Managing the development of a research culture

The first step might well be to ask researchers what sort of support they will actually require in order to make them more efficient and productive. Preliminary inquiries seem to suggest elements such as the following:

1. The ability to contact other researchers, attend conferences, join e-mail discussions, and visit other institutions, perhaps in official roles such as external examiner.
2. Sufficient time to read the work of other researchers, which in turn requires a reasonable timetable and workload, modern library facilities, and sufficient expenditure on journals and books.
3. Official institutional support and demonstrations of value, including encouraging publication, recognising the results of research and publication in the form of newsletters or official celebrations, including research and publication as a criterion for promotion , establishing good contacts with publishers and journal editors.

These are not difficult points to list or to understand, but the art lies in managing them. It does not always fit with the institution's other goals and manpower requirements. For example, expenses incurred may be difficult to recoup in the short term. Staff who might otherwise be researching are also required to teach students, assess the work, and sit in important service-type positions on various committees. In the latter role, they are expected to produce sufficient paperwork to permit the higher functions of the University to proceed, including providing inputs for the Quality Assurance Committee, for example.

In particular, encouraging researchers can be counter-productive. Those establishing successful research careers might be tempted to move on somewhere else, taking their grants with them, or establishing successful enterprises which may make them dangerously independent. Social Sciences and Humanities researchers often seem to develop a strange disdain for the more routine tasks required of them, and spend more and more of their time in research or in unprofitable collegiate activities. Sometimes, they find it hard to switch back from academic writing to the style required for management prose. In both cases, the university loses essential power over personnel, since the institution itself is no longer the sole source of income and prestige. As a result, management may find itself required to discourage a research culture.

Managers are well used to doing what might seem to be the opposite of common-sense, of course, but this is an occupational hazard, and we should not shrink from doing our duty. We can and should take the elements listed above, and convert them into a workable managerial perspective.

It follows that we should:

1. Try to prevent researchers from contacting other researchers in the ways described. One way to do this is to emphasise the competitive atmosphere in higher education where neighbouring institutions become rivals. A contact with rival institutions can easily be seen as breaching commercial confidence, bringing the host institution into disrepute, or offering comfort to the enemy. More simply, considerable obstacles can be put in the way of any would-be collaborator -- restricting conference attendance budgets, or making application procedures excessively bureaucratic, for example. E-mail is a problem, but strict policies governing the use to which officially provided facilities may be put can restrict abuse, such as exchanging pleasantries or discussing ideas with rivals.

2. Some obvious practices can be invoked here, employing the joined-up thinking characteristic of modern management. For example, expenditure is easy to squeeze, and done ideally on relatively obscure finance and resources committees, where managers dominate. Workload can be set at a suitable level invoking agreements with trade unions and past practice, and it is easy to overturn or raise levels subsequently. If staff are encouraged to design and run innovative courses, they can sometimes be persuaded to work hard on them on worse terms -- after all, they are professionals. Timetabling is often still perceived as a mystery best left to the experts, which makes it quite easy to provide pressure and choke points for any aspiring researchers. Student assessment can also be modified at the general level in order to increase the workload; coursework can be increased in length or frequency, for example, in the interests of modernization and current good practice. An atmosphere of constant crisis helps immeasurably, and most people can see how the solution will always involve extra unpaid work on their part.

3. In some ways this seems the easiest of all to manage, but managers are expected publicly to encourage employees, even researchers and academics. Encouraging a research culture is also a performance indicator that emerges now and then in government policy. As a result, directing complete hostility at researchers is unwise. A subtler method is to encourage a climate of informal hostility, using techniques such as innuendo and rumour. Word can be put round that some people are not pulling their weight, are always to be found in libraries, swan off to conferences at crucial moments or fritter away valuable resources writing stuff that no-one ever reads. Researchers can be depicted as arrogant and egoistic, always ready to look down on others. If such an informal climate can be developed, full publicity in the form of celebratory newsletters and the rest can actually serve a double purpose. On the one hand, any external bodies can be given evidence that there is official encouragement. On the other, any congratulation and publicity, especially if rendered in a fairly ambiguous manner, can serve the purpose of clearly marking out people with ideas above their station as dangerous, elitist and contemptible.

As with any other challenge faced by modern management, suitable techniques can be found to impose our own agendas and fulfill our goals. We are the ones who know what our institutions need best. That is why we are there.

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