There is much debate on how the government will pick up the pieces after the recent rioting and looting in London and other cities. But what do recent events mean for the direction of academic research? Phil Ward, Research Funding Manager at the University of Kent, considers how Research Councils have historically focused on contemporary social challenges, and invites you to comment on the possible ‘unshackling’ of academics from political research.
As someone who has spent a good deal of time on the funding block, I have always been impressed at how the Research Councils are able to jump on political bandwagons. Of course, they wouldn’t see at it as such. They would see it as providing research that will answer societies concerns.
After 9/11 and 7/7, it was all about answering the threat from terrorism, particularly Islamic terrorism. Around the same time as Kyoto, it was all about ‘Living with Environmental Change’. In the most recent Delivery Plans, all the talk was informed by the 2008 economic crisis, of ‘enabl[ing] the development of robust government and private sector strategies to ensure sustainable growth’ (ESRC Delivery Plan 2011-15).
Sometimes they take this too far, and the AHRC has had its fingers burnt by appearing to not only jump on the ‘Big Society’ bandwagon, but sit beside the driver and do his bidding.
So, following the recent looting and rioting, how long will it be before a call for proposals is issued around gangs, riots and criminality? My guess is six months to a year, perhaps earlier, and perhaps shoehorned into the ESRC’s ‘Influencing Behaviour’ or ‘Vibrant and Fair Society’ strands.
However, there is a warning to be heeded about the dangers inherent in adjusting your research funding policy in light of current affairs. Remember all the funding that went on terrorism in the mid-noughties? Has it had any real effect? Are we any closer to understanding or preventing terrorism or acts of carnage? Or has the world yawned and moved on, naturally, to other issues? The events in Norway show that individuals or groups can still kill indiscriminately, and that ‘Global Uncertainties’ are no nearer resolution.
Whilst I accept the rationale behind the Research Councils’ wish to meet contemporary challenges, and of the push to integrate university research with the wider society through the impact agenda, perhaps the time has come to recognise that following the curve of current events is somewhat fruitless. Should the Research Councils now unshackle academics so that they can pursue whatever research is good rather than whatever research is political? I welcome your comments below.
This blog post was originally published on the Research Fundermentals blog.
For more debate on the London riots head to the LSE Politics and Policy Blog.
Why can’t they do both?
They can do both, Pravin, but when funding is limited there inevitably has to be a decision about what is a priority. My point was really is it worth ring fencing (or, perhaps, highlighting the wish to see) funding for the issues de jour? Or does this encourage ultimately fruitless gameplaying by academics to shoehorn their research into whatever the latest priority is, and detract from genuinely curiosity driven research that might provide real answers.
An interesting and timely post, that really does help to lift the curtain on some of the tensions and difficulties around research impact. To try to respond to Frootle’s call, and move the discussion along, there’s a couple of different ways to my mind that you can look at a Research Council that responds to events.
The first is that it is a very political process of bandwagon jumping. You’ve rightly highlighted the problems that this can bring for Research Councils when it is seen that the research funding is being used to frame research problems in particular kinds of ways.
In particular, there is problems when that framing is contentious or fits with a particular political agenda. So it would have been a real problem with the AHRC Big Society row if AHRC had only decided to fund research that assumed that public sector interventions were a problem (the ‘dead hand of the state’ view), and voluntary interventions are inherently good. That would have framed research in a way that served particular political interests and agendas, and academics would have been rightly worried to go anywhere near that.
But on the other hand, the fact that these riots have happened makes these communities genuinely interesting laboratories for particular kinds of social research. I do realise that it sounds clinical to say that, but I am saying that from the perspective of someone who has lived their whole life within two miles of the Meadow Well estate, and watched after the Summer 1991 riots how academics sought bigger answers to important questions as part of a process of rebuilding the estate and the lives of its residents.
Particular forces and tensions have been unleashed that mean that they can be used to answer genuinely different kinds of question around social exclusion and globalisation. And you’d be stupid as a sociological researcher or urbanist or whatever not to think about the methodological implications of this, particularly in terms of the web 2.0 record that now exists of the shocking events, and the way that these technologies changed people’s perception of themselves, their situatedness in society and communities, their relationships, duties, responsibilities to others and norms.
I don’t know how the terrorism research funding played out, but I have seem some genuinely interesting research projects funded by RCUK members around questions of identity, belonging, community and technology. These were answering profound disciplinary questions using the changed situation as a laboratory, with the events almost as a kind of disclosing solution that brings particular social sub-currents to the surface and provides a way to explore them.
