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Governing Research: New Forms of Competition and Cooperation in Academia

2023; Emerald Publishing Limited; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1108/s0733-558x20230000086002

0733-558X

Anna Kosmützky, Georg Krücken,

Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

Abstract Traditional studies in the sociology of science have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community. This article focuses on recent interrelated changes that alter that distinctive governance structure and its related patterns of competition and cooperation. The changes that we identify here are contractualization and large-scale cooperative research. We use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the illustrative role of research clusters in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are both a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition for reputation and resources and a means of fostering cooperation. Our analysis of this German example reveals that this new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers, and the state has a profound effect on organizational practices. We discuss the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. Ultimately, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasing strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers. In the final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research and an international comparative perspective. Keywords Academia Science Universities Collegiality Governance Competition Cooperation Research cluster Large-scale collaboration Citation Kosmützky, A. and Krücken, G. (2023), "Governing Research: New Forms of Competition and Cooperation in Academia", Sahlin, K. and Eriksson-Zetterquist, U. (Ed.) University Collegiality and the Erosion of Faculty Authority (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 86), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 31-57. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20230000086002 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2024 Anna Kosmützky and Georg Krücken License Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. I. Introduction Competition and cooperation in academia are not new phenomena in the twenty-first century, but in recent years they have taken on greater significance in science and higher education. Currently, we are witnessing an extension and evolution of news forms of competition and cooperation across different disciplines and areas of research as well as in various national science and higher education systems. In this article, we use scientific research – and in particular the relationship between competition and cooperation contained therein – as a springboard for investigating changes in academia that raise questions about governance and collegiality. This is largely because scientific research is at the core of academic activities and transcends disciplinary, national, and organizational boundaries. With our research, we complement existing investigations on academic collegiality that focus on formal and informal structures in universities as well as related legal-administrative changes. Such structures and changes will be reconstructed in our empirical analysis of scientific research clusters in German universities. This paper is structured as follows. After this introduction, the second section deals with classical accounts and recent changes in competition and cooperation. Against the backdrop of traditional studies in the sociology of science, which have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community, we focus on recent interrelated changes that alter that governance structure of research and associated patterns of competition and cooperation. Here we identify an emerging new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers as strategic actors, and the state. In the third section, we use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the role of contractualization and research clusters as a means of fostering cooperation in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) are a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition of universities and academic researchers for reputation and resources. The fourth section discusses the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. On the basis of our analysis, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasingly strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers that is spurred by contractualization. In the fifth and final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research with an internationally comparative approach. II. Competition and Cooperation: Classical Accounts and Recent Changes Competition has traditionally played a strong role as a mechanism of self-governance in science as individual scientists vie for discoveries and the recognition they bring. Classical studies in the sociology of science have focused on competition among individual academic actors and within the scientific community at large. They have described the race for discoveries, the emphasis on publishing, and the related recognition, all of it very similar to market competition, as a self-governance mechanism that creates systemic cohesion and is based on the norm of the individual independence of the researchers. Likewise, competition has also been acknowledged for its contribution to risk-taking by researchers in their investigation of less popular or niche topics. Thus, competition is responsible for both exploitation and exploration in science (Bourdieu, 1975; Hagstrom, 1965, 1974; Merton, 1973; von Hayek, 1968). At the same time, scientific research has traditionally fostered collaborative efforts whereby scientists become interdependent and form groups to solve problems and share data (Beaver & Rosen, 1978, 1979a, 1979b; de Solla Price, 1963; Hagstrom, 1965). While competition and cooperation might at first glance seem to be quite different or even antithetical forms of social interaction, they are often in fact intimately interconnected. There has been an intensive debate over competition and collaboration in the traditional sociology of science (e.g., de Solla Price, 1963; Hagstrom, 1965; Merton, 1973; von Hayek, 1968), although from an empirical standpoint these studies have generally favored the natural sciences and given the humanities and social sciences far less attention. Classical studies have shown that a great deal of scientific research requires the efforts of multiple parties and that scientists often become interdependent and cooperative to win the race for discoveries and recognition. Beyond this, academics also look to the support of their colleagues to improve their knowledge and skills or to gain access to research facilities, data, and networks, which in turn will improve their chances of solving problems and ultimately achieving success individually or together (Beaver & Rosen, 1978; Hagstrom, 1965). Hagstrom (1965, p. 91) described the relationship between the competitive and cooperative mindset in his classical study as follows: “Before a man can be considered for such an agreement, he must have shown possible competitors that he can compete and can be trusted.” Scientific competitiveness in terms of reputation – as demonstrated, for example, by the number of citations or publications to one’s name – has therefore been seen as one of the prerequisites for cooperation, with trust being the other. The fact that the organization, epistemic cultures, working styles, and academic identities in different research areas differ from each other was also the subject of later classic sociological studies of science (Becher & Trowler, 1989; Henkel, 2000; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Whitley, 1984). Traditionally, scientific work in the natural sciences has been based on a division of labor and more collaborative than is the case in the social sciences and humanities. Scholars in the humanities, for example, have tended to work in an individualistic style rather than cooperatively in teams, which means they have generally relied on libraries, collections, and archives instead of sharing data and equipment. As for the division of labor, epistemic trust, and collective knowledge, these are subject to different conditions in the natural sciences relative to the humanities and social sciences (Klein, 1996; Mauthner & Doucet, 2008; Wagenknecht, 2016).1 However, it must also be acknowledged that digitalization has changed knowledge production and scholarly communication across disciplines (Gold & Klein, 2019). We deliberately started our investigation into new forms of competition and cooperation and the role of collegiality therein by drawing on classical accounts in the sociology of science. In these accounts, the starting point is the academic community and more specifically its self-organized character. Both competition and cooperation stem from the reputational structure and the work organization in science as a whole. While competition for new knowledge and the attendant recognition is inherent to the scientific system, independent of the discipline or research field, the need for cooperation is not equally distributed across disciplines and fields but rather bound to the concrete organization of work. In this regard, and following the aforementioned literature, the natural sciences differ profoundly from the humanities and the social sciences given that research in the former often requires the joint efforts of scientists and access to research facilities to improve the competitive position of the individual researcher. This means that competition leads to cooperation based on the necessities of autonomous academic communities. With this in mind, we would now like to highlight broader changes that have occurred in very different national systems roughly since the 1990s. These changes – three in particular – have altered the interrelation between competition and cooperation. First, universities now position themselves more actively as both competitive and cooperative collective actors in their own right instead of mainly providing an organizational framework for the competitive and cooperative efforts of individual scientific actors. An important part of this new role for universities is the increasing use of target agreements with their professors. Second, the state is increasingly using competition as a governance instrument. In the same way as universities use target agreements with their professors, the state employs target agreements with its universities, thereby fostering a broader trend toward contractualization in science and higher education. Third, with regard to individual academics, more dimensions of scholarly activities (e.g., research funding, research cooperation, teaching, stays abroad, public engagement) have become scarce goods for which academics compete. Even though the last of these changes is reflected most acutely in the sociology of science and especially the field of science studies, prior research has typically paid scant attention to the university as an organizational actor with its own aims and ambitions.2 Therefore, we will begin with changes at the organizational level. Universities have transformed themselves into strategic and competitive organizational actors, thereby causing them to move away from the traditional concept of a loosely coupled expert organization. This trend has been analyzed in detail both theoretically and empirically (Christensen et al., 2019; Krücken & Meier, 2006; Whitley, 2008). These same studies have also shown that this trend is by no means unequivocal as universities