On the Tacit Governance of Research by Uncertainty

Introduction

Uncertainties, understood as risk, unpredictability or ambivalence, are key characteristics of academic research cultures. Lab studies have acknowledged the significance of dealing with the inherent uncertainties of knowledge production, particularly in the bio, medical, or life sciences that work with living, and thus rather unpredictable, material (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1999; Kewell 2013). Uncertainties have also gained such prominence in diagnoses of the present that our time has been called the “age of uncertainty” (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001) and our place the “risk society” (Beck 1986). The science and technology studies (STS) literature usually emphasizes uncertainties that science introduces into social life, while other fields focus on social uncertainties (subversion of social security by more flexible forms of work [cf. Castel and Dörre 2009]). This focus on uncertainty is not surprising in an age where ever more societies build their wealth and well-being on knowledge production (e.g., the efforts of the European Union to become an “innovation union”). They link their fortune to highly uncertain processes, and epistemic uncertainties enter work and life to an extent that has historically been uncommon in Western societies. What is surprising is that we lack studies of how uncertainty impinges on the lives of those involved in knowledge production, particularly in times when their employment security is undercut by organizing research in ever more competitive and temporary projects. An empirical investigation of how researchers cope with experiences of uncertainty is pressing, not least because research in the field of labor studies has established that the experience of social security is key to how people act and perform (Dingeldey, Holtrup, and Warsewa 2015).

This article explores how young life scientists (PhD students and postdoctoral researchers) learn to cope with both epistemic and social uncertainty, drawing particular attention to how the project form establishes a link between coping with both forms of uncertainty. This entanglement has high relevance for the scientists interviewed for this study, particularly with respect to the risk that arises for careers when a research plan could not be finished within the time frame of a project. With the end of a contract drawing closer, unpredictable change in the course of a research project was often described as restricting opportunities for pursuing promising but uncertain research trajectories. It has been argued elsewhere that the project form as part of new public management (NPM) reforms can limit research to “do-able problems” (Fujimura 1987). What is less explored are unintended effects. While resistance to NPM is a known phenomenon (Anderson 2008), we know little about how researchers navigate between conforming to the project form (and the mode of control associated with it) in order to secure research and employment continuity and carving out spaces for autonomous research. This article contributes to a better understanding of researchers’ motivations to take decisions in their research by addressing three questions:

How do researchers experience uncertainties in their work culture?

The Transformation of Work Cultures in Research

When academic activity first fell under regimes of productivity enhancement, profitability increase, and instrumental reasoning, authors argued that the process would cause qualitative changes in the character of academic activity. When the term “academic capitalism” first appeared in the science and technology studies literature, the importance of obtaining external research funding was already manifest in life science research cultures (Hackett 1990, 2014). It became increasingly clear that changes in the material basis of research could affect relationships between researchers (e.g., make them more instrumental), the relationship of researchers to their work (make it more prone to alienation; Hackett 1990, 2005), foster entrepreneurial attitudes (Shapin 2008), and cause researchers to reframe their research interests along changing codes and norms (Kleinman and Vallas 2001). These changes are attributed to direct links to the market (Slaughter and Leslie 2001, 154) but—in the context of the neoliberal reorganization of science—increasingly also to more subtle commodifying forces (Edu-factory Collective 2009; Jacob 2009; Mirowski 2010; Stephan 2012; Popp Berman 2012). Building on these insights, this article focuses on new kinds of uncertainty that have emerged in project-based academic cultures and discusses researchers’ ways of maneuvering within them.

To do so, I will first discuss the project as the organizational form that articulated these changes along the neoliberal turn in academic organizations (cf. Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls 2010, 659) and that has given rise to new experiences of uncertainties. I will then discuss theoretical approaches that help explain how researchers cope with these uncertainties before I discuss in detail four empirical modes of coping with uncertainties.

