At present, peer review is the most common method used by funding agencies to make decisions about resource allocation. But how reliable, efficient, and fair is it in practice? The ex ante evaluation of scientific novelty is a fundamentally uncertain endeavor; bias and chance are embedded in the final outcome. In the current study, I will examine some of the most central problems of peer review and highlight the possible benefits of using a lottery as an alternative decision-making mechanism. Lotteries are driven by chance, not reason. The argument made in the study is that the epistemic landscape could benefit in several respects by using a lottery, thus avoiding all types of bias, disagreement, and other limitations associated with the peer review process. Funding agencies could form a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then select randomly within that pool. The benefits of a lottery would not only be that it saves time and resources, but also that it contributes to a more dynamic selection process and increases the epistemic diversity, fairness, and impartiality within academia.

This article focuses on anchoring effects in the process of peer reviewing research proposals. Anchoring effects are commonly seen as the result of flaws in human judgment, as cognitive biases that stem from specific heuristics that guide people when they involve their intuition in solving a problem. Here, the cognitive biases will be analyzed from a sociological point of view, as interactional and aggregated phenomena. The article is based on direct observations of ten panel groups evaluating research proposals in the natural and engineering sciences for the Swedish Research Council. The analysis suggests that collective anchoring effects emerge as a result of the combination of the evaluation techniques that are being used (grading scales and average ranking) and the efforts of the evaluators to reach consensus in the face of disagreements and uncertainty in the group. What many commentators and evaluators have interpreted as an element of chance in the peer review process may also be understood as partly a result of the dynamic aspects of collective anchoring effects.

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 present, research funding is a Gordian knot that must be cut by each individual researcher. As a response to this situation, some Swedish universities provide guidance to junior scholars on how to navigate in an increasingly entrepreneurial academia through open lectures by senior and successful professors. In this paper, I study these lectures as socialization processes and the role of symbolic violence in the justification of a competitive academic work ethos as well as a pragmatic acceptance of the prevailing funding conditions. The aim is to explore the role of a subtle form of power wielding that is not immediately understood or recognized as power, but that nonetheless reproduces a market-like behavior and legitimizes a career system marked by uncertainty, shortcomings and contradictions.

The purpose of grant peer review is to identify the most excellent and promising research projects. However, sociologists of science and STS scholars have shown that peer review tends to promote solid low-risk projects at the expense of more original and innovative projects that often come with higher risk. It has also been shown that the review process is affected by significant measures of chance. Against this background, the aim of this study is to theorize the notions of academic judgment and agonistic chance and to present and analyze situations in which expert reviewers are faced with the challenge of trying to decide which grant proposals to select when there is strong disagreement. The empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations of ten panel groups at the Swedish Research Council in the areas of natural and engineering sciences. By focusing on disagreement, the study provides a more in-depth understanding of how agonistic chance creeps into the peer-review process and becomes part of the consensus that is created.

From a purely epistemological point of view, evaluating and predicting the future success of new research projects is often considered very difficult. Is it possible to forecast important findings and breakthrough in science, and if not, then what is the point trying to do it anyway? Still, that is what funding agencies all over the world expect their reviewers to do, but a number of previous studies has shown that this form of evaluation of innovation, promise and future impact are a fundamentally uncertain and arbitrary practice. This is the context that I will discuss in the present essay, and I will claim that there is a deeply irrational element embedded in today’s heavy reliance on experts to screen, rank and select among the increasing numbers of good research projects, because they can, in principal, never discern the true potential behind the written proposals. Hence, I think it is motivated to see grant peer review as an ‘oracle of science’. My overall focus will be on the limits of competitive funding and also that the writing and reviewing of proposals is a waste of researchers’ precious time. And I will propose that we really need to develop new ways of thinking about how we organize research and distribute opportunities within academia.