Organisational factors and academic research agendas: an analysis of academics in the social sciences

ABSTRACT

The demands for academic research placed on contemporary universities are closely related to the levels of innovative research they are expected to produce. Concurrently, both governments and university management strive to make the production of academic research more cost-efficient and have implemented measures to ensure this. Top-down policies influenced by the concepts of new public management and managerialism have been introduced, pushing for competitiveness and increased performativity in academic research setups. These policies and guidelines have been criticised by academics as having eroded collegiality and autonomy, which are considered necessary to achieve quality research. The focus of this study is on the social sciences and aligns with this critique, demonstrating that autonomy and collegiality are the key organisational features fostering multidisciplinary, collaborative and riskier research agendas that lead to breakthroughs. Academics with high levels of organisational commitment are more likely to create research agendas that assume more conservative, discipline-bound and risk-averse traits, with less potential to achieve the intended innovative research outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomy
• academic research
• social sciences
• research agendas
• collegiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Research performance is defined and measured by bibliometric outputs, such as publications and citations produced over a given time, and often associated with national and organisation-related incentives, targets and expectations (see Langfeldt, Bloch, and Sivertsen 2015; Hicks 2012; Bazeley 2010).

2 This study uses the definition of performativity suggested by Ball (2003). Ball defines performativity as ‘a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement’ (2003, 216).

3 Outcomes of the new public management, managerialism and performativity environment in academia were the fostering of industry-university collaborations and a greater engagement with civil society (Alexander, Miller, and Fielding 2015). This led to the emergence of a new academic engagement with society, where some academics started to collaborate more with non-academic organisations, but also found the incentives to create start-ups with peers and former and current doctoral students (Perkmann et al. 2013). These processes combined a multitude of funding streams to set up new research agendas, some more related to learning, others to access to research funding, others to access to in-kind resources and others to commercialisation (D’Este and Perkmann 2011). They become a new category of academics, known as entrepreneurial academics and academic entrepreneurs, who share academia with traditional academics.

4 The study was preceded by a pilot study that enabled the authors to conclude that a 10-year time-frame to identify authors was optimal for the analysis. The pilot was also useful in improving the structure, content and focus of the questionnaire. The analytical focus was on higher education journals, for three main reasons. (1) These journals are identified with the social sciences and academics from all disciplinary fields of the social sciences participate in them. Frequently, papers in higher education journals are published by sociologists, psychologists, economists, management and operation research researchers, philosophers, anthropologists and others. This is evidenced by analyses of the fields that include a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches from all social sciences (see Tight 2013). (2) It is an internationalised field, and one where substantial collaborations of social scientists from different backgrounds are found, working together and thus raising the incidence of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies. Higher education journals thus combine both disciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary publications, some arising from collaborations (Tight 2013). (3) The authors are familiar with the field of higher education studies and with higher education journals, ensuring a higher degree of data sensibility in the analysis.

5 Countries with 10 or less respondents were aggregated in a single category, i.e. Others.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by doctoral grant PD/BD/113999/2015 from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and co-funded by the European Social Fund and the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Education; the research was also funded by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee (Hong Kong) through a project entitled ‘Characterising researchers’ research agenda-setting: an international perspective across fields of knowledge’ (project number: 27608516).