Re-Structuring Higher Education and Scientific Innovation (RHESI): The consequences of changes in authority relations for the direction and organisation of research
Final Report Abstract
The Project was part of a European collaborative project "Restructuring Higher Education and Scientific Change” (RHESI). The aim of RHESI was to find out how the changing governance of public science systems and higher education systems are altering key features of scientific innovation, particularly the selection of research goals and the evaluation and integration of results. The German project collaborated with similar projects in Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands. One innovation each from the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities was selected, and its development in the four countries studied by semi-structured interviews with researchers and research administrators. Bibliometric analyses were used to support the analyses of natural science and life science innovations. The analysis of conditions for the successful development of scientific innovations leads to four conclusions about the strengths and vulnerabilities of the German science system. First, the capacity of a science system to generate and develop innovations strongly depends on its diversity. Second, the pluralism, delegation and tolerance of the German grant funding system provided the necessary flexibility for researchers who wanted to change their research by developing an innovation. Although a comparison between universities and state-funded research institutes demonstrated that sufficient recurrent funding provides even more flexibility, grant funding supports innovations. However, this supportive roles depends on the specific decision practices identified in our study – a certain ‘generosity’ –, which are endangered if success rates become low enough that nothing outside the mainstream is funded anymore, and output control is strengthened. Third, the German career and funding systems limit opportunities to develop scientific innovations for researchers who are not (yet) professors. Although much has been done to improve conditions for young researchers, their opportunities to develop innovations are still limited by three important features of the German science system, namely the fixed-term contracts for researchers below the professorial level, the concentration of discretion over infrastructure on professors, and the dependence of the largest ‘workforce’ in the German science system (PhD students) on professors. Consequently, developing scientific innovations that require long time horizons and access to infrastructure as well as personnel remains a privilege of professors and those who are supported by them. Fourth, our findings raise questions about the balance between recurrent and grant funding at German universities. The scarcity of recurrent funding makes the exclusive control of infrastructure by professors almost inevitable because it is impossible to provide resources to all researchers. But even professors can afford significant changes of their infrastructure only at specific times. The grant funding system cannot compensate for insufficient infrastructure. As a consequence, the resources that are often necessary to immediately follow a new idea are often lacking. These conclusions draw the picture of a generally favourable but vulnerable system. There are many scientific innovations that can be developed by most German researchers because the science system is sufficiently diverse and the innovations require only little protected space. More demanding innovations can be developed by fewer researchers and only under specific conditions. These limitations are difficult to overcome. New public management does not directly address them and has the potential to worsen rather than improving general conditions for scientific innovation. At the most general level, facilitating conditions for innovations include ‘slack’ – free resources at the discretion of the researcher – and tolerance for delays and failure. Unfortunately, both conditions are at odds with the notion of efficiency that is being adopted by the current governance of research.
Publications
- (2014): Autonomie als Resistenz gegen Beeinflussung. Forschungshandeln im organisatorischen und politischen Kontext. In: Franzen, M. et al. (Hrsg.), Autonomie revisited. Beiträge zu einem umstrittenen Grundbegriff in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Politik. Zeitschrift für theoretische Soziologie / 2. Sonderband, 41-61
Gläser, J./Schimank, U.
- (2014): Cold Atoms – Hot Research: High risks, high rewards in five different authority structures. In: Whitley, R./Gläser, J. (eds.): Organisational Transformation and Scientific Change: The impact of institutional restructuring on universities and intellectual innovation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 42. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 203–233
Laudel, G./Lettkemann, E./Ramuz, R./Wedlin, L./Woolley, R.
- (2014): Computer Corpus Linguistics: An innovation in the humanities. In: Whitley, R./Gläser, J. (eds.): Organisational Transformation and Scientific Change: The impact of institutional restructuring on universities and intellectual innovation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 42. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 331–365
Engwall, L./Aljets, E./Hedmo, T./Ramuz, R.
- (2014): Der Wandel der „Regelungsstrukturen“ des Hochschulsystems und die Folgen für die wissenschaftliche Forschung. In: Bora, A./Henkel, A./Reinhardt, C. (Hrsg.), Wissensregulierung und Regulierungswissen. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 19-40
Schimank, U.
- (2014): Highly Adaptable but not Invulnerable: Necessary and facilitating conditions for research in evolutionary developmental biology. In: Whitley, R./Gläser, J. (eds.): Organisational Transformation and Scientific Change: The impact of institutional restructuring on universities and intellectual innovation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 42. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 235–265
Laudel, G./Benninghoff, M./Lettkemann, E./Håkansson, E.
- (2014): Path Dependence and Policy Steering in the Social Sciences: The varied impact of international largescale student assessment on the educational sciences in four European countries. In: Whitley, R./Gläser, J. (eds.): Organisational Transformation and Scientific Change: The impact of institutional restructuring on universities and intellectual innovation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 42. Bingley: Emerald Group, pp. 267–295
Gläser, J./Aljets, E./Gorga, A./Hedmo, T./Håkansson, E./Laudel, G.