The “project,” in the sense of a competitive allocation of resources, accommodates two quite inconsistent requirements: planability and flexibility (cf. Besio 2009). It is due to this combination that the project was expected to catalyze the transformation of work cultures into knowledge-based societies/economies. Indeed, “projectification” was identified as one of the main transformations of Western societies (cf. Hodgson and Cimil 2006), as an emergent mode of organization (Kalkowski and Mickler 2002), as a form of socialization (Bröckling 2005), or even as the main ideology of contemporary capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2006). Critical accounts of the project, however, raised concerns regarding its homogenizing aspects: other forms of organizing research—such as temporally open and untargeted research—would become unthinkable. Concerns were also raised about the tense relationship between planability and flexibility. Paradoxically, writing a project proposal is an exercise in planning research that is incompatible with the epistemic uncertainties that are always involved (Torka 2006) and unpredictable change is a common—and in fact necessary—feature of research that frequently requires re-planning and sometimes discarding of a plan altogether (e.g., Besio 2009). The recent call to increase support for “potentially transformative research,” which is heard often at the US National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health (National Science Board [NSB] 2007), only exacerbates the problem. It seems beyond debate that the project as a form shifts the responsibility of coping with the unpredictable from the organizational level to the level of researchers: they must continually balance the risks they are willing to take with the returns they can expect. “Evaluating and selecting risks” has been ranked among the prime tasks of research groups (Hackett 2005, 789). Within increasingly individualizing career scripts (Müller 2012; Sigl 2012), it becomes a task for every individual researcher to balance risks in research within the framework of temporary (project) contracts.

Authors in the lab studies tradition have explored how epistemic uncertainties—and researchers’ ways of dealing with them—define work cultures in different disciplines (e.g., Shinn 1982; Knorr-Cetina 1999), and that the significance that uncertainties attain depends on the meaning that a research community attributes to them through their coping practices. Others have shown that coping practices are only slowly learned and that a considerable share of training in the doctoral phase is dedicated to acquiring the tacit knowledge of coping practices (Delamont and Atkinson 2001). Researchers, thus, are socialized into a particular culture of dealing with uncertainties while learning to engage in a range of small decisions within the research process. The mentioned studies display a strong focus on epistemic uncertainties and strategies, while we learn little about the role that the social structures of a lab or the funding model play for such strategies.

This article connects epistemic and social uncertainties (and motivations for dealing with them) by claiming that the link that is forged by the project form between epistemic and social uncertainties is reflected in a link between the epistemic and the social in ways of coping with them. That is, the small decisions taken in the course of the research process are motivated by epistemic considerations (that promote high-quality research) as well as social considerations (that promote an academic career). To do so, it combines the epistemic perspective on research processes with a social perspective on the working conditions of researchers. In so doing, it contributes to the long-standing discussion on the hazards of academic careers (Weber 1946) by broadening the perspective to the tight link between epistemic and life uncertainties in the twenty-first century.

In order to achieve this, it is useful to draw upon research in the Labor Studies tradition, which had long focused on Fordist work organization and Taylorist management techniques (labor discipline and alienated labor). In the past decades, workplace studies have also started exploring subjectified (or immaterial) forms of labor that build on a high investment of subjective factors such as self-motivation, affectivity, creativity, and communicative skills (Lazzarato 1998; Moldaschl and Voß 2003). These post-Fordist forms of work were largely expected to improve working conditions through less hierarchical social organization and more self-determined work (Beynon and Nichols 2006), but this claim has been empirically challenged. Recent studies point to potential downsides of post-Fordist modes of production, such as self-exploitation and burnout (Moosbrugger 2008; Lohr and Nickel 2009). While the prefix “post” in post-Fordism is certainly inappropriate for academic work cultures, academic research shares both characteristics of subjectified labor and promises of autonomous work. It could be said that work in academia has always been post-Fordist, in that it was always linked to subjective factors (to how researchers build a relationship to their environment and to themselves). Thus, even if academic work cultures today have very specific features (e.g., individualizing career patterns), we learn much about what motivates researchers to do (and not to do) things by considering the subjectified character of their work. This brings a new locus of transformation of academic work cultures into view (Blackman et al. 2008), in that as researchers cope with uncertainties by developing—and changing between—certain forms of subjectification, they change social and epistemic aspects in research cultures (see section: “Understanding Ways of Coping with Uncertainty as Tacit Governance” below). Researching the dynamics of subjectification thus contributes to a better understanding of the distributed constellations of power in the governance of academic research (Jordan, Wurzel, and Zito 2005) and particularly the dimension of “academic self-governance” (De Boer, Enders, and Schimank 2007).

