these examples, and the conflicts internal to them,
reveals constitutive features of moral economies, and the ways in which they are formed, negotiated, and altered. We critically
evaluate these three examples through the filters of rational choice, utility, and American pragmatism, using the latter to
support the conclusion that there is no single vision of moral economies in science and no single theory—moral, political,
social—that will explain them. These filters may not be the only means through which to evaluate the moral economies examined,
but aspects of each appear prominent in all three cases. In addition, explanations for decisions are often given in the language
of these theories, both at the macro (policy) level and at the local level of the moral economies we discuss. In light of
such factors, the use of these frameworks seems justified. We begin with an attempt to define the nature of moral economies,
then move to a consideration of scientific communities as moral communities operating within material and other constraints
which we relate to wider questions of political economy and societal accountabilities.
Dr Atkinson-Grosjean is a Senior Research Associate in the WM Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia where she leads several research projects focused on large-scale science and the ways in which novel institutional and organizational arrangements affect the production and translation of scientific knowledge. Current work focuses on the factors that affect scientists’ participation (or lack thereof) in the translational mandates attached to funding. The goal is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding within policy guidelines of what constitutes ‘translational science’. Cory Fairley is a research assistant on Dr Atkinson-Grosjean’s translational science project and a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he also obtained a Masters degree in Philosophy. His current research focuses on the social history of technology, particularly upstream impacts of market forces on biotechnology in the historical context of twentieth century. 相似文献
| Cory FairleyEmail: |
Dr Atkinson-Grosjean is a Senior Research Associate in the WM Young Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia where she leads several research projects focused on large-scale science and the ways in which novel institutional and organizational arrangements affect the production and translation of scientific knowledge. Current work focuses on the factors that affect scientists’ participation (or lack thereof) in the translational mandates attached to funding. The goal is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding within policy guidelines of what constitutes ‘translational science’. Cory Fairley is a research assistant on Dr Atkinson-Grosjean’s translational science project and a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he also obtained a Masters degree in Philosophy. His current research focuses on the social history of technology, particularly upstream impacts of market forces on biotechnology in the historical context of twentieth century. 相似文献
19.
This paper establishes a structural typology of the organisational configurations of public research organisations which vary in their relative internal sharing of authority between researchers and managers; we distinguish between autonomous, heteronomous and managed research organisations. We assume that there are at least two sources of legitimate authority within research organisations, one derived from formal hierarchy (organisational leadership) and another derived from the research community (professional); the balance of authority between researchers and managers is essentially structural but is empirically mediated by the funding portfolio of organisations and the corresponding endowment of resources at the disposal of leaders or researchers. Changes in the level, sources and strings of organisational and individual research funding are expected to affect the balance of internal authority in different ways depending on the organisational configuration, and to open the door to the influence of external actors in the development of research agendas. 相似文献
20.
Science and technology (S&T) policy studies has explored the relationship between the structure of scientific research and the attainment of desired outcomes. Due to the difficulty of measuring them directly, S&T policy scholars have traditionally equated “outcomes” with several proxies for evaluation, including economic impact, and academic output such as papers published and citations received. More recently, scholars have evaluated science policies through the lens of Public Value Mapping, which assesses scientific programs against societal values. Missing from these approaches is an examination of the social activities within the scientific enterprise that affect research outputs and outcomes. We contend that activities that significantly affect research trajectories take place at the levels of individual researchers and their communities, and that S&T policy scholars must take heed of this activity in their work in order to better inform policy. Based on primary research of two scientific communities—ecologists and sustainability scientists—we demonstrate that research agendas are actively shaped by parochial epistemic and normative concerns of the scientists and their disciplines. S&T policy scholarship that explores how scientists balance these concerns, alongside more formal science policies and incentive structures, will enhance understanding of why certain science policies fail or succeed and how to more effectively link science to beneficial social outcomes. 相似文献