are still “specific organizations” (Musselin, 2007) and their actual strategic capacities vary broadly (Thoenig & Paradeise, 2016). At the decentralized level, then, the modern university is nevertheless more than the sum of its parts, be they individual academics, institutes, or departments. The university as a whole engages in a multitude of strategic efforts that collectively result in the construction of an individual organizational identity, increasingly hierarchical structures, the creation of managerial capacities, and the ever-increasing formation of specialized administrative units for observing relevant environments along with their internal processes and units. Parallel to this internal dynamic, competition has become of paramount importance, and universities compete among themselves for a variety of scarce goods (e.g., reputation, personnel, financial resources, and students). For several decades, analyses of this development have concentrated on the United States (Berman, 2015; Birnbaum, 2000), but more recently their scope has expanded to Europe and other parts of the world (Musselin, 2021). As we will later see when analyzing the German case, some competitive processes initiated by the state do, however, require cooperative efforts by universities and their academic members as a prerequisite for participation. State activities have changed. With the advent of New Public Management reforms, states have increasingly begun to use competition directly as a governance instrument. This shift has been analyzed for different European national systems (Bleiklie et al., 2017) as well as for Latin America (Pineda, 2015) and Asia (Jung et al., 2017). Naidoo (2018, p. 611) speaks of competition as an “unquestionable orthodoxy” in the British higher education system. Following Szöllösi-Janze (2021, p. 244), competition in an orderly way creates legitimate inequality, which from the competitors as well as society as a whole is accepted as just. Competition, in other words, is a machinery for creating legitimate, socially accepted inequality.3 This argument is particularly true for state activities in the field of science and higher education, where meritocratic ideals largely prevail. It is in these very same field that failure and the resulting inequalities among individuals and universities can be expected to have a higher degree of legitimacy relative to other fields of state politics like healthcare or social welfare. One such example of these state activities is a shift from block grant funding to a more competitive allocation of resources (Whitley et al., 2018). States have likewise initiated an increasing number of competitive processes for allocating research funding at the national and supranational levels (Aagaard et al., 2020; Auranen & Nieminen, 2010; Gläser & Laudel, 2016). These developments have spurred a trend toward large-scale research projects that are often multi- or interdisciplinary, involve multiple institutions, and are internationally cooperative (Bozemann & Youtie, 2020; Kosmützky & Wöhlert, 2021; Olechnicka et al., 2019). It should be noted here that political agendas can be quite visible in states’ funding schemes for research on grand challenges (Kaldewey, 2018). Among individual scientists, competition has grown in volume and scope. The “publish or perish” imperative, which has already been analyzed extensively in the Mertonian sociology of science (Lofthouse, 1974; Merton, 1968), has become more granular and specific as scientists increasingly compete for scarce space in highly ranked journals, related citations, and inclusion in publication databases. Starting as early as the PhD level, the publication imperative has become of central importance – including the growing debate about first authorship. Furthermore, other aspects of research like third-party funding have become more widespread as an academic activity and performance indicator not only in the natural sciences but also in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, conducting research today is in large part a matter of designing, launching, and carrying out research projects with specifically dedicated resources (Besio, 2009; Torka, 2009), and researchers spend far more time writing grant proposals than they did in the past (Gross & Bergstrom, 2019; Serrano Velarde, 2018). The imperative to compete also creates new requirements for cooperation. Academics build cooperative networks strategically to increase their chances of securing external funding, and they compete – not just in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and related fields (i.e., STEM+) but also in the social sciences and humanities – for prestigious grants and the ability to participate in large-scale collaborative projects (Borlaug & Langfeldt, 2020; Ekström & Sörlin, 2022; Hellström et al., 2018). Changes like these are increasingly shifting the nature of cooperation from traditional informal cooperation and collective problem-solving without funding (or with institutional funding) to formal cooperation with competitive project funding (Georghiou, 1998; Sacco, 2020). Long ago, the seminal laboratory study by Latour and Woolgar (1979) identified the procurement of external grants as the exclusive task of the head of the laboratory, yet, in the years since, grant-seeking as an academic activity has become widespread for researchers at all levels and across disciplines. The competition for external funding has even extended to junior scientists, both for the basic ability to conduct research and as a reputation marker (Waaijer et al., 2018). For academics across the board, so it seems, self-identifying as a member of an academic community – be it a discipline or a particular school of thought – has taken a backseat compared to highlighting one’s individual performance along different dimensions