Who is ready for the results? Reflections on the multivoicedness of useful research

Abstract

How is the usefulness of research assessed as university research becomes more and more commodified? The question is addressed through an analysis of how the results of a particular research project were received in a large private company that had provided the main funding for a research project on gender and top management, a project based on poststructuralist approaches. The ways in which the company received the research took many forms. There were differing responses from the organization's human resource staff, the managers and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) depending on their varying interests, hierarchical positions and individual investments in specific organizational moves and individual careers. People in different positions in the organization applied elements from rationalist and constructionist discourses and combined them in ways that were neither coherent nor fixed. The article offers a complex analysis of the many and still shifting forces involved in the recipients' assessments of usefulness. It poses questions for researchers and university management concerning researchers' current working conditions and the protection of research integrity.

Notes

1. One could of course discuss this subject as Mode II research, and rush into the traditional questions of implementation and (researcher) resistance. However, our counsel is, instead, to learn how to ‘read’ out the multilayered constellations that research findings collide with, and to ask how new narratives are liveable across varied stakeholders.

2. The human resource (HR) staff work for the optimization of the ‘human resources’ (personnel, competences) of the organization. Optimization can be enacted by technologies such as balanced score cards, testing and teambuilding.

3. For research on the lack of women at the organizational top level see for instance Kanter 1977; Adler 2001; Czarniawska‐Joerges and Höpfl 2002; Carter et al. 2003; Catalyst 2003, 2004; Ding and Choroenwong 2004; Holgerson et al. 2004; Kossowska et al. 2005).

4. This subheading is inspired by the title of a government report, ‘New ways between research and the private sector – from thought to invoice’, Danish Government 2003 (our translation).

5. This practice till now has been a cornerstone of applied research, which in Denmark for the most part has been conducted in specific research institutions. But today external funding (and thereby invoice‐initiated research) is turning into a fundamental principle of other parts of the Nordic universities too, involving not only the natural sciences but to a still larger degree also social sciences and the humanities.

6. Danmarks Erhvervsforskningsakademi means the Danish Business Research Institute.

7. ‘Regeringen’ means the Danish Government.

8. See Scheurich (2002) for this argumentation against ‘complexing’ analyses in relation to another axis of power, namely white racism.

9. As we write in Staunæs and Søndergaard 2004. Here we have translated some of the sentences into English.

10. Subjectification is the two‐sided process through which humans come into existence as subjects: subjected to discursive power and acting subjectively through the very same power.