FOR 517:  International Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of Universities and Research Organisations - New Forms of Governance

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2003 to 2009
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5470436

The German research system is under high political and economical pressure since the middle of the 1990s. Universities and research organisations have to find new positions with respect to changing and contradictory demands of state and society, increasing competition and shortage of resources as well as acceleration and internationalisation of knowledge production within the European research system.The Research Unit aims to analyse empirically and systematically the reality of reform policy "on paper" and its implementation within universities and research organisations. The Group will regard the internal as well as the external forms of governance of universities, research and science organisations. Especially, central media of control such as money, personnel, law, organisation and decision competencies and processes are examined. In addition, the researchers analyse the impact of the reforms on research performance of the organisations, especially with respect to opportunities and incentives of taking up innovative research questions. Reform processes in the German research system will be regarded longitudinally to see the impacts of policy changes over time. In addition, a cross-sectional comparison to foreign reform models is on the research agenda. The research results will be fed back to actors and policy makers and recommendations for fine-tuning of the new governance models may come out of this. To sum up, the aim is to analyse the positive and normative conditions for the implementation of new forms of governance within universities and research organisations.The Research Unit combines approaches of law, social science as well as economics while analysing the reform processes and their consequences for the German research system. The Research Unit shares a theoretical framework of actor related, institutionalistic theoretical approaches in law, economics and social sciences. These discuss incentives, contracting and expectancy stabilisation through norms and trust as mechanisms of coordination in complex, interdependent actor constellations. In the first instance, altogether five projects are going to cooperate. These projects use common selection procedures, matching or nesting of the objects under study and work with common (context-) records.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Netherlands, Switzerland

Projects

• An international comparison of the management and the self-governance model of university decision-making and its consequences for research (Applicant Schimank, Uwe )
• Auswirkungen der Zusammensetzung von DFG-Graduiertenkollegs auf die Forschungsperformanz: die Analyse eines Governance-Instruments (Applicant Pull, Kerstin )
• Conditions and facilitating governance structures for inter-institutional research collaboration across national borders in the field of nanoscience and -technology (nano S & T). (Applicant Kuhlmann, Stefan )
• Das Verhältnis von externer und interner Governance der Forschung an den Universitäten aus nationaler und europäischer Perspektive (Applicant Trute, Hans-Heinrich )
• Die Förderung wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses: ein (lokales) Kollektivgut? (Applicant Sadowski, Dieter )
• Intrnational competitiveness and innovate capacity of universities and research organizations - New forms of governance (Applicant Jansen, Dorothea )
• Networking strategy and network capacity of research groups (Applicant Jansen, Dorothea )
• Performance indicators of research institutions, in particular research groups (Applicant Schmoch, Ulrich )
• Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen innovationsfördernder Regelungsstrukturen außeruniversitärer Forschungseinrichtungen (Applicant Groß, Thomas )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Dorothea Jansen (†)