Martin Benninghoff

Policy learning in Swiss research policy--the case of the National Centres of Competence in Research

Abstract The article treats the problem of “rationality” in learning processes in research policies. The underlying hypothesis is that there are contemporary efforts in research policy-making, which, against views in organisational sociology like “bounded rationality” or “garbage-can”, endeavour to “rationalise” the process of decision-making in research policies. This hypothesis is worked out by taking one example, the setting-up of the “National Centres of Competence in Research” (NCCR) in Switzerland and analyse the processes that have contributed to the acceptance of this funding measure. Our finding is that Switzerland has introduced some “rationalising devices” but that these devices are still insufficiently institutionalised and can be further elaborated. In addition, it is made clear that goal-oriented problem-solving and interests are closely intertwined and cannot be dissociated from another. This may have distorting effects on the rationality of the learning process. It is, nevertheless, a necessary condition in order to learn at all.

Changing Models and Patterns of Higher Education Funding: Some Empirical Evidence

Although the role of universities in the knowledge society is increasingly significant, there remains a severe lack of systematic quantitative evidence at the micro-level, with virtually all policy discussion based on country level statistics or case studies. This book redresses the balance by examining original data from universities in six European countries – Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Interdependency management in universities: a case study

There remains uncertainty in scientific discussions regarding the governance of universities in new public management regimes in terms of who actually ‘rules’ in the university. Apparently, a strengthened management leadership is confronted with continuing elements of academic self-regulation and professional autonomy in knowledge production and diffusion. Organisational and academic rationales coexist in todays management of universities. This article endeavours to clarify some of the ambiguities pertaining to the coexistence of two authorities by demonstrating the working of ‘interdependency management’ that is taking place within universities. For this purpose, the authors have scrutinised research, teaching and recruitment policies in one Swiss university that is subject to such ambiguities. The study confirms existing research in that a command-and-control system is not applied. Policymaking in universities is instead based on a mix of negotiations in faculties that are taking place in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’, negotiated bargaining between faculties and leaders and occasional unilateral decisions of leaders. This mitigates latent conflicts between management and the academic community: strategic orientations of the university are generally accepted by the academic community while the academic community has influence on policy formulation and maintains defining powers over policy substance.

Highly Adaptable but Not Invulnerable: Necessary and Facilitating Conditions for Research in Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Evolutionary developmental biology is a highly variable scientific innovation because researchers can adapt their involvement in the innovation to the opportunities provided by their environment. On the basis of comparative case studies in four countries, we link epistemic properties of research tasks to three types of necessary protected space, and identify the necessary and facilitating conditions for building them. We found that the variability of research tasks made contributing to evolutionary developmental biology possible under most sets of authority relations. However, even the least demanding research depends on its acceptance as legitimate innovation by the scientific community and of purely basic research by state policy and research organisations. The latter condition is shown to become precarious.

Culture in Interaction: Academic Identities in Laboratory Work

The present contribution is based on an ongoing ethnography of laboratory work in a physics and a genetics laboratory, respectively. The proposed ethnographic account addresses “academic identities” as a sociological issue by turning it into the following empirical question: how, if at all, are academic identities relevant issues for laboratory work? The curious neglect of that question in both higher education and ethnographic studies provides the reason for doing so. The contribution, then, provides the building blocks of an appropriate answer to the raised question. Firstly, it discusses, from the ethnographic perspective of laboratory studies, the recent literature in higher education studies on the topic of academic identities. The reliance of that literature on interview accounts will be of particular interest. Secondly, the detailed analysis of differently situated activities will allow us to examine how laboratory members themselves achieve and exhibit the social organization of their laboratory, their working activities and respective identities. For instance, laboratory members’ use of membership categorizations and their formulation of ordinary rules of conduct will be examined as two related ways of exhibiting the social organization of scientific practice. In conclusion, we will discuss the analysis with respect to the methodological issues it solves and the empirical results it provides. A preliminary remark as to our methodology may be nevertheless suitable. Certainly, it will prove to be difficult to describe scientific practice from within its disciplinary relevancies via participant observation (especially if one lacks adequate training, as we do). That difficulty as such, however, does not challenge participant observation as a working solution to figure out what an appropriate answer to the stated question may look like: an answer that is detailed so as to recover laboratory work in its practitioners’ relevancies, among which, perhaps, their respective identities of academic membership.

Institutional Conditions and Changing Research Practices in Switzerland

Abstract This article analyses in what way Swiss academic institutions have had a favourable or unfavourable influence on changing research practices by following developments in four scientific areas – Bose-Einstein Condensates, Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Large-Scale Assessments in education research and Computerised Corpus Linguistics. Based on empirical evidence, we argue that overall a number of institutional conditions have had a positive influence on the decisions of scientists to dare a switch to a new scientific field. One finds, however, also differences in the working of these institutional conditions leading to quicker or slower developments of the four selected scientific areas.

La métropolisation des universités en Suisse. Le cas du bassin lémanique

Avec l’exemple de la cooperation interuniversitaire dans le bassin lemanique (cantons de Geneve et de Vaud), cet article vise a montrer comment les universites en Suisse ont ete en quelque sorte «reterritorialisees » dans des espaces metropolitains/ regionaux (supra-cantonaux) et nationaux au cours de ces vingt dernieres annees dans le double contexte des transformations des sciences et des dynamiques territoriales a l’oeuvre a differentes echelles. Les incitations financieres de l’Etat central (la Confederation) ont joue un role determinant dans les recompositions territoriales decoulant de cette politique universitaire.