of competition. Although we have described broader trends across national systems up to this point, their actual configuration is bound to specific national characteristics. For the German system, some peculiarities have to be taken into account, namely, those which limit the power of the state and the university organization over the academic profession and its individual members (Hüther & Krücken, 2013, 2018). To begin with the legal structure, one should recall that academic freedom in Germany is constitutionally guaranteed. Article 5.3 of the German constitution (Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland) states, “Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free.” In a number of judgments, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has interpreted the freedom of research and teaching as an individual right, thereby protecting individual academics, and in particular university professors, from state and organizational intervention. Complementary to this, the vast majority of professors at public universities are civil servants (Beamte) who have lifetime tenure and cannot be dismissed by the organization with ease. However, it is possible to sanction professors who do not align their professional activities with that of the organization. University leadership can exercise control over resources (e.g., personnel, equipment), although this source of power is limited as most resources have to be acquired externally through third-party funding. Far more effective is to incentivize professors through the new remuneration scheme (W1–3 salaries) that came into existence in 2006 and supplanted the previous, more egalitarian scheme. Under the new scheme, professors can obtain regular performance bonuses from their universities by, for example, creating new study programs or participating in cooperative large-scale research. Through this method, there are ample opportunities for the university as an organization to exercise “soft coercion” (Courpasson, 2000) in academia and to shape the research and teaching activities of its members. Another peculiarity of the German system lies in the federal structure of higher education and science policy, which leads to the proliferation of competitive activities initiated by the state. Legal regulation and financing of universities is basically the responsibility of the 16 states (Länder). As state governance through law is not an option for the federal government, there are far fewer constraints when it comes to competitive funding, which more closely resembles both the structural constraints and related policies of the European Union vis-á-vis its member states. Governance through competitive funding in Germany encompasses all major activities at universities, such as research, teaching, and innovation, not to mention specific funding programs on internationalization, gender equality, family friendliness, or science communication. Large programs like the Excellence Initiative (renamed the Excellence Strategy in 2016) explicitly foster cooperation within universities and with partners from non-university research organizations.4 Furthermore, the Excellence Strategy in particular spurs competition among the 16 states and universities given that individual states create competitive programs for universities at the state level in order to strengthen their competitiveness at the federal level. In Germany, the three relevant actors outlined so far – universities, individual academics, states – converge in altering the traditional configuration of competition and cooperation by their particular focus on research clusters. Their role will be elaborated in the next section. III. The Role of Research Clusters in German Academia In this section, we illustrate the relationship between new forms of competition and cooperation based on developments in German academia, specifically by looking at highly competitive and collaborative research clusters.5 This illustrative example aims to show that the research cluster as a scarce good is very influential in the competition for reputation and resources and in the overall competitive institutional configuration of German academia. It has also had a profound influence on recent changes in the interrelations between individual academics, universities as organizations, and the state. The increasing clustering of research spurs the contractualization of research between the German states and their universities as well as between universities and their professors. Whereas collaborative research groups are an elemental form of collaboration and knowledge production (Hackett, 2005), research clusters are in fact a special form of group as well as of collaboration. Research clusters are large-scale collaborative research projects designed around long-term basic research. They are organized in a modular and decentralized fashion and based on a division of labor that consists of several sub-projects with their own principal investigators (PIs). At the same time, the goals and activities of the sub-projects contribute to the overarching aims of the research cluster itself. Research clusters may be disciplinary or interdisciplinary, and, depending on the larger aims of their research, the sub-projects might be interlinked to a lesser or greater extent in terms of content and mutually (in)dependent research activities (for a more detailed description, see Hückstädt, 2022). The most prestigious research clusters that typically bring with them the greatest gain in revenue and reputation and also determine the status position of German universities are the so-called Coordinated Programmes funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which have a highly competitive application process. We focus on such DFG programs for research clusters as an empirical example, namely, the programs