Something new in old Europe?

Abstract

This paper investigates whether EU research programmes have led to innovations in European social research. This is based on an assessment of a group of EU‐funded projects on the changing nature of work in Europe. EU‐funded projects have contributed to the creation of a European social space for European researchers, but at the cost of consolidating English as the lingua franca of European social research. Such projects tend to involve heterogeneous research actors and are oriented towards policy issues. To some extent they are therefore representative of a ‘Mode 2’ form of knowledge production. More clearly, they have ensured that social research about Europe is no longer simply comparative research. The new EU Sixth Framework Programme on RTD will undermine many of these achievements through its focus on conventional definitions of ‘excellence’ and the insistence on large‐scale research instruments.

Notes

Accompanying measure ‘Infowork’. Contract no. HPHA‐CT‐2001‐60007; project webpage: www.tcd.ie/erc/infowork. The five projects in the cluster include Flexcot, NESY, Servemploi, SOWING and WHOLE. Further details of the projects can be accessed through the ‘Infowork’ website.

Accompanying measure ‘European Dimension’ (co‐ordinator: Michael Kuhn, Universität Bremen), project webpage: www.eu‐dimension.uni‐bremen.de. The core of this project is a series of ‘Group Discussions’ with a sample of co‐ordinators of TSER and IHP projects.

European Dimension Group Discussion, 2,153.

The final reports of Flexcot, NESY, Servemploi and WHOLE, which all list publications based on the project, were reviewed. No such list of dissemination activities is contained in the final report of SOWING.

Project webpage: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/unireg

In my own university the official concerned with IPR told a seminar that if we discovered something valuable, we must not talk about it until we have patented it.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the ‘European Dimension’ discussions (e.g. GD2,185; GD2,186).

European Dimension discussions GD2,8; GD2,156.