Abstract
The paper introduces a concept of a ‘negotiated space’ to describe university researchers’ attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external research funding agencies and university strategies and policies. We develop this concept to explore the degree of autonomy researchers in fact have in this process and draw on semi-structured interview material with research group leaders in Finland and the UK, in the former in seven research fields, in the latter in two fields. First, the analysis reveals that topic selection is strongly filtered by the intra-scientific factors. In topic selection researchers have more leeway, a broader negotiated space than in research content, that is, in the ways in which they pursue their research, which are more affected by funding opportunities and other contextual matters. Second, the ways which affect researchers’ agency include individual- and more aggregate-level acts and factors: at the individual level, researchers resort to different strategies to create a negotiated space, but at the more aggregate level field-specific factors play a role. In fields with multiple funding opportunities, which we call ‘shopping mall’ fields, researchers can have a broader negotiated space than in fields where funding is more based on ‘lottery’. In the latter, the researchers’ negotiated space is narrow and contingent on the outcome of the funders’ decisions.
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Notes
In this paper, the term ‘governance’ mainly refers to the governing modes and structures within the university, though the national research policy and its governance structures also frame the context in which both the researchers and their university organisations operate.
We consider ‘reputation’ here as related to a subjective mix of issues such as research quality, standing of research topics pursued (say in terms of proximity to the state-of-the-art), intellectual culture (the presence of strong particular ways of working in terms of topic selection, method choices and publication practices), resources, as well as some considering of university rankings (publication and funding success related metrics).
Tekes funded this project from its innovation research funding instrument.
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ accessed on September 11, 2015.
See Luukkonen (2014) for a more thorough description of the data and methods as well as some preliminary findings on several questions explored in the study.
These interviews mainly provided some background information on the university environment and policies as well as funder policies.
In our interviews with the archaeology field, for instance, empirical archaeological excavations were conducted by a larger group of people working on a temporary basis, but data analysis is done by individual senior researchers.
Aalto University; University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä, University of Eastern Finland, University of Oulu; University of Turku; and Lappeenranta University of Technology. In our classification of ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ universities the University of Helsinki belonged to the ‘elite’ and the rest to the ‘non-elite’ group. Of the UK universities, Imperial College London represented the ‘elite’ universities.
The nano-materials field was not in the end selected for the study but where possible, these interviews were used in the analysis.
For instance, originally, we would have wanted to include organic chemistry, but in the end, included chemistry more broadly.
Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation has a broad agenda to promote the technological level, innovation capabilities, and innovation activities of Finnish industries. It has traditionally supported research conducted in universities and public research institutes, too, but on the premise that they collaborate with companies and conduct research of, at least, potential relevance to them. In the past two-to-three years the conditions of Tekes funding to universities and public research institutes have, however, become more demanding in terms of requiring closer interaction with and more short-term utilization of the research by companies. At the time of this research this change had only just started, and most of the interviewees had not yet had experience of the new rules of Tekes funding.
It is a research council system with the members of different research councils coming mostly from academia or the research institute sector.
Governance here refers to various forms of university administration, management and leadership.
For the financial year 2013/14, for universities in England, HEFCE allocated £1.6 billion to universities for quality-related (QR) research funding, to provide among other things the underpinning infrastructure for research, determined by the results of this research assessment system.
Full economic costing in principle takes into account all the costs of a particular activity or project. In so doing it takes into account a number of factors that have previously been ignored by funders, including paying the higher education institutions for the time spent on a particular activity by the existing staff. The way such models calculate the costs can vary and the costing models are not identical in different countries, universities or funding agencies.
Arnold et al. (2013).
Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation (SHOKs) are strategic public-private partnerships and one of the principal innovation instruments of Finnish innovation policy, aiming to increase the competitiveness of the country’s research and innovation system (Lähteenmäki-Smith et al. 2013).
Aalto University was established in 2010 through a merger of the Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Art and Design Helsinki.
It is to be noted that the recent evaluation of the Academy of Finland (Arnold et al. 2013: 53-54) drew attention to the fact that the research programmes of the Academy are a result of a bottom-up process and reflect the research ambition of the fields which have representatives or are active in the process of forming of the programmes.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by Tekes, Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, from its innovation research funding instrument, award number 40422/11. The team that conducted these interviews consisted of, besides the authors of this paper, Juha Tuunainen, Antti Pelkonen, and Antti-Jussi Tahvanainen. We gratefully acknowledge the highly useful comments by the anonymous referees of our paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Eu-SPRI Science and Innovation Policy Conference, Manchester, 18-20 June 2014, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research.
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Luukkonen, T., Thomas, D.A. The ‘Negotiated Space’ of University Researchers’ Pursuit of a Research Agenda. Minerva 54, 99–127 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9291-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-016-9291-z