Project work strategies in fusion research

Abstract

In this article, we examine and discuss observations on projectification from organizational and management studies and contextualize them with recent insights from the discourse around social acceleration. Against the backdrop of these debates, we ethnographically inquire into project work strategies in fusion research. First, we briefly survey existing scholarship that interrogates acceleration and projectification of research. Second, we explain why we focus on projects in fusion research and introduce the site of our investigation. In the third section, we identify three project work strategies in fusion research: content adjusting, temporal stretching, and (de)consolidation. In the final part, we argue that the highlighted project work strategies emerge as a product of the dialectical interplay of projectification and stabilization contexts that yields new spaces and opportunities for crafting agency and negotiating time in research that go beyond the reductive fast/slow dichotomy that nowadays tends to characterize contemporary accounts of temporality in and of research.

Keywords

Project(ification)speed/acceleration fusion research

On acceleration, projects, and projectification

Readers of this journal probably will not need to be extensively reminded of what Sarah Sharma (2014: 5) calls simply the “speed theory,”¹ triggered by the writings of Paul Virilio (e.g., 1986, 2000a, 2000b, and 2012), and consolidated by the agenda-setting work of Hartmut Rosa (2005, 2010, 2013) on social acceleration. The work of Rosa, arguably the most representative speed theorist,² has been prominent in the pages of Time & Society for quite some time now (see, e.g., Cockain, 2018; D’Ambrosio, 2019; Hsu, 2014; Schöneck, 2018). This acceleration debate gave rise to several new research avenues, directions, and “upgrades” not only in social studies of time and how modernity might be retheorized³ but it also reinvigorated debate on rhythms and rhythmanalysis initially opened by Henri Lefebvre (2004; see also Alhadeff-Jones, 2021; Dakka, 2021; Dakka and Smith, 2019; Lyon, 2018; Iparraguirre, 2021).

Even if Rosa’s scholarship on the “critical sociology of temporal patterns” (on the latest evaluation of Rosa’s work, see Montero and Torres, 2020) does not dwell extensively on the connection between acceleration and projectification, he does consider how modern project organization mediates acceleration of the labor process. Rosa claims that projects limit “‘intrinsic temporalities’ (Eigenzeiten)…[and]…individual rhythms” (2013:171) and hence also the autonomy of labor time as it relates to the project objectives. Mobilization of labor energies and limitation of individual rhythms and temporal agency create new coercing opportunities for the project manager “to increase productivity, and hence to accelerate” (ibid.) the work flow and tempo when achieving project objectives. Rosa then claims that in most organizations, the subordination of a work regime to project scheme does not take into account individual time constraints (i.e., the physical and mental capacity to work during a day), overlooks whether a person is incapable of working or is ill, does not consider the “noneconomic motivations of workers,” and assumes continuous perfection and a sustained effort at all times (2013: 171–172). Elsewhere, when addressing acceleration from a different conceptual angle, Rosa implicitly notes that the process of projectification is possible only if it operates vis-à-vis stabilized social structures and/or institutions:

‘[F]lexibilisation’ and ‘dynamic developments’ can only endure conceptually and practically if they take place against solid background structures; after all movement is only noticeable against a stationary background. Flexible elites confronted with stubborn institutions, managers who sail from project to project, or football coaches who coach a different club every year may all be successful...[only if there are some fixed solid social structures they are embedded in] (2015a: 95).

The growing body of literature on projectification understands projects as hegemonic devices of contemporary capitalism. Barondeau and Hobbs (2018), for example, suggest that late modern society is a “project society” and that rationalized modernity has witnessed the rise of the “project man” (more so, we may assume, than “project woman”; see Saini, 2017). Clegg and Baumeler (2010) note that in countless social arenas, projects are one of the most significant, if not dominant, characteristics of contemporary organizations in terms of administration, organization, planning, and conduct of a given task or set of tasks. Jensen et al. (2016) claim that projects are the new human condition, that the modern individual is experiencing the “projectification of everything” (see also Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 109). The literature on the intrinsic characteristics of a project portrays its boundaries as evoking a sense of rush, acceleration, and a “countdown” (Jensen et al., 2016). Projects operate within a clock-time regime that, some authors have claimed, is highly instrumental and that disregards various other kinds of rhythms that are not as predictable and universal in nature. Ylijoki (2016: 8–9) argues that “the triumph of the project format springs from its apparently seamless fit with the needs of today’s unpredictable and turbulent ‘high-speed society’ characterized by social acceleration.”

