Maria Nedeva

• Professor of Science and Innovation Dynamics and Policy
• Professor (Full) at The University of Manchester

This paper contributes to understanding the effects of research governance on global scientific fields. Using a highly selective comparative analysis of four national governance contexts, we explore how governance arrangements influence the dynamics of global research fields. Our study provides insights into second-level governance effects, moving...

This article offers a framework for the study of research governance effects on scientific fields framed by notions of research quality and the epistemic, organizational, and career choices they entail. The framework interprets the contested idea of ‘quality’ as an interplay involving notion origins, quality attributes, and contextual sites. We mob...

Societal impact of academic research has been high on both policy and scientific agendas for several decades. Scholars increasingly focus on processes when analyzing societal impact, often inspired by the concept of 'productive interactions'. Building on this concept, we assert that processes do not take place in isolation. Rather, we suggest that...

The current range and volume of research evaluation-related literature is extensive and incorporates scholarly and policy/practice-related perspectives. This reflects academic and practical interest over many decades and trails the changing funding and reputational modalities for universities, namely increased selectivity applied to institutional r...

This paper introduces the use of co-nomination as a method to map research fields by directly accessing their knowledge networks organised around exchange relationships of intellectual influence. Co-nomination is a reputation-based approach combining snowball sampling and social network analysis. It compliments established bibliometric mapping meth...

Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they vary between fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts. Yet, the role of these co-existing notions in research, and in research policy, is poorly understood. In this paper we offer a novel framework to study and understand research quality across three k...

Due to its role in the industrial and R&D system of the former Soviet Union, an independent Armenia inherited a diverse and developed network of research institutes, notably those under the National Academy of Science (NAS), and higher education institutions focused largely on education rather than research. The consolidation of the public and high...

From 2012 USA universities entered new partnerships with private sector companies including Silicon Valley start-up Coursera. Coursera spearheads a new broad online learning segment of the fast growing global ‘educational technology’ (EdTech) sector. They offered free ‘massive open online courses’ (MOOCs) for global, universal learner audiences. Si...

In the wake of the twenty-first century, Europe embarked on an ambitious, large-scale project ideologically framed and politically justified by the concept of the European Research Area. This project has not only brought about a new set of policy and governance mechanisms within the EU, but has significantly altered the understanding and functionin...

Since the European Research Area was launched at the beginning of the century, significant efforts have been made to realise the vision of a coherent space for science and research in Europe. But how does one define such a space and measure its development? This timely book analyses the dynamics of change in the policy and governance of science and...

There is little doubt that the policy, governance, structures and organization of science at the European level has been changing dramatically and rapidly over the last couple of decades. Notions regarding the role of European-level funding and support for research and the interactions between the European and national funding have been re-framed....

This is the opening by the then European Commission president José Manuel Barroso in commenting on the report, “The Future of Europe is Science”, presented to him by his Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC) in 2014. The report was presented and further discussed at a high-level conference with the same title, convened in Lisbon in early O...

Popular journal paper. Published in "Research Professional".

Available at http://www.fteval.at/upload/fteval_Journal_for_Research_and_Technology_Policy_Evaluation_39.pdf#page=38

The opening of national research programs has gained importance as a means for increasing international collaboration and for improving the quality and efficiency of scientific research at the national, European, and international levels. The concept of opening refers to the fact that actors who do not belong to a national research space can partic...

There has been a steady and rapid growth of academic literature and policy debate on the broad ranging changes of the universities in the Western world. These are mostly founded on two problematic assumptions. One of these is the assumption of ‘unity of object’ whereby ‘the university’ has undergone an institutional dislocation and ‘fragmented’ int...

Popular journal paper. Published in "Research Professional".

Final report to the Swiss Science and Technology Council

Consultable en ligne : http://www.forschungsinfo.de/STI2013/download/STI_2013_Proceedings.pdf

Change in policy and organisation is often presented as solely the outcome of a combination of social and political processes. Furthermore, these processes are, somewhat misguidedly it is argued here, presented as explanations or ‘reasons’ rather than historically specific social mechanism through which core tensions are resolved. In counter-distin...

