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The Way We Ask for Money… The Emergence and Institutionalization of Grant Writing Practices in Academia

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Abstract

Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental adjustment of the funder/fundee relationship around a common discursive practice that consists in describing and evaluating research projects: How has the perception of what constitutes a legitimate funding claim changed over time and why? By investigating the normative framework enacted in the justification strategies of applicants, we shed light on the historical coevolution of the increasing competition for project funding, the epistemic culture of applicants, and grant writing rhetoric. To do this, we mobilize a comprehensive data set consisting of archival data from Europe’s oldest and largest funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as a corpus of 80 successful grant proposals written between 1975 and 2005. We find that the 1990s mark an important normative consolidation of what we consider to be a legitimate funding claim: Ensuring the success of the project and the project’s results becomes a major concern in applicant rhetoric. This time period coincides with a substantive rise in the level of competition for project funding. Yet, even though justification strategies might seem to address the same issues in grant proposals across the disciplines under investigation, the normative framework to which applicants refer differs according to the applicant’s epistemic culture.

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Notes

  1. October 1920, the DFG was founded under the name “Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft,” which loosely translates to “Emergency Association of German Science.”

  2. The “open call” program is not only the oldest but also one of the most important tools for funding basic research Germany.

  3. Otto Warburg was a well-known biochemist/physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1931. The application, which consisted of a single sentence, “I require 10,000 marks,” was funded in full. This is a reconstruction based on a detailed description from H. Krebs, published first in Koppenol et al. (2011). Reprinted with the permission of the authors and the journal Nature Reviews Cancer.

  4. Although the grantmaker issued informal guidelines for the peer review from the 1990s on, these guidelines were never published. Since the DFG does not grant access to archival documents issued in the last 30 years, we were not able to include these documents in our analysis.

  5. We encountered substantial difficulties in accessing the peer reviews for the grant proposals in our observation period, since the university archives have only preserved the grant proposals and the financial documentation of third-party funded projects.

  6. The degree of task uncertainty refers to the degree of uncertainty a researcher may face when trying to solve a specific problem. The higher the field-specific consensus regarding the legitimacy of research methods (technical task uncertainty) as well as the relevance and importance of research issues (strategic task uncertainty), the lower the degree of task uncertainty.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christine Musselin, Stefan Hornbostel, Woody Powell, Julian Hamann and Wolfgang Schluchter for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. I am also immensely grateful to Jochen Gläser who provided insight and expertise that greatly improved the overall argument of this paper. Finally, I thank Kai Behrendt, Martin Hölz and Miriam Schwarz for their excellent assistance in the research process. This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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  1. Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology, Heidelberg University, Bergheimer Straße 58, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Kathia Serrano Velarde

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Correspondence to Kathia Serrano Velarde.

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Serrano Velarde, K. The Way We Ask for Money… The Emergence and Institutionalization of Grant Writing Practices in Academia. Minerva 56, 85–107 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9346-4

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