Empirical Setting, Research Approach, and Analysis

The story of life science research in Austria is one of the several waves of reorganization of research institutions. Starting with a new law on university organization in 1993, through the new university law (in force since 2004), a stronger independence of universities from the state (in the sense of “university autonomy” [Felt and Glanz 2003]) has been gradually implemented and a shift toward competitive project funding has taken place (project funds increased approximately 30 percent since 2007; Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung [BMWF] 2011, 107). In the academic life sciences up to 80 percent of personnel are externally funded. As a result, researchers are increasingly employed part-time and for shorter time periods. The two empirical settings of this study reflect these changes. The first is a local cluster of life science research institutes at which joint academic and private research efforts are designed to increase the marketability of biotechnological knowledge production (e.g., in serving as an incubator for spin-off companies). The second was a large-scale research program for the life sciences with the political and economic demarcation of developing science but also economy and society.

For exploring researchers’ experiences, different methods have complemented one another in an approach of triangulation (as, e.g., suggested by Flick 2008). The core of the empirical material consists of fourteen narrative and reflexive biographical interviews (app. 2-3h) with early career academic life scientists. All interviewed scientists held temporary contracts (mostly project-based and limited to one to three years) and none of them were tenured. Their role is best described as “marginal” (Hackett 1990, 249) since they represent scientists whose academic career prospects are insecure while they make up large parts of the workforce in academic life science research.

The interviews included broad retrospective and prospective reflection about planning research trajectories and career decisions. To understand the collective dynamics of life science research, four group discussions were held and, to a smaller extent, observations of everyday lab practices were carried out. Besides this, data on the sociopolitical and institutional contexts of employment in life science research in Austria were gathered and analyzed. Particular emphasis was placed on elucidating links between individual and collective agencies within their particular institutional contexts.

The interviews had a reflexive character in that researchers were asked to discuss their environment, their roles within it, and the reasoning behind their decision making (cf. Rosenthal 2005, 50). This allowed insight into how researchers conceptualized their spaces of maneuvering (confinements and degrees of freedom). The overall aim was not to reveal how their lives actually were but to shed light on researchers’ “biographical work”—that is, the ways in which they made sense of how they were moving within their societal contexts (cf. Fischer-Rosenthal and Rosenthal 1997, 135). In doing so, the research approach avoids the trap of retrospective or biographical illusion (Bourdieu 1990, 76) and acknowledges that what we learn from biographical narrations is necessarily fragmentary; what we get to know is a fragile, flexible, and inconsistent way of perceiving an environment and of people relating to it. Thus, the knowledge that is gained from analyzing experience lies in exploring the rationales, reasoning, and legitimation strategies involved in how people appropriate, coproduce, and transform their environments and themselves within them.

The analysis of interview transcripts and field notes followed a grounded theory approach. The particular research interest was not precast from the beginning but developed within a broader investigation of research cultures in the life sciences. A circular mode of working with empirical material and theory building about academic research as culture and practice was employed. Empirical material was gathered and analyzed utilizing an open coding procedure that helped to identify relevant topics and suggested more focused questions (Glaser and Strauss [1998] 2005). The qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti 6 and TAMS Analyzer 2.5 assisted the coding.

The Experience of Epistemic Uncertainties as Individual, Existential Risk

During the interviews, participants tended to highlight two features as quite specific to research: epistemic uncertainties and increasingly normative academic career patterns. Taking the term “research” literally, one explained that if it was less uncertainty intensive, it would not be called research: “That’s why it is called research; ‘re’ as in ‘search again’ … it is time and again a cycle until you can show something” (m2: 633-5 ¹ ). This progression of uncertainties was narrated as making research exceptional compared to other professions but also more exciting. Accounts of uncertainty experiences, however, always referred to research funding patterns, employment policies, performance criteria, and the structure of qualification steps. When a PhD student was asked whether the choice to make an academic career was a safe one, she said, “Safe? No, certainly not … science is not safe in any way” (f8: 604). The statement was placed in the context of the conditions for making a career: “You can qualify for the profession, but then you need to perform extraordinarily to have a salary. That’s why I’d rather not call it a safe … job or something. Because there is still too much competition … as soon as you are in … you need to fight to stay in” (f8: 604-10). This quote is a good example of how the course of an academic career was generally described as being particularly precarious by interviewees ranging from early PhD researchers to those in the postdoctoral phase. In the course of the above quoted interview, the respondent made references to employment conditions (e.g., last-minute hiring decisions due to uncertain project funding). Her pervasive experience of uncertainty was thus clearly informed by social security aspects.

