Research culture as a politics of uncertainty

The success of 'research culture' in science policy

In the Netherlands, research culture is closely tied to initiatives around the Recognition & Rewards reform movement, which promote broader recognition of diverse academic contributions and reduce the emphasis on publication-based metrics. In Germany, the German Research Foundation established a dedicated working group on Forschungskultur, focusing on academic working conditions, supervision practices, and research integrity. In the United Kingdom, where the term originated, UK Research and Innovation has shaped policy debates through its Research Culture programme and related funding calls. Science Europe has likewise positioned research culture as a central concern in a recent vision document.

At the same time, it often remains somewhat unclear what exactly is meant by research culture. Documents usually gesture towards academic working conditions, questions of inclusivity, and, to a lesser extent, issues of precarity and social safety. From a science studies perspective, the way the term is used can sometimes seem somewhat naïve and undertheorised - especially because it often focuses exclusively on social organisation and dependencies, sidestepping the question of how research culture shapes the knowledge that is produced.

From REF problem to governance object

Part of the reason for this can perhaps be found in the origins of the concept. Historically, research culture appears to have emerged as a way of discussing the negative (though not wholly surprising) side effects of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the national assessment exercise that allocates funding to universities in the UK. First applied in 2014, the REF is sometimes seen as a mechanism for creating fair competition in a university system otherwise characterised by reputational differentiation, but has also given rise to a number of problematic adaptations: transfer markets for academics, increased precarity, intensified hierarchies, and forms of institutional dependence that many academics experience as corrosive.

In this context, research culture initially functioned as a container category for naming such issues. More recently, however, it has been turned into a governance object in its own right through funding programmes, evaluation frameworks, and interventions aimed at measuring and improving research culture. Recent policy work increasingly formalises this shift by treating research culture as an object of monitoring and organisational learning.

From our perspective at CWTS, the rise of research culture as a policy concern is significant. It signals a shift away from a long-dominant cybernetic understanding of science - where research is conceptualised largely as a system governed through inputs and outputs - toward greater attention to people, institutions, and working conditions. It opens up questions about how research is organised as something that can be collectively debated and governed rather than simply taken for granted.

This is reflected in our work at CWTS, including research and intervention projects on career structures, working conditions, inclusion in academic work, the diversity of knowledge, and publishing practices.

That said, there are also clear risks. One is for research culture to become a site for largely symbolic action and thereby result in frustration and ultimately cynicism, much like diversity and inclusion interventions sometimes do. Another risk lies in the vagueness of the term itself, which makes it hard to operationalise and gauge any progress made in enhancing research culture.

Research culture as a politics of uncertainty

In what follows, I briefly sketch one way of giving the concept of research culture more analytical substance. Drawing on a longstanding tradition in science and technology studies that understands research as an activity governed by uncertainty, I propose to theorise research culture in terms of a politics of uncertainty in academic work.

In a specific sense, research is inherently concerned with uncertainty. Researchers seek to find out something they do not yet know whether by investigating natural phenomena or developing new conceptual perspectives in the humanities and social sciences. Yet science studies scholarship has long shown that uncertainty is never encountered in a pure form. It is always mediated materially through infrastructures and technologies, symbolically through concepts and theories, and socially through institutions, funding systems, and career structures.

In practice, this means that researchers constantly navigate multiple uncertainties at once. When developing new ideas, the question is rarely only whether they are intellectually interesting. Research must also be fundable, publishable, visible to relevant audiences, compatible with institutional agendas, and sustainable within longer-term career strategies.

From this perspective, research culture can be understood as a politics of uncertainty: a way of organising how uncertainty is distributed across research systems.

This immediately raises questions about who can afford to take risks. The capacity to pursue uncertain or unconventional lines of inquiry depends heavily on career stability, access to funding, institutional prestige, and infrastructures for visibility and publication. These capacities are unevenly distributed across institutions, regions, disciplines, and demographic groups. Publishing infrastructures and evaluative systems also unevenly distribute the ability to generate attention around particular forms of knowledge - a crucial condition for career development and future access to resources.

A second set of questions concerns how uncertainty is distributed across research problems themselves. Some forms of research are simply easier to pursue than others because they fit more comfortably within existing funding priorities or evaluation criteria. Increasingly, an important research competence lies in the ability to pre-emptively align projects with anticipated funding opportunities and institutional expectations.

How researchers adapt to uncertainty

Finally, this perspective raises the question of how researchers deal with uncertainty in their everyday practice. Current debates around AI often frame it as a threat to research integrity, given its ability to generate increasingly plausible-looking papers and assist in writing and evaluating grant applications. A problem with this framing is that it tends to locate agency primarily in the technology itself.

An alternative perspective is to ask how competition in research, for example, for funding, employment, and publishing space, leads researchers to adopt practices that prepare the ground for AI in the first place. In many parts and aspects of contemporary science and scholarship, researchers engage in a form of mutual adaptation, embracing tried and tested strategies for producing publishable work and approaching their careers.

A key effect of such mutual adaptation is that research strategies, projects, and publishing become increasingly conventionalised. This, in turn, makes it easier for AI systems to generate outputs that resemble legitimate research. Yet agency here lies not only or even mainly with technology, but also in how we decide to deal with uncertainty in research and in our careers.

Thinking about research culture in this way shifts the question from whether research culture is 'good' or 'bad' toward asking how uncertainty is organised within research systems, whose futures become possible within them, and who gets to bear the risks.

Header picture by Paul Pastourmatzis on Unsplash.
DOI: 10.59350/wh9bp-hz764 (export/download/cite this blog post)