for Clusters of Excellence (Exzellenzcluster; EXC), Collaborative Research Centres (Sonderforschungsbereiche; SFB), and Transregional Collaborative Research Centres (Transregios; TRR) as well as what are known as Research Units (Forschungsgruppen; FOR). Research clusters from these programs are located at German universities, but researchers from non-university organizations, such as the Max Planck Institutes, at which a considerable share of cutting-edge fundamental research in Germany is carried out, can be and are typically involved (Buenstorf & Koenig, 2020). The DFG funding programs for research clusters were established in the 1960s to promote research in universities in select research areas. They expanded quickly on account of increasingly scarce basic state funding for universities. The shortage of state funds in the 1970s resulted in additional research in universities being funded primarily through special focus areas for cutting-edge research, especially in interdisciplinary fields and in fields of “new” technologies (e.g., microelectronics, biotechnology). This was done not only through the DFG funding programs but also by the state ministries, which established competitive programs to promote special focus areas and research priorities in universities, particularly in the form of new interdisciplinary areas and priorities (Mayer, 2019). In conjunction, the income from third-party funding at universities became a performance indicator. The German Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat, WR) pointed out in the 1980s that third-party funding is an essential element in ensuring the quality of research at universities because it is typically awarded through competitive processes (WR, 1982, 1985). In the mid-1990s the Council recommended accordingly: “Competition for third-party funding is the most important way of allocating research resources on the basis of performance. The volume of third-party funding must therefore be increased” (WR, 1996, p. 10). Together these developments put universities in a mode of competition not just for basic research funding but also for cutting-edge (interdisciplinary) research priorities in the form of research clusters (Mayer, 2019). Third-party funding along these lines – and especially DFG funding for research clusters – has therefore become more than a simple enabler of research but is nowadays also considered a key indicator of the organizational research performance and reputation of German universities (Gerhards, 2013; Mayer, 2019). In general, the third-party income of German universities tripled from public sources and quadrupled from private sources (industry and others) in the 20 years between 1995 and 2015 (Dohmen & Wrobel, 2018). German higher education institutions, especially universities with a high proportion of research, now increasingly derive their resources from third-party funding. Between 1995 and 2015, the share of third-party funding of the total budget of German higher education institutions “increased from 23% to nearly 50%,” according to Dohmen and Wrobel (2018, p. 131, see also WR, 2023). They point to the “disproportionate importance of the DFG as an additional source of income” (Dohmen & Wrobel, 2018, p. 124). As the analysis by Mergele and Winkelmayer (2022) shows the Excellence Initiative made a pronounced contribution to greater disparity in the distribution of absolute amounts of DFG funding among universities. Research Clusters: A Competition for Resources and Reputation Among Universities In the late 1960s, the DFG established Collaborative Research Centres (SFBs) for collaborative long-term and large-scale research of up to 12 years. These clusters were expected to strengthen research in universities and to contribute to the development of special focus areas by means of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional cooperation. A total of 56.85 million euros (converted from German marks) in funding for the first 17 research clusters was awarded in 1968.6 By 1980 the number of clusters had grown to 120 (with total funding increasing to 135.2 million euros, converted from German marks) and today has reached 294 (with a total of 872.9 million euros in funding) (DFG, 1980, 2021).7 The most prestigious DFG funding program for research clusters is part of the Excellence Strategy (formerly known as the Excellence Initiative), which has decisively shifted science policy in Germany even further away from the traditional egalitarian approach and toward a competitive approach (Möller et al., 2016).8 To date there have been three rounds in which Clusters of Excellence among other programs have been funded (2006–2007, 2012, 2019). A fourth round with funding decisions to be determined by 2024 has just started. Clusters of Excellence can receive funding for up to 14 years. Although only universities are able to submit proposals for this type of research cluster, the funding program also explicitly aims to foster collaboration between universities and non-university research organizations (Buenstorf & Koenig, 2020; Möller et al., 2016).9 The funding program for Research Units (FOR) has existed since 1962, which predates the Collaborative Research Centre program by several years. It provides funding to – comparatively speaking – smaller and more short-term research clusters (up to six years when the program started, nowadays up to eight years). This program therefore contributes less to the total amount of university funding from the DFG and likewise has less influence on the organizational structures of universities. Nevertheless, it still ranks among the most prestigious and competitive third-party funding programs in Germany today. Since the establishment of the DFG funding programs for the aforementioned clusters, they have invariably grown in number. So, too, has the competiti