Late PhD students or early postdoctoral researchers (who had already acquired firsthand experience of failing experiments) tended to discuss epistemic uncertainties and social uncertainties as tightly entangled. Imagining a failing experiment often coincided with imagining the end of a career:

The risk is very high … I hope that something will come out but also that … that I can define sub-targets that can lead to a publication anyways. I hope that I can accomplish … a certain output this way … without being [in the lab] day and night and needing to take the … shortcut from the sixth floor down, right? (laughing) (f6.1: 469-77)

An additional layer atop these experiences of uncertainties is that participants displayed a strongly subjective relationship to their research, depicting it as self-determined, free, and highly personalized work. Many researchers narrated their professional life course as building on a “predisposition” (f4.1: 17-21) that made the decision for a career in research quasi-natural. As has also been noted elsewhere, work and life seemed hardly distinguishable for them (cf. De Angelis and Harvie 2009) and the choice for an alternative career would mean adjusting to a very different way of relating to themselves. This subjectified character of labor rendered the entanglement of epistemic and career uncertainty a quite personal experience since what was at stake was not only an experiment or a career but also a particular notion of self.

In project-based work relations, where the success of research is a precondition for the financial subsistence of researchers, uncertainty experiences thus seemed easily generalized into a sense of anxiety. In other words, the epistemic uncertainties of the research process were experienced as existential risk: a risk to individual academic careers, individual sustenance, and the individual perception of self. The key words in this are “risk” and “individual.” While the inherent uncertainties of a research project are not in themselves a danger for anyone, they become, in the experience of researchers, an experience of risk, and something that endangers their selves. The character of the experience as existential risk tended to individualize and isolate researchers. In this light, coping with uncertainties becomes a more encompassing phenomenon than securing output: It becomes a matter of establishing social security and managing processes of subjectification (of developing a certain sense of relating to one’s environment and oneself).

Four Modes of Coping with Uncertainty Experiences

While often made invisible in life sciences research cultures (i.e., it is hardly represented in publications), the handling of uncertainties appears to be an omnipresent force in making decisions during the research process. In informal shop talk, the need to adjust to the unforeseen was discussed as a major challenge that, on the one hand, bears risks but, on the other hand, provides the exceptional joy of getting into the discovery of the unknown. Learning to deal with failing experiments, developing “a certain tolerance to this frustration” as a postdoc puts it (f1.1: 115-23), was described as a crucial part of becoming a life scientist, the challenge being to find the right balance between tolerating a certain degree of uncertainty and knowing when this degree has been exceeded and a failing experiment threatens a career. Researchers would usually insist that the skills that this required could not be taught in a textbook but are a feeling that is developed over time.

Coping with uncertainties thus meant preventing failure, but in a particular, context-sensitive sense. Whether an experiment had failed was defined in relation to the available resources, for example, when it did not lead to publishable results within given time resources. In many instances, coping with uncertainties also meant the creation of “protected spaces” that Whitley and Gläser have defined as “periods of time in which scientists have discretion over the use of needed resources, including their own efforts, to pursue particular problems and approaches before having to produce publishable and collectively valued results” (2014, 8). While protected spaces are usually seen as being available only to professors (that have permanent positions plus control over resources), the modes of coping with uncertainties I will describe in the following demonstrate that the younger generation of researchers learns to seize opportunities for creating protected spaces—and have a high motivation to do so—often, however, at the cost of high investment in time and effort.

The most dominant modes of coping in researchers’ narrations were coping as a member of a clan, coping as a member of a collective, coping as a manager, and coping as a trickster. Each represents a particular form of subjectification (of how researchers relate to themselves, to their environment, and the uncertainties they encounter). The terminology of clan, collective, manager, and trickster is used to characterize distinct meanings with regard to the hierarchical structures involved, particularly with regard to the ownership of the key resources: funding, time, and experience. The separate discussion serves as an analytical tool for picturing rationales of ongoing transformations in research cultures. In practice, researchers switched among these modes all the time.

In the context of my study, I define a clan as a group of people organized around a founding member (in this case the leader of a life science lab/group leader) who has ownership of most key resources and is in charge of distributing them. In the observed labs, up to eighteen researchers of different professional experience gathered around one group leader who was the name giver of the group, decided on who entered or left the lab, spent much time on funding acquisition and—as the most senior researcher—was also the prime supervisor of students in the lab. While the lab leader’s time was scarce, she or he was best equipped with funds and experience. Young researchers often referred to group leaders’ ways of distributing resources when narrating their ways of coping with uncertainties, which is why it is discussed here first.