Many critics (e.g., Gershuny and Sullivan, 2018; Sharma, 2014; Vostal 2014; Wajcman, 2015) of social acceleration have taken issue with the lack of agency in Rosa’s account. Humans, if they were even accounted for in Rosa’s initial conception, were considered powerless victims of the mega-force of acceleration engulfing everyone and everything. However, social acceleration is by no means a uniform, even, and ubiquitous process. Acceleration, be it experienced on social or individual levels, is co-shaped by various contextual and situational circumstances and numerous sociologically relevant variables. Moreover, as Sharma notes, the discourse of speedup itself is part of the “problematic cultural context in which people understand and experience time” (2014: 8).

A significant stream of organizational and management scholarship focuses on how projects and their temporalities are practically handled in diverse contexts. Even if the “time brackets” of projects are often (strictly) given and their breach might be sanctioned, studies of different forms of temporary organization forms (e.g., R&D projects, emergency response teams, task forces, and theater and film productions) stress that projects can be successful in spite of inevitable uncertainties, unpredictabilities, situational constraints, unforeseen deviations (Kreiner, 2014: 36), drifting environments, and idiosyncratic diversions (Kreiner, 1995: 337, 342). Moreover, temporal plasticity might be negotiated between the funder and the funded if there is a high level of mutual trust and professionalism that governs this relationship (Kreiner, 2014). Projects can often function as highly versatile and loose “temporal instruments,” much less rigid than, as we will see, critics of projectification seem to imply. Following this line of reasoning, Dille et al. (2018) highlight three temporal strategies that further complexify the one-dimensional connection between acceleration and projectification. They suggest that a project’s temporal dimension is fine-grained and not reducible to acceleration and is rather subject to subtle “time-reckoning.” First, they argue that temporal avoidance is a practice whereof workers seek “to avoid, eliminate, or marginalize temporal institutional complexity... [and] control...entities that escape their jurisdiction or influence” (2018: 682). Second, in the case of temporal splitting, workers in an organization divide or attend to institutional requirements in piecemeal fashion and create separate smaller units from larger entities. Third, Dille and her colleagues identify temporal matching, a strategy of matching and coordinating “by playing constituencies off against each other” (ibid.) that is used when other collaborative solutions that synchronize requirements and negotiations fail. Also, and importantly, when researching projects and their dynamics, Engwall (2003) highlights their historical and organizational context since no projects are executed in an organizational vacuum. “The impact from history and context might be of different kinds and of different magnitudes in different projects and different situations, but that there would be no influence seems implausible. Rather than ignoring these influences, the challenge is to acknowledge them and analyze them further” (Engwall, 2003: 803). Our account follows this line of reasoning and pays attention to institutional and organizational contexts in understanding projectification and projects.

Against this background, the article proceeds as follows. First, we briefly survey existing scholarship that interrogates the projectification of research. Second, we explain why we focus on projects in nuclear fusion research, briefly discuss the site of our investigation, and provide methodological details and data analysis. Third, we identify three project work strategies in fusion research: content adjusting, temporal stretching, and (de)consolidation. In the final sections, we focus on organizational and institutional contexts and suggest that projects should be understood as highly malleable. In conclusion, we return to the relationship between Rosa’s notion of social acceleration and projectification and claim that project work strategies we identified emerge as a product of the dialectical interplay of projectification and stabilization contexts, that enables the occurrence of new opportunities for crafting agency and negotiating time in research.

