Public research organizations respond to external pressures from national research evaluation systems, performance-based funding systems and university rankings by translating them into internal goals, rules and regulations and by developing organizational identities, profiles and missions. Organizational responses have primarily been studied at…

More than resource allocations, evaluations of funding applications have become central instances for status bestowal in academia. Much attention in past literature has been devoted to grasping the status consequences of prominent funding evaluations. But little attention has been paid to understanding how the status-bestowing momentum of such…

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and…

For U.S. research universities, cluster hiring has become a popular means to add faculty members in university-defined priority fields. The expectation of advocates is that these faculty members will collaborate on high-impact research. Utilizing a national sample of 168 cluster-hire faculty members from eight U.S. research universities, we find…

Since the 1980s scholars have been increasingly confronted with expectations to orient themselves toward societal and economic priorities. This normative demand for societal responsiveness is inscribed in discourses aimed at increasing the usefulness, competitiveness, and control of academia. New performance criteria, funding conditions, and…

It is widely recognized that universities all around Europe have taken on a more market-oriented approach that has changed the core of academic work life. This has led to a precarious situation for many junior scholars, who have to seek research funding to cover their own wages in an increasingly fierce competition over scarce resources. Thus, at…

Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is…

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…

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…

Excellence and frontier research have made inroads into European research policymaking and structure political agendas, funding programs and evaluation practices. The two concepts travelled a long way from the United States and have derived from contexts outside of science (and policy). Following their conceptual journey, we ask how excellence and…

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To…

Early career researchers are faced with the expectation of their scientific communities to conduct independent research, which is reflected in the development of independent new research lines. This change must take place under conditions that vary between national career systems. Case studies for a chair system (Germany) and two tenure systems,…

In the study of innovation institutions, it is important to consider how different institutional models can affect a research organization in conducting or funding successful work. As an industry collaborative, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) provides an example of a privately funded institution that leverages the inputs of several member…

This study looks at some of the traits that characterized Argentina's scientific and university policies under the military regime that spanned from 1976 through 1983. To this end, it delves into a rarely explored empirical observation: financial resource transfers from national universities to the National Scientific and Technological Research…

The academy is widely reported to be going through a period of transformation: not just changes to what is taught, but threats to tenure and internal funding, perhaps balanced by new possibilities for external funding and interdisciplinary projects. This article discusses a recently conducted survey of US and Canadian Philosophy departments, in an…