PhD students described their position as being particularly precarious since they still lacked the tacit knowledge resources for estimating the riskiness of a project. As a result, they experienced their academic success and quality of work as strongly dependent not only on themselves but also on their supervisors’ (or more experienced coworkers’) ways of assigning research questions and managing risks:

It is seldom the case that a person exclusively works on one topic and needs to follow it through until the end …. There are always backup procedures … when you see that this one doesn’t work, then you can do a topic that is more secure …. Whereas when you’d have a supervisor who doesn’t care and who doesn’t bother … then you really have a problem. (f9: 512-21)

In this quote, protection (from risk) is presented as being available only through the support of a supervisor. Narrations of this kind represent a modus of coping in which better-resourced members of a lab (lab leaders and senior postdocs) provide coping resources to less equipped lab members (PhD students and postdocs) and which is based on inherently hierarchical social relationships (such as between supervisor and student or between a postdoc and a lab leader who grants access to a lab’s infrastructure). This modus of coping largely follows a leitmotif of paternalistic care, requiring the maintenance of good social relations between supervisor and the supervised. Protection is—primarily—granted by a system of guardianship. In summary, this mode of coping seemed to be experienced as quite powerful in alleviating tensions and reducing individual risk within project-dominated research cultures. However, in transferring the responsibility for handling uncertainties to the supervisor, coping as a member of a clan increased another anxiety, that of being personally dependent on better equipped lab members. These superiors were experienced as not only in charge of early career researchers’ professional development but also in charge of their social security.

The collective mode of coping is characterized by building mutual support and reciprocity. This mode was described as common and basically unavoidable in everyday research. As an interviewee once puts it, “most things … are only possible with teamwork. You just can’t do it alone” (f8: 253-7). Such narratives subtly imply that resources like time, skills, and tacit knowledge, which lab members have at their disposal, are exchanged collegially. In this ideal-type depiction of lab life, every member has equivalent rights and duties in the functioning of lab work and the lab collective:

… when you want to make a weekend trip, you need to look and see that someone can put in a weekend shift for you and such things and that’s not like in a firm where you are paid for such things. Rather people do that … for free … it mostly works on a personal basis, because those are favours that we mutually do each other. (m4.2: 767-74)

Across these two modes of “coping together,” two modes of coping apart were narrated: the managerial and the trickster modes. The managerial modus of coping is characterized here by the rationale of risk management. the goal is to achieve a balance of more risky and more secure research projects for maximizing career chances. Framing epistemic uncertainties in terms of risk is not a given but a way of coping with uncertainties in its own right. Researchers often implied that a project-based work culture requires a managerial attitude toward career making. This included long-term planning of how the fragmented pieces of an academic life could be patched together in order to secure epistemic and temporal coherence and continuity:

I knew I could do research for a year … or 1½ years before I needed to look for new funding …. It’s indeed good to have a certain competition but there has to be a certain continuity … that you say, I can do research, and I can carry on doing research, and I don’t need to spend half a year within these two years writing a proposal to secure my position …. (f6.1: 335-48)

In practice, the clan mode and the managerial mode were often entwined when a lab leader had enough funds to manage them: formal project structures (time and funding frames) were then deconstructed to merge different project funds into one budget pool. Lab leaders then reconfigured these resources to allow for full-time and more continuous employment and for making both risky and less risky research possible (thus cross-financing risky research with funding for secure research). Early career researchers often implied that the managerial skills and efforts of lab leaders are crucial for making research less risky and were decisive for some in choosing a lab for doctoral research: lab leaders who were known for putting aside a backup funding pool, thereby creating economic security buffers, were favored over others. The managerial modus of coping thus builds on tactics of (re-)arranging fragmented conditions into continuous and risk-balanced careers. Protection is guaranteed by the practice of reordering the environment and of maximizing individual career prospects. The managerial approach is characterized by the idea that what it takes to make an academic career is smart risk management that takes into account both epistemic and social uncertainties.

The managerial mode is distinguished from the trickster mode of coping by its performance orientation and temporal positioning. The managerial mode largely complies with performance-optimizing logics, and present activity is often undertaken in the service of a career future. The present tended to slip out of sight, as in the following narration of a thirty-eight-year-old postdoc who experienced his academic life as in a state of limbo:

… this is what I would like to do. [I am] (c)ompletely aware that it will probably not be easy and will probably not work out … in principle I still have the feeling this would be what I want to do. (m1.1: 36-51)

