The Social Politics of Research Collaboration

Gabriele Griffin, Katarina Hamberg, Britta Lundgren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135091705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The past two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on large and interdisciplinary research configurations such as research networks, and centers of excellence including those in Social Sciences and Humanities research. Little research has been undertaken, however, to understand how these new large research structures that are being called forth by research funders and research/higher education institutions alike function socially, and what the impact of operating within such structures is on those working within, and those working with, them. Past writers have discussed the "intra-agentic" operations of human researchers and the material laboratory environment in its broadest sense. This volume is concerned with the social politics of research collaboration in relation to six key positions: leaders of large research formations, leaders of sub-projects within large collaborations, participant researchers, junior and early career researchers, advisory board members, and those who look in from the outside such as researchers who are un-funded. It explores the mostly unacknowledged but critical aspect of social structures in research, discussing issues such as struggles over leadership styles, the marginalization of researchers working cross-disciplinarily, power hierarchies and intellectual ownership, and the silencing of dissent in research.

1 Introduction

Gabriele Griffin, with Katarina Hamberg and Britta Lundgren

[An EU project co-ordinator] explained that working with partners, not only from other countries, but also from other streams [within his discipline], allowed him to extricate himself from the national scientific community, which is ‘extremely conservative and frozen, and (confined to) small circles and little mafia schools’ (Kuhn and Remøe 2005: 128).

The highly charged vocabulary used in the quote above points to one of the many reasons why we embarked on this volume, namely the complex and difficult nature of the sociality of research that all research entails, and research collaboration makes particularly apparent. ‘Small circles’ and ‘mafia schools’ are one way in which researchers may describe their experiences of being an insider or an outsider within their ‘home’ research environment—what they articulate through this is the notion of a set of social relations that contour and circumscribe the possibilities they have in the conduct of their research. This circumscription is structured through relations of power, of dependency, of loyalty, of employment, of friendship, of enmity—and a host of other factors that are rarely discussed in the context of research collaboration because of the long tradition of viewing scientific enquiry as dis- or un-invested. Pierre Bourdieu (2004: 68–69), for example, vigorously defends scientific endeavor in terms of its properties of closure, and the struggle for legitimacy in terms of dominance of a specific scientific representation of ’the real.’ But for all his talk of scientists he disavows notions such as ’calculated strategies of self-aggrandizement’ as part of researchers’ motivations. These strategies point to the encounter between scientists as socio-emotional entities in their research collaboration. At certain points in his texts for Bourdieu, in a sense ‘field’, or the scientific domain dominates and he pooh-poohs those who suggest that more might be at stake than the pure scientiscity of any research work. However, as—but not just because—research has become increasingly bound up with public (and increasingly also, private) funding, with the needs of the nation-state, with audit cultures, with commercial interest and questions of ‘ownership’ of knowledge in the form of patents and copyright, scientific enquiry has also been revealed more and more as structured through social relations that for that very reason benefit from scrutiny. This is actually as evident in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) Homo Academicus as it is in the extraordinary website Beyond the Academic Façade: A Virtual Tour of Old McGill (at http://ericsquire.com/tour/tour.htm, accessed 6/9/2012). This website states in its second paragraph that ‘This virtual tour introduces some of the people and interests who shaped McGill. You will be challenged to consider how the university actually mediates power.’ The website thus immediately introduces the concept of power into a presentation of the ‘interests’ that shape the university. ‘Interests’ are not disembodied entities—on the contrary, they are socially mediated concerns. And such socially mediated concerns, also known as ‘vested interests’, exercise their regulating function in research collaborations as much as in all other aspects of academic work. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem, as the McGill website implies, occurs when such interests are not declared or not discussed, when there is a disjuncture between what appears to be the case on the surface and what the underlying actualities are, or when the way in which such interests are managed is by implicitly or explicitly disavowing them. The feminist movement,¹ for instance, underwent long and bitter struggles because its ideational disposition that all women were oppressed, and that sisterhood was global denied differences among women and forced a sociality of equality that left the grievances of those who considered themselves—and were considered by others—to be different, or differently oppressed, or fighting for different kinds of changes, unaddressed (see Liinason in this volume for a version of that problematic as it pertains to junior researchers in research collaborations).