Projectification of scientific research

The projectification in and of research emerged only recently as a scholarly concern (Fowler et al., 2015; Sigl, 2016; Vermeulen, 2015; Ylijoki, 2015, 2016). Existing accounts show that the project is now a standard instrument used in organizations that govern research, particularly in “big science,” which the department we studied certainly belongs to. Based on a qualitative study of Finnish social scientists, Oili-Helena Ylijoki claims that the instrumental and compartmentalized format of project does not fit comfortably within the “organic” and largely unpredictable nature of the process of research. Ylijoki’s research and arguments triggered our interest in the projectification of research and how it relates to research time and social acceleration. We wanted to explore the claims about projects acting like “straitjackets” or “iron cages” in academic research and whether researchers feel “trapped” and “conquered” by project time to almost the full extent that the general literature on the proliferation of projects in the public domain both implicitly and (to a lesser degree) explicitly claims. Niki Vermeulen (2015: 31) suggests that projectification has an epistemic dimension when she says that “…a project format...determines not only the structure of the research process but also influences the content of science.” Vermeulen (2015: 31–32) looked into a particular Dutch genomics project about which she highlighted several “discontents” that are commonly associated with project format work: the short-term orientation in planning and execution; the hegemony of effectiveness, flexibility, and fixed time frames; and the overall “insensitive instrumentality” that characterizes the research process (see also Hodgson et al., 2019: 2–4).

A nuanced exploration of the personal and professional uncertainties attached to project-based work is provided by Lisa Sigl, even though in her study she rarely uses the term “project.” Sigl mapped various reactions to the projectification of life sciences in Austria in terms of epistemic and social uncertainties (2016: 3) and highlighted something often overlooked in debates on changes to the academic vocation, which is that, compared to other professions, there is already “enough” uncertainty (and often more excitement) in research itself. One of her insights is that epistemic uncertainties translate into individual and existential risks (2015: 8–9). A failed experiment, which might ultimately mean there will be no data and therefore no publication or any other kind of “valuable output,” could actually represent an existential threat. Especially for an early-career scholar, it could result in a researcher not being promoted, not having their contract extended beyond the project term, and, ultimately, not even having a job. Sigl (2016: 10–20), however, extensively discusses several ways of coping with this insecurity that are based on formal and informal social relations where one can become a member of “a clan” (where epistemic and social uncertainties dissolve in hierarchical guardianship) or “a collective” (where uncertainties are assessed and collegially distributed). Other coping mechanisms include formal and informal individual practices, where one can try to cope like “a manager” (uncertainties repackaged into manageable risks and subsequent sets of arrangements) or like “a trickster” (personal social uncertainties ignored and deliberate epistemic uncertainties created for others).

Nina Fowler et al. (2015) offer an interpretation of how projects are dealt with and faced by various researchers, project managers, and administrators working in the natural sciences and engineering in Sweden. The authors focus on daily research practices and note inconsistencies between the kind of practices associated with a project and how often that project—and its results—is presented to superiors and/or funders. They claim that “the taxonomies, tools, and techniques (that are being) imposed upon the research are partially accommodated, incorporated into research applications and into reporting, but much less so in daily research routines” (2015: 27). They identified three forms of resistance: the partial, sometimes fractional acceptance of project-related practices in research; the decoupling of a project’s requirements (especially administrative and research activities) by allocating them to a project’s administrative personnel; and the transfer of project-related work to a “new breed of project administrator,” young scholars without funds or senior support (Fowler et al., 2015: 26).

Existing accounts of the projectification of research stress often, but not exclusively, the negative sides of the project format in research and tend to frame project workers—researchers—in the role of “victims” of the project format. With our analysis, we would like to nuance this perspective by elaborating on some of the insights from organizational and management studies mentioned above. Our objective is to point out that often the same tendencies that make someone vulnerable can also increase their autonomy or otherwise strengthen their positions. Before we present our typology of project work in and with projects, we will discuss the site of our analysis: a nuclear fusion research department in the Czech Republic.

Fusion reserach: data, methods, venue

Fusion research is a vast research area that encompasses a range of disciplines, from experimental physics to engineering and material science. What unites this branch is its specific “futuristic” objective of designing a functional power plant that operates on the principle of fusing light atomic nuclei at high temperatures to release energy. This process of producing energy is considered to be extraordinarily clean⁴ and safe.⁵

The history of fusion research dates back to the first half of the 20th century, when astrophysicist Arthur Eddington suggested in the 1920s that the Sun and other stars obtain their energy from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. After that, fusion started to be experimented within laboratories and from the 1950s, the first machines for such experiments, namely, tokamaks and stellarators (replicating the natural processes of energy release), began to be constructed (Eurofusion, n.d.). Since then, nuclear fusion has been researched in dozens of machines around the world. The largest fusion experiment worldwide and one of the most expensive scientific experiments on the planet, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), is being built in southern France with the joint efforts and resources of seven of the world’s largest economies (China, EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and USA). Fusion research has always been tightly intertwined with various political and civilizational agendas, and the recent climate- and safety-oriented societal and political pivots away from both fossil fuels and nuclear fission have again turned attention to this energy sector in-the-making (see Bromberg, 1982; Max Planck Society, 2016).