Implicit in the above described practice of deconstruction and reconfiguration is a further modus of coping that builds on sidelining and tricking conditions that are deemed unreasonable for a good and interesting research process: the trickster mode of coping. In contrast to the managerial modus, trickster attitudes are less bound to formalized requirements and quality criteria. They are characterized instead by a mind-set of deviation and a desire to resist contemporary conditions (e.g., career expectations) for doing research. Researchers displayed this form of subjectification by emphasizing that following their interests is sometimes only possible by hiding their original motivation from evaluation or funding institutions. Many researchers claimed that even if they were using arguments of societal relevance to acquire funding, what they intended to do was, in fact, basic, highly uncertain, research. Asked what he would do if a research idea was not funded, one postdoc said that he was likely to pretend that he was working on another project while he was in fact following his original plan:

I would apply for a different project, but continue doing my idea.… That is a bit exaggerated.… Formally you work on a project but really you work on … this actual project that has been previously rejected …. (m1.2: 891-6)

The trickster mode thus differs in its epistemic strategy from other modes of coping. It does not try to tame uncertainties but rather creates spaces where epistemic uncertainties can play out. It does so without letting considerations of social security interfere in epistemic decisions so much. In some ways, though, these narratives of working around expectations can be read as a way of buying—or in fact stealing—time and resources to follow highly uncertain research interests. Bypassing project rationales appeared to relieve the immediate pressure to be productive and allow for more autonomous and uncertainty-intensive “free project[s]” (m2: 455-7). By refusing to trade a (rather constrained) present for a latent academic career future, the trickster mode allows researchers to reclaim a livable present by rejecting a perception of epistemic uncertainty as risk. The trickster mode of coping thus is not so much geared toward protection and security in the future as it is toward creating a livable present and spaces for open-ended, uncertain research trajectories that matched researchers’ desire to follow their research interests autonomously. In doing so, it builds on practices of evading requirements, of disregarding expectations and, often, also of considering alternative career paths.

In addition to the different temporal and career trajectories of the managerial and the trickster modes, a main dividing line between these two individual modes of coping is the extent to which they refer to formal structures. While the former manages and reorders existing forms (such as the project form) in the attempt to create good and continuous research and career conditions within formal structures, the latter rather refers to (and uses) formal structures to acquire resources for the informal, that is, for going beyond the boundaries that formal structures set. This deviant mind-set sets the trickster modus apart from the other three modes.

Another way to distinguish between the four modes of coping is the degree to which they are institutionalized. While the clan modus can be said to refer to institutionalized lab hierarchies and the manager modus is strongly oriented at formal career requirements, we hardly find the trickster modus institutionalized or formally represented. The collective modus is in a middle position since it is indeed represented by the lab group as a work unit. The mutual exchange of experience within the lab is also often semi-institutionalized (e.g., in regular lab meetings). As a researcher puts it:

You present regularly in so-called lab meetings and there you get input from other people. It’s important—and it stays important even when you become an established group leader—that you have this kind of discussion …. (f3: 655-8)

Interestingly, researchers often narratively linked their ways of coping with uncertainties to an absence of institutionalized or legal forms of protection. The following quote refers to the practice of not prolonging temporary contracts for a corresponding amount of time if someone takes parental leave. It is a quite strong account of how otherwise institutionalized social rights (like parental leave) are levered out by flexible and unstable employment conditions:

So this legal issue of being able to come back doesn’t exist anymore. We cannot come back like … we are supposed to, because there is nothing to come back to. And then it comes into politics—like social small nanopolitics in the institutes—in the lab and then it comes to the professor. If he wants to have a mother working or also probably a father who is very involved in any case or not. And what I see is that a lot of professors … are very reluctant to take mothers back …. Out of very … subjective reasons …. And then they give arguments like: ‘… I can’t rely on them, because … they will be home when their kids are sick, or they have to leave on time. I cannot tell them at seven in the afternoon, I need this by tomorrow.’ And this is the kind of … arguments they bring for themselves, why they don’t want to foster [parents]. (FGg_pd: 426-40)

Understanding Ways of Coping with Uncertainty as Tacit Governance

These empirical examples show how the link between the epistemic and the social that the project form creates is dealt with by the four modes of coping (see Figure 1). In other words, the modes represent different ways in which young researchers learn to explore their freedoms of maneuvering, to go beyond maintaining the status quo and act upon their environmental conditions. In the following, I focus on accounts of researchers that hint at social and epistemic changes that arise from ways of dealing with uncertainties, suggesting that the latter are a source of (tacit) governance in project-based research cultures.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Dimensions of modes of coping (from the perspective of young reserachers).