Differences among researchers become of course more apparent when researchers work together, when, as Bourdieu (2004: 42) argues, ‘contacts between sciences’ as these occur in interdisciplinary research collaborations, for example, function as ‘occasions when implicit dispositions have to be made explicit.’ Importantly, here Bourdieu highlights the confluence of ‘disciplinary habitus’ and ‘trajectory’ or the individual researcher’s social and educational history (2004: 42) as important for understanding the differences among researchers that one encounters, and that manifest themselves in research collaborations.

One of the developments in social sciences and humanities research over the past two decades or so has been the increasing emphasis on large research configurations such as research networks, centers of excellence and, in the European Commission context, so-called IPs or integrated projects. All national research councils now put out calls for applications for such structures. These are premised both on the idea of reducing administrative costs through concentrating research administration (and indeed displacing this onto the new large research structures) and on generating research excellence through encouraging research collaboration. Such collaboration is often, though not invariably, encouraged to be ‘interdisciplinary’, and a rapidly increasing body of literature now deals with the issue of interdisciplinarity, its meanings and efficacies (e.g. Thompson Klein 1990, Weingart and Stehr 2000, Coleman 2002, Moran 2010).

Little research has been undertaken, however, to understand how these new large research structures that are being called forth by research funders and research/higher education institutions alike function socially, and what the impact of operating within such structures is on those working within, and those working with, them. Research by writers such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), Latour (2005) and John Law and Annemarie Mol (2002) has discussed the ‘intra-agentic’ operations—to borrow a term from Karen Barad (2007)—of human researchers and the material laboratory environment in its broadest sense, but this work which deals in part with agency in the so-called posthuman world does not discuss the specific positionalities and the issues that arise from these for those who work within large research structures. Collaboration is also, in fact, something of a novelty for certain disciplines, especially for humanities researchers in subjects such as law and literature, which have traditionally fostered and relied upon the lone scholar. It therefore has become necessary to understand the processes and effects of large research structures and their participants, and to prepare future researchers for work in such contexts.

There are a range of articles dealing with various specific aspects of research collaboration in particular disciplinary contexts such as J. Sanchez and R. Olivares’s (2011) ‘Problem Solving and Collaboration Using Mobile Serious Games’ (Computers and Education 57/3: 1943–1952), or APRE/SME’s (2010) ‘Supporting SME-Academia Collaboration in the Area of Biomedical Research in FP/…’ (Journal of Biotechnology 150/1: S108). Additionally, there are also a number of articles dealing with collaboration, impact, and productivity such as S. Lee and B. Bozeman’s (2005) ‘The Impact of Research Collaboration on Scientific Productivity’ (Social Studies of Science 33/4: 673–702), J. Li, C. Zhou, and E. J. Zajac’s ‘Control, Collaboration and Productivity in International Joint Ventures: Theory and Evidence’ (Strategic Management Journal 30/8: 865–884), or R. Leimu and J. Koricheva’s ‘Does Scientific Collaboration Increase the Impact of Ecological Articles?’ (BioScience 55/5: 438–443). But that work does not itself engage with the structured social dimensions of research collaboration, which tend to be taken for granted rather than interrogated in these texts. This volume then seeks to fill a currently substantial gap in the literature on research by considering the ways in which the social positioning of researchers within large research configurations (i.e., their ‘role’ in such structures) impacts on the functioning of these configurations, and of necessity and by implication, on the work done within them. It is intended for postgraduates and academics, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, who are going to be or are already involved in research collaboration. Research collaboration is an area of academic work which is at present wholly underaddressed in the relevant methodological literature even though the research funding trend is increasingly geared towards the expectation that the dominant research mode is, or will become, collaborative research. Indeed, the European Metris Report (2009: 28–29) identified the project as the dominant form of research organization in social sciences and humanities research. Additionally, it is also the case that the last ten years or so have seen an increasing emphasis on research training and transferable skills training as an integral part of the postgraduate research experience. Research councils now demand the explicit articulation of research training, and that includes professional development for academics, as part of funding scholarships. Despite this, there is little to prepare postgraduates and academics for the collaborative research they are expected to participate in and, frequently, to lead. This volume is therefore also intended to fill this particular gap, and to facilitate discussions about how research collaborations operate at different levels of engagement from being a participant in a project to leading multiple researchers, and what is at stake in engaging in such collaboration.

