Changing Funding Arrangements and the Production of Scientific Knowledge: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

With this special issue, we would like to promote research on changes in the funding of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Since funding secures the livelihood of researchers and the means to do research, it is an indispensable condition for almost all research; as funding arrangements are undergoing dramatic changes, we think it timely to renew the science studies community's efforts to understand the funding of research. Changes in the governance of science have garnered considerable attention from science studies and higher education research; however, the impact of these changes on the conduct and content of research has not received sufficient attention, and theoretical insights into the connections between funding practices and research practices are few and far between. The aim of this special issue is to contribute to our theoretical understanding of the changing nature of research funding and its impact on the production of scientific knowledge. More specifically, we are interested in the interplay between funding and research practices: What is the impact of institutionalised funding arrangements on the production of scientific knowledge?

An early career perspective on encouraging collaborative and interdisciplinary research in ecology

“…Changing competitive funding models is also pivotal to facilitating a more open and collaborative atmosphere in academia (Oni et al. , Gläser and Velarde ), such as the encouragement of challenge‐led research (Gibson et al. ); that is, interdisciplinary funding programs organized around pre‐defined themes.…”

“…Participants also strongly advocated for active funding of ECR collaborations, for example, through funding networking events or specific travel grants for visiting collaborators. Changing competitive funding models is also pivotal to facilitating a more open and collaborative atmosphere in academia (Oni et al 2016, Gl€ aser andVelarde 2018), such as the encouragement of challenge-led research (Gibson et al 2019); that is, interdisciplinary funding programs organized around pre-defined themes. Participants encouraged institutions to measure outputs and success on more than simply publications alone, thus also including non-traditional research outputs such as developing tools and reports for end users, successful engagement with the public, or demonstrated behavior change.…”

Organizing in the Shadow of Academic Entrepreneurship, Excellence and Omnipresence

“…Various authors have demonstrated how, in the last twenty-five years, the decline of budget funding has led to policy reforms based on market discourse [8] in most western countries [12], including in the Belgian higher education system [9]. Universities have "to compete against each other in attracting the 'best' students and scholars as well as funding from the market in order to deliver a high-quality service" [13: 688].…”

Should we fund research randomly? An epistemological criticism of the lottery model as an alternative to peer review for the funding of science

“…Should we trust peerreview, or choose the projects randomly (Gillies 2014)? Secondly, there is a relatively voluminous literature in economics, management science, and sociology that aims at characterizing the effects of contemporary modifications of funding policies on the production of knowledge (Gläser and Velarde 2018). These works study, for instance, the role of funding agencies as intermediaries between states and scientists (Edler et al 2014), grant writing practices in academia (Velarde 2018), the diversification of sources of funding (Luukkonen 2014), or the mechanisms of research evaluation (Musselin 2014).…”

“…However, their practical normative interests seem to be limited by their failure in deducing normative conditions for the public funding of science. The recent state of the art proposed by Gläser and Velarde (2018) states that this literature does not succeed in "establish [ing] clear causal relationships between funding and the content and conduct of research" (p. 4). The complexity and the variety of funding environments is a real obstacle to drawing general conclusions about the epistemic consequences of the choice of one given funding scheme over another.…”