"Speaking Truth to Power"? On the Challenges of Collaborative Research through European Funding

The submission puts forward a sociological investigation (with a Luhmannian orientation) of the relationship between knowledge and policy in Europe. It does so by exploring large EU funded research projects in social science and their role in policy-making. The development of large EU research projects that gather diverse academics and researchers over a significant period of time is a relatively new phenomenon. Precisely what is new is not the fact of collaboration as such: it is rather the fact that collaboration is increasingly being incentivized (funded) and governed (controlled), through policy programs, funding agencies and so on (Papatsiba 2013). This evolution has resulted in a double outcome. Whilst the governing of research becomes apparent through the emergence of stringent policy-related expectations attached to such projects, the financial incentives have triggered the rise of new forms of organizations: large, international, temporary organisations. In the literature, one finds several attempts to find out whether such collaborative research is more or less productive than solo research. Mauthner and Doucet argue that the social science community has been rather “unreflexive and uncritical in its adoption of team-based research models and practices”. According to them there is “an unspoken assumption that team research is ‘better’ than solo research” (Mauthner & Doucet 2008: 972). Our argument in this submission is that the question one should ask, is not whether such or such form of research organization is more or less productive, better or worse than another. One should rather wonder how a given form of research organization works and responds to its external conditions of possibility. That is, how scientific research handles the expectations raised by its political environment through policy-makers and the like. We are thus particularly interested in the inside and the outside of large EU funded research projects, which implies understanding the interaction between their internal functioning and the external (policy) demands they are supposed to respond to. Collaborative research is one of the several forms in which the contemporary relationship between science and policy becomes apparent. As all other forms (think tanks, government-led study centres, advisory boards, ad hoc expertise, etc.), it rests however on the same, more general expectation that the best criteria for sound political decision-making are best distilled from scientific knowledge. This expectation conforms strongly to the self-descriptions of the political world, but often much less so to the sociological reality of its decision-making process. In this submission we look both (1) at EU funded collaborative research and (2) at how policy-making deals with the knowledge-intensive environment that it helps create