The volume is structured around two intersecting axes: a) researcher positions and b) thematic issues that attach to (but may not be exclusive to) those positions. We identified six key researcher positions that we thought were common in many forms of research collaboration and which are discussed in the subsequent chapters. They are:

1. Project leaders for large research groupings
2. Leaders of subprojects or of thematic subareas
3. Project participants
4. Junior/early career researchers in large projects
5. Advisory board members (e.g. in international reference groups or similarly termed committees within large research groups)
6. Those looking in from the outside (e.g. those not financed, those not covered by the selected topics, those excluded from collaborations for some reason, etc.)

The discussion of these researcher positions intersects with a discussion of a related series of themes as indicated below in the brief discussion of the chapters in this volume. The first five of the researcher positions seem to us fairly obvious; the one of those looking in from the outside is perhaps less so. But it is one that is not only becoming increasingly common as research funding is more and more concentrated in particular institutions and around specific research centers or clusters; it also exerts considerable influence on the research world. In a parallel volume published in this Routledge series, titled The Emotional Politics of Research Collaboration (Griffin et al. 2013), Annelie Bränström-Öhman, for instance, discusses the difficulties a researcher may have when she is awarded a grant but a colleague who has applied for the same grant is not. In a similar vein, some years ago one of us was told that a group of researchers had won a large European Commission grant but that—following the award of the grant—the Russian researcher involved had withdrawn, apparently because his head of department had said that since he was the only one with such a grant, it was not fair on the other staff members and therefore this researcher was made to withdraw.² This, of course, meant not only that certain kinds of data would not be gathered but also that it placed that researcher outside the research context in which he could have had a place. Yet others are never (even) invited to the table. In a bitter article in 2011, for example, Elena Tarasheva investigated the extent to which East European scholars were able to publish in ‘international journals’—meaning Western journals. Her sense was that in the context of critical discourse analysis there were ‘insular schools of thought which avoid each other and carve separate niches for themselves, while heading in the same direction’ (2011: 207) such that Western authors do not cite Eastern researchers’ work. Her plea was, in part, for greater degrees of collaboration but also for the recognition of the academic capital that East European researchers bring to the table.

The processes through which a researcher becomes involved in research collaboration may seem opaque, especially of course to those outside of such collaborations. And, indeed, such processes are rarely discussed, possibly and not least because these processes are social, a function of whom one knows and what their standing in the academic community is, how likely one thinks the person in question is to agree to collaboration and on what terms, etc. The process of becoming involved in research collaborations is thus not straightforwardly a function of identifying some form of disembodied academic excellence or merit. These processes are also not often discussed because, as Nyhagen Predelli analyzes in this volume, the output-oriented ‘nature’ of research funding and research collaboration usually means that common difficulties and issues that researchers encounter in collaborations are downplayed or denied in researchers’ engagement with funders and often even when researchers engage with each other, because key to one’s professional career is being seen to be successful. This means that issues can only be addressed as ‘problems solved’, not as problems that one just manages to contain or, worse, has to live with or cannot deal with. The classic index of this is the researcher curriculum vitae, which is normally made up entirely of the successful outcomes of one’s endeavors—funding awarded, publications realized, etc.—not of the underlying processes and issues which fill the time leading to the outcome. Unsuccessful grant applications, articles rejected, promotions denied, wrangles with colleagues and fellow researchers—all these experiences which occupy significant time in terms of effort as well as emotional and social labor—are erased from researchers’ curricula vitae, even as they shape researchers’ professional trajectories and habitus.