In this sense, nuclear fusion research lies at the intersection of basic and applied scientific approaches. As a senior scientist from the department we studied noted, nuclear fusion is “mission-oriented research”:

When someone researches astrophysics or particle science in CERN,⁶ the whole motivation is to go after the physics, to explain it. If we wanted to go after plasma physics, (…), we would build slightly different machines. [Our device] is not optimal plasma fusion experiment; it is optimal for achieving high temperatures that enable energy release. So, it is something like rocket science, where you don’t have to understand everything, but the main thing is that it has to work.

However, such devotion to a quest for a particular applied solution does not free fusion researchers and departments from the need to create scientific knowledge in the form of academic research articles and the like. As such, fusion research is characterized as “technoscientific” in the sense that “new technologies are constructed both to develop new energy systems and to produce scientific knowledge” (Hackett et al., 2004: 749 paraphrasing Latour, 1987: 174–175). Constant tension between these two cultures (epistemic and technogenic) is a defining feature of fusion research that also contributes to fusion departments being unique workplaces, equipping researchers and technicians with variety of transferable skills, enabling them to easily find jobs elsewhere.⁷

This article draws on an analysis of data one of the authors generated at a plasma physics department in the Czech Republic.⁸ The ethnographic fieldwork took place between October 2016 and October 2017, with average 1–2 research visits to the department per week. The research consisted of participant observation in the laboratory, regular attendance of department meetings, observation of experiments, semi-structured interviews with 25 department members (some interviewed multiple times), and informal conversations on- and off-site. The semi-structured interviews usually lasted 1–2 h, and workers were asked about their everyday work and operation of the department, project and funding strategies, and their career choices, while being allowed to bring their own topics and agendas into the interviews. The department members interviewed ranged from graduate students and junior and senior researchers to technicians/engineers and managers. Although various age-groups and career stages are represented in the department, there are proportionally more early-career researchers. However, it became apparent from the interviews with the (post)doctoral students and early stage researchers that their involvement with management and administration of projects was rather limited, so for the sake of this article, we decided to focus on senior researchers in mapping how both they and the department navigate in the sphere of projectified science.

Based on our conversations with physicists from different research departments in related fields and a simple web search, it is clear that the selected department is one with a good reputation and high visibility in the national scientific scene. It is generally regarded as having progressive management and a young and lively staff, and it has been growing since the 1990s, from roughly 15 to 60 or so active members in 2017.

The department also makes active use of its attractive experimental device and energy crisis-solving mission, focusing on openness in public relations (it organizes frequent open house days and guided tours around the laboratory). National and European science stakeholders and politicians often visit the laboratory, and many researchers are actively involved in various external institutions (such as universities). The laboratory was also exceptionally open to us conducting our research, allowing us generous and unhurried access to the facility.

The laboratory under study is well established in the European consortium of fusion research institutes, and, as such, a significant part of its activity consists of working on topics and tasks in preparation for a DEMOnstration Power Station (DEMO)⁹ plant, the expected successor of ITER. Fusion research is thus not concentrated in one central facility but is being carried out by a variety of devices dispersed around the globe that engage in coordinated and supplementary research agendas organized and planned for the large international experiments (ITER, subsequently DEMO).

This essential need for coordination of fusion devices’ operation and the exclusive applied goal that unites them arguably helped transform fusion research into a highly projectified field, with projects being the main units along which work agendas, tasks, and funding are organized and distributed. As such, it is a well-suited site for investigating projectification effects, their impact, and how those are dealt with.

