This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speakers: Prof. Dr. Anna Kosmützky & M.A Sarah-Rebecca Kienast, Leibniz Research Centre Science and Society (LCSS), Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

There is much evidence that universities as organizations feel increasingly pressured to demonstrate their “excellence”. To this end, they compete with other universities for outstanding ranking positions and top researchers, excellent students and research, and related resources for conducting such research. What is competed for—internationally and nationally—might differ, though, according to the institutional configuration of higher-education systems.

In our talk, we focus on German higher-education organizations as a case of a public and primarily state-funded higher-education system. In recent decades, third-party research funding has become an important excellence indicator within the German system, and an ever-larger share of research funding is awarded competitively. Specific third-party funding sources have an exceptionally strong reputation, and related collaborative research projects and international collaborations are also increasingly seen as organizational excellence indicators.

In this context, German universities as organizations now aim at such particularly prestigious third-party funds for collaborative research. Their competitive organizational aims contrast significantly with the traditional perspective that sees research activities and research collaborations as self-organized activities of individual scholars based on individual scholars’ interests regarding selecting themes, forms, scope, and collaboration partners. It points to tensions between universities as organizations and their individual university members.

Our talk discusses such tensions when universities try to facilitate their members’ (collaborative) research activities. What kind of activities and measures do German universities use to facilitate collaborative research activities? How do such activities and efforts deal with and resolve the tension between organizational aims and the aims of individual scholars? What are the limitations of such activities of universities as organizational actors?

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