Abstract
While at the top of universities, strategic research management has evolved from facilitation to become more directive, partly inspired by New Public Management approaches, and the need for universities to profile themselves, at the bottom level of research groups and other research performing entities, the orientation and resource mobilization is towards scientific fields and domains of application, which allows them a degree of autonomy. The intermediary layer of deans and directors of (big) scientific institutes is becoming increasingly important. A striking example are the Centres of Research and Excellence, actually a new type of entity in the strategic research landscape.
The evolution of research management is traced for each of these levels and their interactions, in three universities in the Netherlands, and three universities in South Africa. They represent the three main types of universities in terms of their resource dependency strategy: classical-elite universities, entrepreneurial universities and niche universities. One finding is that the classical-elite universities and the entrepreneurial universities appear to converge, because their research groups and centres operate on the same market of strategic research.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, scientists (and physicists emphatically) could see their chairs or groups as temporary settlements of an international scientific community (cf. Rip 1985).
- 2.
This heritage is visible in how present-day attempts at the top to be more strategic, in terms of performance management and responsiveness to external needs, still rely heavily on documenting of what happens.
- 3.
We use the possessive pronoun “their” on purpose: there is often a sense of identification, and a drive to make “their” university successful. At the intermediate level, deans can identify with the university, while directors of (big) research centres and institutes almost always identify with the research domain(s) the centre/institute works in.
- 4.
There is a large literature, often referring to the influential notion of a new (second) mode of knowledge production introduced by Gibbons et al. (1994), see Rip (2000) and Hessels and Van Lente (2008). For other attempts at the diagnosis of new modes of knowledge production and regimes, see Rip (2004) and Bonaccorsi (2008).
- 5.
Both Jansen et al. and Enders et al. (this volume) address the implementation question and argue, drawing on respondent’s experiences, that “life at the bottom” tends to continue somewhat independently from measures at the top, in the sense that there is adaptation on paper, but they are able to protect their ongoing work from interference (up to a point).
- 6.
- 7.
We noted a worldwide “return to excellence” in the late nineties after the move towards relevance which started in the 1970s (Hackmann and Rip 2000).
- 8.
It is not really possible to disentangle NPM as an external driver from the use of instruments by top managers that seek to ‘modernise’ university without attendant ideological trappings, because the understanding of a ‘modern’ university is predicated on NPM assumptions of efficiency and effectiveness (cf. also Enders et al. this volume).
- 9.
Its culture of top-down management (from Potchefstroom’s Afrikaaner/Calvinist roots) provided the management with space to be interventionist.
- 10.
See Rip (2011) for an analysis of such centres of excellence and relevance, and how they might/will “burst the seams” of the modern university.
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Rip, A., Kulati, T. (2015). Multilevel Dynamics in Universities in Changing Research Landscapes. In: Jansen, D., Pruisken, I. (eds) The Changing Governance of Higher Education and Research. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09677-3_6
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