5Phases of institutional research development
Two South African research management cases
Dr. Anita Venter
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Professor John Taylor
Centre for Higher Education Management and Policy at Southampton CHEMPaS
University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Throughout the world renewed emphasis is being placed on the higher education sector as a major player in knowledge creation through formal research. Governments are investing in institutions that have a proven track record of producing substantial research outputs. In South Africa there are eleven universities that share 82% of the total national budget for higher education (HE) research. Five of these eleven universities dominate higher education scientific output with a combined output that amounts to approximately 62% of the national output (CHE, 2004, p. 117). According to the new research funding formula these institutions share 62% of the research budget allotted to universities. Research funding in South Africa, as in the United Kingdom, is predominantly allocated to research-intensive institutions.
Higher education institutions with a predominant focus on teaching usually show limited to no research activity. Institutional mission therefore has a direct impact on the intensity of emphasis on research. As a result of the differences in research emphasis in institutional missions, categories of research intensity have emerged. Categories used to classify institutions during the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercises are: ‘research-led’, ‘research-driven’ and ‘research-informed’ (stated from most research-intensive to least research-intensive) (Ball & Butler, 2004, p. 90). It follows that institutions that fall within the ‘research-informed’ category might aspire to move into the ‘research-driven’ category and the ‘research-driven’ into the ‘research-led’ category. Institutions are therefore neither equal in their research missions nor in their intention to be ‘research-led’. The focus of this paper is on those institutions that have made a decision to include or retain research as part of their core mission.
In the midst of the global thrust for new knowledge, two broad groupings of higher education institutions (HEI) engaged in research emerge namely, those that are completely new in their involvement with research (referred to as Newcomers by Hazelkorn (2004, p. 119))including those that have an existing but poor history of research (referred to as Latedevelopers by Hazelkorn (2004, p.119)),and research-active institutions. Both these groupings of institutions now contend for the same funding against a standard set of rules, levelling the playing field but at the same time widening the gap of attainment of research status.
At research-active institutions, an increase in research output is influenced by power play problems through two forms of agendas. The first has to do with academics and their need to research and teach in the purest form. The second revolves around the administration’s desire for effectiveness and efficiency. External resource scarcity and competition amplifies this tension (Sporn, 1999, pp. 32-33).Barnett (2000, p. 140) concurs with Sporn and comments that research at universities is changing procedurally. Universities seem to be securing their place in the future by becoming more entrepreneurial and market-orientated. Universities have to obtain research grants and other forms of funding, and are thereby being forced to focus more on applied research, which the market actors require (Sporn, 1999, p. 18). Research, furthermore, has to be transformed into commercial products to increase the institution’s income capacity. These changes result in universities becoming more sophisticated and specialized in their research efforts to address the issue of competition. This in turn leads to team-based research (largely due to cost savings and inter-disciplinarity) thereby resulting in fewer organizational units conducting research (Smith & Langslow, 1999, p. 144; Barnett, 2000, p. 141). The research function at research-active institutions is therefore more externally focused, by virtue of the sources of funding in the market place, which in turn requires greater sophistication and specialization in attracting and managing such funds.
Three key issues that Newcomers and Latedevelopers are dealing with are a history of unequal government resourcing, academic staff that were originally hired to teach, and academic disciplines that traditionally have been grounded in professions or vocations with no research traditions (Hazelkorn, 2004, p.121). Institutions that were, and are, research-active predominantly deal with issues such as financial survival, including the navigation of the market place for sources of funding, retaining and increasing the status linked to an institution’s research profile, and a redefinition of institutional mission through intense emphasis on research activity.A redefinedinstitutional mission has many unintended consequences such as an impact on academics’ identities and the identities of academic disciplines (Henkel, 2000, p. 250-251), changes to career paths of academics when considering the research and teaching nexus (Hazelkorn, 2003, p. 16), a redefining of the notion of scholarship (Boyer, 1990, p. 25) and the purposeful management of research.
Universities in the United Kingdom have indicated that the conscious and active management of the research environment is the biggest change in research activity in recent years (Sanders, 2000). Research management, or the capability to design and operate new structures and processes for stimulating, guiding and overseeing research, is therefore a major challenge for researchers and administrators alike (Connell, 2004). Although research is conducted by individuals, research productivity is affected by institutional conditions (Fox, 1992) which in turn are managed in order to positively support researchers thereby increasinginstitutional research output and revenue.
What are these institutional conditions that affect research? And how do we use this knowledge to assist institutions in developing or furthering their research missions?
