Managing budgetary uncertainty, interpreting policy. How researchers integrate “grand challenges” funding programs into their research agendas

Abstract

A recent trend in European science policy is the attempt to influence academic research agendas through mission-oriented funding programs. Under the label of 'grand challenges', these aim to stimulate knowledge and technology deemed crucial to society, but unlikely to develop from corporate R&D and traditionally funded research. This paper takes a detailed look at the mechanisms through which academics in two German university departments integrate such funding into their research agendas. The first department focuses on electromobility research, and the other one on sustainable biotechnological alternatives for industrial petrochemistry. The paper highlights an illacknowledged tension between the normative goals of grand challenges and the practical uncertainty that reliance on such funding creates for recipients. While formally incentivizing the production of highly innovative technologies, the often unclear timeframe of mission-oriented grants and the hard-to-predict behavior of commercial actors pose a counter-incentive for academics to limit their commitment to ambitious research agendas.

Re-invent Yourself! How Demands for Innovativeness Reshape Epistemic Practices

“…Second, my analysis adds important insights to studies which have sought to investigate how research governance reshapes epistemic practices (Gläser and Laudel 2016;Kaltenbrunner 2020;Laudel 2006;Müller and de Rijcke 2017), beyond placeholders such as the impediment of innovative research. As I have shown, prevailing pushes for innovativeness can prevent researchers from conducting follow-up or validation studies, which can, for example, result in untested hypotheses floating around in the scientific landscape.…”

Changing publication practices and the typification of the journal article in science and technology studies

“…In some influential publications, Fujimura (1987Fujimura ( , 1992 proposes that the production of academic knowledge requires the creation of temporary alignments between different organizational levels, each of which pose distinct forms of uncertainty that threaten the successful conduct of research (Fochler, 2016;Fujimura, 1987Fujimura, , 1992Kaltenbrunner, 2020;Sigl, 2016). A first level of organization is that of particular research projects.…”

“…Previous scholarship has usually focused on how packaging of methods and ad-hoc work to ensure and repair alignment between organizational levels facilitate making research doable in the face of such diverse pressures (Fujimura, 1987(Fujimura, , 1992Kaltenbrunner, 2020). Turning originally complex and decision-laden sequences of scientific tasks into black-boxed methods removes degrees of freedom from daily research practice that scientists no longer have to worry about and around which other tasks can be more flexibly organized.…”

Closing out twenty-twenty on a positive note

“…Institutional and organizational level empirical investigations and assessments include reducing inequality through 3D printing in US public libraries (Woodson, Telendii, and Tolliver 2020), embedding responsible innovation in a UK synthetic biology multi-disciplinary research center (Pansera et al 2020), researcher expectations and practices around open science in Australia (Lacey, Coates, and Herington 2020), the integration of policy-driven grand challenges into research agendas in German university settings (Kaltenbrunner 2020), and the problematic paradigm of 'social license to operate' as used within synthetic biology public engagement discourses (Delborne, Kokotovich, and Lunshof 2020).…”