Final report The study “Investments in JOint and open R&D Programmes and analysis of their economic impact” (the JOREP study) has been launched by the Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission (Economic Analysis Unit) to quantify and analyse the coordination and opening-up of national public funding which constitute...

We describe the development and testing of a framework to characterize researchers individually (a profile) and in aggregate (as types) at the first stage, baseline step of a controlled, two-stage study of public research funding agency impacts. Our framework characterizes researcher attitudes and attributes, and conditions and opportunities experi...

1. Introduction This special issue collects five articles that have been presented at the Science and Technology Indicators Conference organized by the European Network of Indicators Designers (ENID) in September 2011 in Rome. As such, they represent the final outcome of a selection process which started with about 100 abstract submissions for the...

League tables are a common way for various competitive sports to judge team quality and identify winners and are also making increasingly frequent appearances in higher education globally. In this paper, we argue that this compilation of league tables is a product of the global hegemony of market-driven systems of higher education in which universi...

Early impacts of the European Research Council suggest shifts toward competition and excellence in EU-wide basic science.

The EURECIA project aimed to develop and apply a novel framework and methodology to understand better the European science system and the impact and outcomes of the European Research Council (ERC) funding schemes. This report presents the design and execution of the baseline stage of a two-part characterisation of recipients of the first cohort of...

If one had to express the dominant characteristic of the Science and Technology Policy in the 1990s in one word, it most probably would be “change”. At least half of the countries of Europe are attempting a radical re-orientation of their science and technology policies, and the other half are in a process of incremental change of their research sy...

Increasing the level of integration is currently an important policy objective for European research. This brings to light issues regarding the meaning and nature of integration and integration in research; issues associated with the mechanisms to enable and facilitate higher levels of integration in research as part of a policy process; and issues...

What constitutes graduate employability is discursively framed. In this paper we argue that whilst universities in the UK have long had an involvement in producing useful and productive citizens, the ongoing neoliberalisation of higher education has engendered a discursive shift in definitions of employability. Traditionally, universities regarded...

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009 This presentation was part of the session : Organizations of Science and Innovation Elsewhere we argued that there has been a shift in the way in which social change occurs from broadly organic to predominantly policy driven transformations (Boden et al., 2004). Organic change is one where tr...

The United Kingdom has been carrying out a major exercise in the field of Technology Foresight, involving fifteen panels engaged in wide consultation about the future of their areas. The objectives of the Programme are to help set priorities for publicly funded science and technology and to create new working partnerships between science and indust...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the change process of academic science. The change pressures currently visible in UK science have been conceptualised as the product of three interdependent dynamics: a shift towards neo-liberal ideologies and discourses of government; a process of reconstitution of the relationship between government and...

Changes in the nature of science as a social practice were fundamentally organic and endogenous in nature prior to the 1970s. Since then changes in UK public science has been policy-led and the imperatives exogenous. This shift was the result of attempts to achieve strategic managed change in the sector using new public management (NPM) techniques....

The PRIME Forum project has analysed one means of organising this policy-oriented discourse: the so-called Fora. As a starting point, it has defined Fora as … 'institutionalised spaces specifically designed for deliberation or other interaction be-tween heterogeneous actors with the purpose of informing and conditioning the form and direction of st...

Today in most countries the relationships between the research performance level and government or industry are mediated by specific, dedicated organisations. Patters of mediation and organisational forms can and do vary substantially across national environments, but historically there has been an overall tendency towards expansion of the number a...

A questionnaire-based survey of attitudes to the introduction of the Ethical Review Process (ERP) was carried out in late 1999, some 6–9 months after the introduction of the ERP to all establishments involved in animal experimentation in the UK. Five categories of people working under the Act were surveyed (Certificate Holders, Named Veterinary Sur...