Literature available on ways to stimulate or develop research at institutional level, for both developed and developing nations, is limited. Hazelkorn (2002, 2003, 2004) investigated the challenges of growing research at new and emerging HE institutions in developed economies. This study culminated in institutional “good-practice” and institutional issues for Latedevelopers and Newcomers. Very little research is available regarding institutional research management in South Africanor other developing country higher education systems. Various complementary studies have been conducted focusing on the student-to-study-leader relationship (Schepers & Blignaut, 1994; Strydom, 2001; Schepers, 2001), and the management of quality in postgraduate training in South Africa during 1990 (Sellschop, 2001).
Moreover, literature does not describe the phases of institutional research progression: from research non-active to research active and beyond. Knowledge about these institutional development phases could assist those in charge of managing institutional research conditions to monitor research development progression, redirect institutional practices and provide pointers for the development of strategies that will lead to the stimulation and growth of research.
The aim of the study was therefore to postulate phases of institutional research development from the qualitative data derived from two institutional cases. The findings described in this article forms part of a larger mixed methods study conducted into the identification of the factors that influence a productive research management environment at two merging higher education institutions in South Africa (Venter, 2006).
Background to the case institutions
Two case institutions were chosen due to the fact that they were very different in institutional mission, research activity, history, and staff profile. Furthermore, these two institutions were in the midst of a forced merger to create a comprehensive university.
Background to the Technikon
The technikon is an institution with a mission of teaching, given to it by government and was founded in 1925. This teaching mission was adjusted in 1993 to include the ability to award degrees. Until this change in government policy, the technikon’s research activities centred on industry research contracts. Up to 1993, the technikon could not earn any research subsidy from government and found it difficult to gain access to other sources of research funding. Furthermore, a complete overhaul of the management of the technikon has also occurred since 1997. The institution followed a managerial strategy to transform senior management and this resulted in a predominantly classical strategic management approach of managing the institution. A classical strategic management style (Whittington (2001, pp. 9-40) is where the environment is scanned, goals are set, responsibilities are allocated to various organizational levels and evaluation is done at intervals during the operationalization of the strategy.The technikon produced an average of 8 publication units per year for the institution from 1997-2001 which indicates extremely low research activity.
Background to the University
The university is an institution where both research and teaching have been part of the core mission since its inception in 1967. The university has followed the typical Western model of a university in which there is unity between teaching and research, and through student learning the development of new knowledge emerges. The university is furthermore managed by academics for academics.
The high regard for the research profile of the institution (average of 300 publication units per year for the institution for years 1997-2001) was tempered by the reality that, although the institution had a proud and strong research tradition, it was not regarded as a research-intensive institution by external role players and that this might be linked to the profile of the research that was conducted, and by implication the standing of those researchers.
Method
This study investigated two merging South African HE institutions with very different traditions of research and research management, one a university and the other a technikon (university of technology). The exploratory purpose of the study guided the research approach (Peshkin, 1998, cited in Leedy & Ormrod, 2001) and the study was based on two exploratory cases (Yin, 2003) at polar type institutions (Eisenhardt, 2002). Both cases represented research management and institutional research development issues (Stake, 1995).
Twenty (20) unstructured interviews were conducted with senior managers of the two primary case institutions (12 initial and 8 follow-up interviews). All the existing academic and management staff at each of the institutions remained in similar positions at the merged university and therefore it is reasonable to argue that the factors that influence research at each of the separate institutions will, by and large, be carried over into the merged institution. This means that in all likelihood the current managers will continue to manage research for the merged university for at least an interim period of one year and they will therefore be the new policy formulators. Given this, the senior management directly involved in research management at both institutions was targeted for interviews.
Unstructured interviews provide an opportunity to reconstruct and better understand experiences of respondents. Unstructured interviews with a schedule were chosen as the research method (Schurink & Schurink, 2003, p. 3).Unstructured interviews with a research schedule give the opportunity to understand experiences and reconstruct events in which a researcher did not participate, and are especially useful in social and political processes. The research schedule that is used during the interview process “. . . is a guideline for the interviewer and contains questions and themes that are important to the research” (Schurink & Schurink, 2003, p. 3). The research schedule does not dictate questions, sequence, process or themes. Instead it is used as a tool to ensure that the research agenda or purpose of the interview is covered. The schedule was a practical guideline and not based on theory. During interviews the level of control over data was very low since the emphasis was on rapport, trust and participation as measures of establishing validity in the study (Babbie & Mouton, 2003, p. 77).