One frequently given example for ongoing transformations due to coping with uncertainties is that project funding and the related flexibility of employment are related to decisions within research processes as well as in publishing strategies. Some interviewees suggested that in a discontinuous staffing situation the research quality suffered from unavailability of local expertise:

… the problem is that partly the contracts [of successive personnel] don’t even overlap and much know-how is lost … sometimes you have a complete switch. A lot of knowledge is lost and you have to start from zero. I find that rather idiotic. Because … when you have invested a lot in someone and he has knowledge and he can’t even hand it over before he has to go (.) it is also money that is wasted …. And research obviously suffers from that. (f7: 312-21)

However, as we have learned above, researchers resist these dynamics in various ways; by managing budgets differently than intended, by maintaining collective working modes in the face of individualizing career norms, or by engaging in caring activities even if they could not expect them to be validated for their careers.

This perspective on researchers suggests that how they learn to cope with uncertainties—and how they set priorities between modes of coping—is an intermediary in the articulations between funding policies and actual research practices. While this claim has been made before (Fujimura 1987), the analysis above highlights how researchers explore their spaces of maneuvering in that they can (to a certain extent) choose between the modes of coping (i.e., between modes of relating to their coresearchers) and between rationales of planning their careers. In that sense their subjectivities appear as a locus of how research cultures are governed.

Considering the social risks ² imposed by the combination of uncertainty-intensive research projects with uncertain funding conditions, it could be expected that any rational, highly qualified, and career-oriented researcher would either focus on secure projects or leave academia for industry, where salaries are higher and contracts are usually longer term. Interestingly, though, there were no researchers who claimed to undertake only secure research or who pictured a job in industry as their primary career choice (few planned to leave academia). Instead, they valued their personal relation to research and the strong motivation for their work. Explaining how the secure and riskier parts of his work related to each other, a postdoc compared the safer parts (that he was eager to keep within a limit) with work in industry:

For us this is rather like a job in industry …. I mean, honestly speaking, if they would pay double, yes! (laughing) But it isn’t as if we had a huge salary … but in exchange we have an interesting work, right? Because if we would do less interesting work that we could just as well do in industry where you get paid more, this is something different. (m1.1: 303-9)

His mixed-risk strategy was strongly guided by his personal motivation. Asked whether he found the prospect of working in industry desirable he said: “Personally, no. That is very time consuming, work intensive and in fact relatively boring” (m1.1: 293-4). The high value he placed upon interesting work prevented him from doing work that would allow for secure publications and comply with an institutional policy toward more service orientation.

Through such self-motivated practices, young researchers’ ways of coping mediate between the social organization and the epistemic fabric of research. Their research and career choices can thus be seen as representing a layer in the tacit governance of research (Felt and Fochler 2010): a change that is not immediately visible but might subtly change priorities in the epistemic orientations of fundamental and uncertainty-intensive life science research that is discussed in this article.

Conclusion

This article has empirically discussed how the project form—and the funding uncertainty related to it—can lead to epistemic uncertainty being experienced as generalized, personal, existential risk by young life scientists and therewith create a structural link between the epistemic and the social. Along four modes of coping with uncertainties I have shown that this link gives rise to new kinds of tacit knowledge and skills required for living a life in academic research (cf. Polanyi 1985). Ways of coping represent a propensity to act (or avoid acting) and become part of what qualifies life scientists to be able to stay employed and make a career in academia. In that sense, ways of coping travel with the bodies of the researchers and literally get under the skin in that they yield certain ways of reasoning and preferences to act. Tacit as they are, they are pushed into the margins of conscious practice, somehow forgotten as they become part of their subjectivities, of who life science researchers are.

In the following, I conceptualize the entanglement of epistemic and social uncertainties as governmental precarization (an experience of uncertainty that has transformative potential) and then discuss potential implications for research cultures.