My view would be – and I appreciate how utopian this is in the pressure chamber of the current funding situation is – is that it is possible to react to these challenges in a measured and useful way. What you need is an interplay of academics and research councils and organisations like Rowntree to sit down and define a broad agenda that allows the particular to match to the theoretical, and the political to the universal and scholarly. That broad agenda can then be turned into a funding programme which needs to have space for both blue-skies research as well as translational and Impact activity.
Thanks for this detailed and thoughtful comment, Paul. It’s interesting what you say about the RCUK-funded research on terrorism. That’s heartening, and I’m glad that it did have a positive effect. My original post was intended to be open: I really didn’t know if RCUK funding had had any effect on our knowledge or understanding of terrorism. However, whilst it was ‘genuinely interesting’, has it moved society/government on in tackling or preventing terrorism, which is surely what the RCUK wanted when it issued the calls? Once again, that is an open question: I don’t know the answer, though (as I suggest) there will always be the problem of fanatics such as Breivik that will be difficult to pre-empt.
It’s been interesting reading the comments and analyses following the riots. I think you’re right: aside from the human, commercial and social costs, they do provide an interesting ‘laboratory’ for understanding society, and the effects of social developments and government policy in the last 30 years. Yet my point still stands: should RCUK issue a specific call, or should the best, most interesting, most viable research be funded, regardless of topic? If a proposal comes forward on the riots that asks interesting questions and has the potential to produce useful and informative results, so be it. But it should be up against proposals in all areas, and shouldn’t, I think, get special treatment.
Hi there Phil,
Thanks for your clarification and response, and I think it is a very interesting question to ask, to say what would be the effect of an RCUK research programme on the riots on the quality of the UK public research base. The blog seems keen on a dialogue, and I am thinking about these issues today, so here a comment in response.
Firstly, I think that undoubtedly there would be ‘brownie points’ for RCUK, and that is clearly important in the longer term, because the impact agenda is going to have to evolve beyond simple spin-out stories to the wider value of being an intelligent society.
I was pleasantly surprised for example to see that Routledge today have put a selection of their research into ‘riots’ broadly defined on-line, free of charge (here http://t.co/hdzZ70x). So if a commercial publisher see profile advantage in engaging with riots in research, I think RCUK can win themselves positive coverage – at least in the short-run, with a riots research programme.
But then there are two other effects that I think will only become clear if RCUK decide to go for it. The first is the direct effect on academics. It is clear that the best academic research does not emerge in a vacuum, it responds to opportunities to move forward, which may be the best research questions, but equally they might be funding opportunities.
So a riots research programme might be a rallying point for the best researchers in a set of fields to apply their minds to this kind of question, rather than giving funds to mediocre researchers who would not be fundable in the absence of the programme.
You then have to try and make a quality judgement about the effect of one researcher or research team doing two different projects, rather than between two entirely different projects. It’s hard to judge whether in the absence of the research programme what these individuals would have otherwise done would have been better or worse than that research.
I think it is important not to make the assumption here that you are necessarily going to get lower quality research, or indeed opportunistic research proposals from mediocre researchers. The skills required to get funding and the competitiveness of funding mean that anything that is funded under the peer review system has to meet a minimum quality threshold. And that’s a high threshold, so a call might help direct the best researchers to address a particularly important field.
But then I can see two further possible negative scenarios, which are inter-related. The first is the crowding out effect, so what are the problems which emerge in which funding proposals that are excellent but not about riots get rejected. Does a failure to follow these problems weaken the UK science base as a whole? And the answer is, the more get rejected, the more severe the impact, but below a certain level, it’s probably not so bad.
That is a serious concern, but it is also important not to imagine that these other proposals have emerged in an ivory tower, and that somehow makes them better than ‘riots’ research. All research problems are collectively defined in a field or discipline involving academic and non-academic problem-owners. So there is no guarantee that these rejected proposals will be more blue skies than riots research. But it might be, as an empirical outcome.
The second is the wider question of confidence in the academic community of the role played by funding councils. A desire for independent research is clearly an important element of the way academics regard their professional identity. So it could be that a riots research programme creates a general feeling of depression amongst researchers, as part of the ennui evident around the wider ‘Impact’ agenda. Again, that ‘depression’ effect would remain to be empirically demonstrated, and its scope would partly be a function of the details of the programme.
So in summary, I am not sure you can say ex ante whether a riots research programme would be good or bad on balance, but from this analysis, you can take some measures to make it as good as possible, including
– making sure Peer Review and excellence (rather than sandpits or workshops) are the basis for funding,
– that good researchers are funded (so you are using the programme to direct excellent research, not rewarding mediocre research),
– ensuring there is space for heterodox research perspectives are funded, and
– network/ seminar funding to ensure that there is wide participation and critique of the funded research by the wider academic community.