By the 1980s, UK government research laboratories were an often quirky but always essential part of the state sector. The importance of these laboratories only usually becomes evident when there is some new and frightening scientific public issue - for example 'mad cow disease', foot and mouth disease or anthrax threats. Yet much of the work of the...

This book is about change and specifically, the wide-ranging changes experienced by Government Research Establishments (GREs) in the United Kingdom (UK). During the last two decades, the GREs in the UK have been subjected to a process of rapid policy initiated transformation, the dimensions and social consequences of which are still largely unclear...

In Chapter 3 we discussed how privatisation to the maximum extent feasible and marketisation/commercialisation of the remaining public sector were themes central to NPM in the UK from 1979 to 1997. These themes have not been attenuated under subsequent Labour governments. In Chapter 4 we explored how NPM had prompted the development of new organisa...

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 discussed the transformation of government science and technology service providers along three key axes: the organisation of science; the visions of what science ‘is’ and scientific knowledge production processes. These chapters demonstrated that transformations of government scientific service providers reflect more general ob...

In this chapter we turn our attention to the third of the principal dimensions of scientific change that has been in evidence in recent years — change in scientific knowledge production processes. Knowledge production processes are defined here as how the vision and organisation(s) of science combine together to actually produce scientific knowledg...

The driving forces of the public sector reform processes to which GREs were subject from 1979 onwards are collectively and generically known as New Public Management (NPM). In Section 2 of this chapter we define, insofar as possible, NPM in general terms. In Section 3 we contextualise this general discussion by critically documenting and describing...

In Chapter 1, we explored the differences between organic scientific change and policy-driven change. We also explained that this book was about just such a shift from organic to policy-driven change, and the consequences of that. We suggested that a shift from organic to policy-driven change could be complicated, or even frustrated, by a failure t...

In Chapter 3 we explained the context of new public management within which UK government S&T service providers have been transformed. In this chapter we specifically address three issues related to the organisational reform consequent to these public management transformations.

During the past 20 years, some of the UK public sector’s oldest and most idiosyncratic institutions — the GREs — have experienced fundamental and purposive change. That change has occurred at three intertwined levels: organisational forms, vision and knowledge production processes. The scale, and at times ferocity, of this reform programme could sc...

This paper focuses on one aspect of the fundamental changes facing higher education in the knowledge-based economy, namely the growth of industry-academic links and in particular the growth of cross-border collaboration and funding. Following an historical background and context to industry-academic links and its more recent growth trends, the pape...

Nearly all establishments in the UK regulated under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 had introduced an ethical review process (ERP) within 9 months of its formal requirement, although quite a high proportion of more junior staff were not familiar with it. A significant proportion of those questioned believed that the ERP has improved th...

A postal questionnaire survey was carried out in late 1999 of those involved in working under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, namely the Certificate Holders, Project Licence Holders, Personal Licence Holders, Named Veterinary Surgeons, and Named Animal Care and Welfare Officers. The aim of the survey was to elicit views on the effecti...

The approach adopted in the design of a system of continuous evaluation and monitoring for COST, the European mechanism for the stimulation of co-operation in scientific and technical research, is described. The emphasis is on the derivation of a framework which asks questions about the information required and how it should be obtained, and which...

This article examines the dimensions of research collaboration between researchers from EU and Central and East European countries in the post‐communist period. The discussion draws on experience of two initiatives for research co‐operation, COST and EUREKA. Following an analysis of the formal levels of participation of the countries of Central and...

This paper examines the role of industry in the support of academic infrastructure, in particular university research equipment. Although the United Kingdom provides the framework for discussion the described situation should be a familiar one in most countries. The argument is constructed around the perceptions, opinions and positions of universit...

Science has a matrix of research 'space' and 'fields'. Research space is a virtual environment comprising knowledge producers, users, funders and policy makers. Research 'fields' enclose the cognitive architectonic of science and cut across organisational and disciplinary boundaries. Research fields and space can be conceived of as in a matrix rela...