Academic life science researchers are a highly qualified community, members of which have a (comparatively) low risk of finding themselves unemployed. Nevertheless, discussing low income security in this relatively privileged group is a political issue. The most obvious implication of high exposure to social uncertainties is that, even more than before, researchers that can afford income insecurity will have a (competitive) advantage. Specifically, the pursuit of highly uncertain research trajectories is less risky—and more tolerable—for those who can count on resources outside the academic world (parents, partners, and other sponsors). As such, the less privileged might be discouraged from pursuing an academic career and therewith be excluded from producing the knowledge base of our societies. However, depicting the uncertainties in researchers’ experience as (governmental) precarization goes beyond the victimizing of researchers. Rather, it questions the implications of high exposure to funding uncertainty on the mix of motivations that lead to decisions in the research process. When epistemic uncertainties come to be experienced as social risk, the rationales for decision making might be increasingly guided by the social security considerations of research staff instead of by epistemic or other rationales (e.g., social relevance or market relevance). Precariousness in that sense means an uncertainty that has a dimension of social security and, beyond that, a governmental dimension; not as an instrument of power from above but in terms of an “active participation of each individual in the reproduction of governing techniques” (Lorey 2011, 4). As “a condition of economic exploitation … (it is also an) incalculable and potentially empowering self-government” (Lorey 2011, 6). This article has shown that this layer of governance—the tacit governance of research by uncertainty—gains in relevance under certain conditions: first, when epistemic uncertainties are structurally linked (and added) to social uncertainties, second, when this link is established in uncertainty-intensive environments (like life science research), and third, when there is a simultaneous absence (or subversion) of institutional modes of coping.

The exploration of researchers’ ways of coping with uncertainties can therefore provide a new perspective on how work cultures in academia are undergoing transformation today. It draws attention to how young and marginal researchers shape the rationales that are involved in decisions within a research process. Project-intensive research environments thus may provide room for mechanisms that prevent researchers from pursuing uncertainty-intensive research. This is also supported by a study by Grit Laudel who found for the field of molecular biology that “protected spaces” allow researchers to follow new and innovative lines of research instead of staying within more established research areas of their lab leaders (2014). Second, they may also prevent people that cannot afford unstable income conditions from pursuing an academic career. Put differently, when decisions on risk are delegated from the organizational (institutional) level to the individual, decisions on the rationales (or modes) of choosing research questions are delegated as well. The social distribution of the responsibility to cope with uncertainty will thus have an effect on what kind of research is—and is not—carried out.

As argued elsewhere, project-intensive work cultures need “project institutions” that establish a mode of coping that relieves the immediate link between epistemic and social uncertainties for researchers. For academic institutions, this would mean adapting to the requirements of project-based research cultures that tend to delegate the need to cope with uncertainties to the individual and take on the responsibility of being a project institution (Nowotny and Raunig 2008, 94). To do so, some universities have already made use of available measures in establishing interim funding for employment gaps, by offering tenure-track positions or by allowing for permanent contracts, therewith providing a better balance between permanent and temporary staff and more continuity in local networks of expertise. Such measures might counteract the marginalization of collective—often semi-institutionalized—modes of coping in the face of individualizing career norms and performance standards.

Continued high exposure to uncertainty might incite social (labor) conflicts in research contexts. Researchers’ accounts suggest that in many cases employment standards that have come to be formally accepted in Western industrialized countries—in the Austrian case the eight-hour-day, forty-hour week, free weekends, five weeks of vacation per year, and employment protection during maternity leave—are subverted on a regular basis, not by direct force but by a form of self-exploitation that is induced by an experience of existential uncertainty. It is (among other things) before this background that collective resistance against the neoliberal transformation of academic research forms: these conflicts become visible in the formation of thought collectives that problematize the “great degree of stress, anxiety and depression” linked to working conditions in academia (Haiven 2014), the occupations of university spaces that took place in the past decade (with a peak in 2009 in the Austrian context) and increased interest of unions to support workers in academia (e.g., the Templiner Manifest in the German context; see Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft [GEW] 2009).

When a society stakes its wealth and well-being on knowledge production, it needs to be aware that in doing so the uncertainties involved in the enterprise of seeking new knowledge are imposed on the social world in one way or another. The development and institutionalization of creative approaches toward social protection (cf. Murray and Gollmitzer 2012; McCann et al. 2014) become imperative for building knowledge societies that are fair in preventing epistemic uncertainties from being experienced as existential social risks. Similarly, the scientific enterprise of seeking new knowledge—and high-risk, transformative research in particular—can only build on a creative environment that stops social security issues assuming priority in the making of strategic decisions in research. How researchers act and perform in research (Dingeldey, Holtrup, and Warsewa 2015) will depend on how far we accept that a failing research venture is often not ill success but part of what it means to live and work in knowledge-based societies. Acknowledging and understanding the entanglements of social and epistemic uncertainties might enable the development of more suitable societal coping modes, and they could allow for more courage in rating “do-able” problems (Fujimura 1987) and allow other—than social security—rationales to take up more space in shaping our notions of reasonable, smart, and valuable research.