Kvale (1988, cited in Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 35) states that the interviewer, together with the interviewee, ‘co-authors’ the data during an interview. The researcher co-authored the data by summarizing and reflecting on what the interviewee was saying, thereby interpreting the meaning that the interviewees gave to their data. This ensured that participants’meaning was accurately captured and it kept the interview focused.The researcher further kept field notes which consisted of three types suggested by Schatzman and Strauss (1973, p. 99-101 cited in Schurink, 2004, p. 18). They are observational notes, theoretical notes and methodological notes. Bogdan and Biklen (1998) also suggest that field notes should contain reflections on analysis, method, ethical dilemmas and a researcher’s frame of mind. The framework for the researcher’s observational notes was based on the research schedule but also included information about the interview setting and any interesting points noted about the behaviour and actions of the interviewee.
Analysis of data was conducted manually using the Atlas.ti computer package as database. The electronic functionalities of the programme eased the support of large datasets and supported the analysis procedure that was followed. The Miles and Huberman ‘transcendental realism’ analysis approach, which is “…directed at tracing out lawful and stable relationships among social phenomena, based on the regularities and sequences that link these phenomena”, was followed (Miles & Huberman, 1994, cited in Punch, 1998, p. 202). The analysis approach is based on pragmatism as well as critical theory, which both contain qualities of interpretivism as well as post-positivism. The analysis approach that was followed included substantial order and formalisation together with interpretation of meaning (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Analysis was conducted in three phases, namely data preparation, data analysis and data verification. The data analysis and data verification phases were repeated during the clean-up process of data on Atlas.ti and again after the follow-up interviews.
Rigour was also ensured by follow-up interviews with participants of the qualitative study. All the participants were requested to verify networks and all interpretations made by the researcher. From an interpretive perspective there are three strategies which are arguably particularly important when it comes to checking and demonstrating how researcher bias and inappropriate subjectivity are managed. These are: (i) reflexivity, (ii) the audit trail, and (iii) peer debriefing (Schurink, 2005, p. 17).The researcher was part of the entire research process, not in all instances as a participant, but definitely not as a neutral observer. It also meant that the researcher had to caution herself not to read into situations what other participants did not see or mean, and also not to impose her preferences onto the process. In all instances the researcher ensured that there was full support from the participants by requesting them to verify findings.
From the two heterogeneous cases a thick description of the research management functions and research management practices of the two institutions emerged. Interpretations lead to a classification of phases of institutional research development with associated descriptive characteristics.
While the conclusions are not necessarily generalisable beyond this particular study, it is believed that new understandings of the phases of institutional research development in a modern university setting will assist in the design and operation of new structures and processes for stimulating, guiding and managing research, especially in developing economies.
Findings
The findings presented in this section illustrate the contrasts and differences between the management philosophies and practices at the two case institutions. Quotations are used to support and/or highlight explanation of the findings. Each quotation starts with the symbol P followed by a number, e.g. P1. The symbol P denotes a primary document in the Atlas.ti programme and is equivalent to an interview transcript. The primary document number is followed by a row of numbers in brackets e.g. P1:(3:4) denoting row numbers 3 to 4 in primary document number/interview 1.Quotations are rendered verbatim except where square brackets are used.
Management philosophies
The management philosophy at the technikon has a distinctly greater propensity for control and regulation executed by the senior management team,when compared to the university.
The technikon manages people through emphasis on accountability of managers in all of its layers. This implies that managers have to be involved in the decisions that have direct bearing on them. Classical strategic management is used to guide all levels of management in the same direction. Strategies are carefully planned according to the institutional goals, criteria are determined for the strategic goals and managers are held accountable for reaching those goals, according to the criteria. Strategic planning underpinned by the accountability of managers means that institutional research goals are placed above subject discipline or individual academic freedom.
P 7: (126: 127)“. . .you can't just let individual pockets of people continue doing what they are doing, without aligning it to some kind of coherent strategy.”
In contrast to the managerial approach at the technikon, the university was described as an organization where all the academics knew what they are employed to do – teach and research. Participants viewed the university as a place where science is practised. Together with this viewpoint, researcher autonomy is interlinked with the manner in which the practice of science is defined.
P 4: (125:127)“. . . this is how a university functions . . . you [an academic] are here . . . you have the space and the freedom to express yourself, according to your needs, within the broader context of scientific practice.”
Top down strategic management is not practiced and academics are seen as highly competent individuals who are able to execute their research in an orderly way without being formally managed.
Nature of people management
At the technikon, academics’ teaching time and work load are managed though a system of class rosters that is filtered up through the management hierarchy from the head of department, then to the head of school and then controlled by the dean.
P11: (227: 229)“. . .every person has a timetable and each of my heads of department, each member of staff, will have a little roster.”
The monitoring of staff activity through the class roster system goes further in some instances where academics are not encouraged to telecommute and their ‘on campus’ presence is favoured.