We have therefore called this volume The Social Politics of Research Collaboration not only because we want to engage overtly with the question of the social dimension of such collaboration but also because we regard that dimension as a ‘politics’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the ‘principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status’³, that is, a form of strategizing designed to achieve certain personal and professional ends which, however, often tend to remain unexplicated. Or, as Bourdieu (2004) puts it: ‘Every scientific choice … is also a social strategy of investment oriented towards maximization of the specific, inseparably social and scientific profit offered by the field and determined by the relationship between positions and dispositions’ (59).

A Question of Silence?

When we decided to work on this volume, and invited scholars to contribute, many replied positively but some also refused, citing—unsurprisingly in this age of accelerated and intensified demands on researchers’ time— work overload, the question whether or not contributing to a volume such as this would ‘count’ in their discipline-based research assessment, and, most revealingly perhaps, anxiety over how this work would be regarded by colleagues and professional friends. Two very senior colleagues stated repeatedly orally that they did not wish to be ‘written about’ or be the objects of this work, assuming, intriguingly, that they would be the objects of work published here. Finally, several of the actual contributors went through processes of consulting with—usually senior—colleagues about their chapters. These were not colleagues consulted for their expertise in what one might regard as the conventional scientific manner but rather, they were almost invariably researchers with whom the contributors had collaborated and whom they wanted to have ‘on side’ as they discussed the social politics of research collaboration. At least one potential contributor withdrew because she could not see how she could discuss being a participant in a collaborative project without writing about issues that she thought would incur the wrath, and hence withdrawal of patronage (in this instance actually matronge) of, the senior colleagues who were part of the collaboration she had originally intended to analyze.

We think this is both a telling and a sad state of affairs. For one thing, it indicates the extent to which the social, meaning implicitly and explicitly regulated relations between people, structures research and publications strategies. It certainly reveals that in Bourdieu’s (2004) terms, the ‘possession of a large quantity … of capital [such as having large grants] gives power over the field, and therefore over agents (relatively) less endowed with capital’ (34). Even in countries such as northwest European ones which consider themselves to be very egalitarian, professional inequalities rule researchers’ lives—as this volume amply demonstrates. The very fact that the potential contributor feared a detrimental effect of any publication on her career and professional relations suggests the need to investigate much more sustainedly how the social operates in research. Secondly, the potential participant’s withdrawal also indicates the effects of the neoliberal regime in universities and beyond, which reduce inter/actions and their effects to individuals. The kinds of issues our potential contributor wanted to deal with in her contributio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Leading Large Research Structures
• 2 Brave New World?: Leading Large Research Structures
• 3 Managing Differences: The Complexities of Leadership and Leadership Styles in Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration
• PART II Projects within Projects: Leading Subthemes/ Subresearch Projects
• 4 “Frontstage” and “Backstage” Managerial and Emotional Labor in a Comparative International Research Project
• 5 The Political Implications of Research Collaboration
• PART III Participating in a Large Research Structure
• 6 Negotiating with Neoliberal Instrumentalism: The Foreseeable and the Uncontrollable
• PART IV Being the Junior Researcher
• 7 Young Blood: The Social Politics of Research Collaboration from the Perspective of a Young Scholar
• 8 At the Interstices of Disciplines: Early Career Researchers and Research Collaborations across Boundaries
• PART V Being an Advisory Board Member
• 9 Critical Friends: A Contradiction in Terms?
• PART VI Looking In from the Outside
• 10 Boundary Work and Symbolic Capital Exchange: Knowledge Transfer in Multidisciplinary Research Revisited
• Contributors
• Index