Performing size. On the effects of ‘critical mass’ in science

ABSTRACT

Creating critical mass has become a cornerstorne of science policy on both national and transnational levels. It suggests that once a certain size is reached, exponential growth or accelerated change will occur. In reconstructing theories, policies and practices associated with critical mass, the paper traces the image of critical mass as a size that performs in different dimensions. It takes the German Excellence Initiative, a state programme for the competitive distribution of research funds, as a policy intended to create critical mass. That the Excellence Initiative did not trigger exponential growth but organisational change points to qualitative effects of size. On the basis of case studies, it is reconstructed how Excellence-funded graduate schools and others perform size. They accumulate prestige, build-up research capacity, reproduce ‘schools of thought’ or provide for research personnel. In doing so, the schools are not a critical mass for exponential growth but normalise sizing practices in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical mass
• organisational change
• performative effects
• Excellence Initiative
• graduate schools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 European Commission: What is ERA? (https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/era_de#what).

2 Transl. BMBF (2019) Clusters4Future (https://www.bmbf.de/de/zukunftscluster-initiative-9195.html).

3 Transl. BMBF (2016) Nutrition for a healthy life (https://www.bmbf.de/foerderungen/bekanntmachung-1145.html).

4 Transl. BMBF (2014) Trinational cooperation in epigenomics (https://www.gesundheitsforschung-bmbf.de/de/trilaterale-zusammenarbeit-deutschland-frankreich-kanada-3420.php).

5 From a linguistic perspective, the use of a quantifier like ‘many’ suggests that people behaving in a certain way can be counted. However, when ‘much’ is used as a quantifier, it is related to nouns that cannot be counted. If such an unspecified entity is related to other entities, it first needs to be rendered commensurable through the construction of common properties that can be quantified and measured against a common standard (Espeland and Stevens 1998). The growing use of metrics in higher education is one example for this development.

6 Also, organizations are not considered as actors in diffusion processes though sociological new institutionalism (which is also popular in economics) has demonstrated their pivotal role (Strang and Meyer 1994).

7 In line with this, critical mass plays a role in court decisions on anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies in the US. Critical mass also figures prominently in diversity discourse.

8 German science policy supports the appointment of female professors with a special programme. Since 2007, altogether 570 professorships exclusively for women have been funded. Though the share of female professors increased faster at the funded universities, which might be indicative of critical mass, still only every fourth professor at German universities is female. The evaluationacknowledged that the programme has raised the awareness for gender-related issues rather than changed structural inequalities (CEWS 2017). Data on the Excellence Initiative shows that the share of female professors grew faster at the funded universities, yet had initially started from a lower level (Bloch et al. 2021).

9 The 94 group was founded in response to the creation of the Russell Group and had in the beginning 17 small research-intensive universities as members. It dissolved in 2013.

10 Transl. Excellence Agreement (Exzellenzvereinbarung) between the federal and the Land governments, June 18, 2005, Preamble.

11 In 2004, when the Excellence Initiative was first brought into the discussion by the then in power social democratic party, its first secretary O. Scholz popularized the notion of elite universities with the vision to have Germans again being awarded Nobel Prizes (‘Wir wünschen uns wieder Nobelpreisträger’, interview with Olaf Scholz, Süddeutsche Zeitung January 8, 2004).

12 In the German federal system, the 16 Länder are politically responsible for their Land universities. The federal government is only allowed to provide for extra, project-based funding (though this has been relaxed for the successor programme Excellence Strategy, which is financed on a permanent basis). The Excellence Initiative, therefore, had to be negotiated with the Land ministries in such a way that all 16 Länder could at least hope to profit from it. However, in three rounds of the competition, three Länder received no funding at all from the Excellence Initiative. This, in turn, was hailed as a triumph of academic standards over policies of redistribution that are characteristic of German federalism. In fact, for other competitive programmes such as the Pact for Quality in Teaching, a specific formula guarantees each Land a certain share of resources, depending on its size (notwithstanding the fact that proposals additionally must pass a competitive selection procedure).

13 Hicks and Katz argue with regard to the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that “any resource distribution that truly mirrored the distribution of research performance would be untenable in the public realm because of its extreme degree of inequality” (Hicks 2012, 147). Likewise, the overall budget of the Excellence Initiative (2007–2017) is with 4.6 billion Euro quite small when compared to an equity-oriented programme such as the Higher Education Pact 2020, which provides 38.5 Billion Euro for additional study places (2007–2023). The extra funds distributed through the Excellence Initiative made up for only four percent of the research budget of the university sector (IEKE 2016, 11).

14 The number of graduate schools without funding through the Excellence Initiative or the German Research Foundation increased more than five times from 91 (2006) to 516 (2014) (Bloch 2018).

15 The Bologna Process had legitimised and formalised doctoral education as the third cycle of studies in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) but not provided incentives for such a change.

16 The case studies involved 54 problem-centered interviews with professors, administration, postdoctoral and doctoral researchers, as well as the observation of events such as meetings of the selection committee, research classes, retreats, graduation ceremonies and guest lectures.

17 One professor refers in the interview to the curriculum as a ‘boot camp’ for new graduate students.

18 The idea of ‘schools of thought’ (Denkschulen) goes back to the work of Ludwig Fleck. According to Fleck, the collective character of research is not limited to the division of academic labor but is also related to the active induction of ‘thought collectives’. Etzemüller describes this process with reference to the biography of historian Werner Conze: To make himself known in the field, ‘he set his first students to work on social history, founded his own institute and an influential research group’ (transl. Etzemüller 2013, 190). Graduate schools can then be seen as a modern method to establish and spread a certain ‘school of thought’.