Project work strategies

There is a shared sentiment across the studied department (especially among senior physicists with lengthy research experience) that there has been a great proliferation of projects in the department in recent years. This expanding projectification tends to be described along two lines. First, there has been an increase in funding for projects, especially when compared with the rather “static” amount of institutional funding. This very shift, however, gradually led to a substantial dependence on project funding. Although we were not able to access accounting books and financial records, according to the department’s manager, project funding now makes up roughly 80% of the department’s total budget. Nevertheless, he later explained that certain long-term funding schemes, though they are technically called “projects,” actually “secure financial stability” and significantly supplement institutional funding. He further adjusted the ratio to 60% coming from short-term project funding and 40% from long-term funding schemes. The large number of and differences between project schemes has also meant a hitherto unprecedented complexification of administrative work and increase in the effort required to meet different funders’ requirements (which also involves frequently changing rules, controls, and audits).

Second, some researchers considered the proliferating project schemes to be narrower, more focused, more task-oriented, and thus more constraining on the possible scope of research activities. One senior researcher noted:

I can compare the former and the current European grant schemes, when before the assignment was much broader and it went like ‘Do what you want among the approved topics and then tell us what kind of results you have’, but now there are these very specific calls on selected topics, where people have to write how much time they will spend on it, what exactly they will accomplish, even though they don’t really know that in advance.

The proliferation of the project format (along both aforementioned axes) is our starting point, and our aim here is to focus on strategies and practices that highlight how projects are dealt with, accommodated, and “gamed” with in specific historical and organizational contexts of the fusion research department in the Czech Republic.

We now turn to three strategies researchers and the department employed when dealing with projects and their growing presence and near-ubiquity in the everyday operation of the department. By identifying these strategies, we aim to demonstrate the diversity of contexts in which projects occur and are subject to or enable changes. In particular, we focused on strategies that highlight both how projects’ qualities can be changed and altered (Strategies 1 and 2) and how projects are instruments of change (mainly concerning career and organizational politics) (Strategy 3).

Strategy 1: Content Adjustment

A common critique of projects as units for the organization of scientific work focuses on their strict boundedness and linearity and their insensitivity to the organic nature and time considerations of the research process. In spite of (or maybe because of) the consolidation of projectification dynamics in research environments across disciplines, we observed various highly creative approaches used to adjust, amend, or alter the terms of a project. We can illustrate this here through the example of a senior scientist’s research project supported by a national grant funder. The four-year research grant was originally provided for a project that sought to construct a unique diagnostic device that was expected to be used to carry out measurements in an environment with very high plasma temperatures. In the case of its successful construction, a patent was expected both by the research team and the funder. However, in the course of work on the project, the principal investigator (PI) and his team were repeatedly unable to construct this diagnostic device. Eventually, the team decided to change strategy, abandon the initial plan, and repurpose the project objective. To do so, they focused on the secondary aims of the initial project, which involved modeling and experiments conducted with different, already established machinery, and on a side objective of contributing to a specific task within the ITER experiment.

As the PI of this project explained to us, throughout the project, he and his team strategically and pragmatically produced a substantial number of high-quality publications on the original as well as modified goals of the project. In the project’s final report, there was a detailed and honest explanation of why the diagnostic device did not work and why it could not be built (e.g., the wrong materials were selected) and the continued pursuit of this goal given the repeated failures was explained as “inefficient.” The funding body’s evaluation panel seemed to understand and accept this reasoning, and the project received an extremely positive evaluation, in which the panel highlighted two aspects of the project’s outcomes: the international dimension of the project’s results, which had contributed significantly to a well-known international experiment, and the large number of diverse and quality publications.

This project was much discussed in the department, and its evaluation was eagerly awaited. Although this particular project was a somewhat exceptional case, for many of the department’s scientists, it seemed to only reflect the broader changes that had been taking place in the current field of projectified science. In a discussion with several of the department’s physicists, we registered two sets of remarks that relate to the aforementioned project and the way that project format is becoming flexible. The first remark can be summarized as “lessons learned”: the main thing that counts is the number of articles produced—that is the crucial requirement the funding body expects to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, after carefully reading the evaluation report, it became clear to us that the funder’s evaluation panel had considered not only the quantitative but also the qualitative parameters of the project, such as whether the project had made a significant international contribution and how much student guidance it provided.

The second set of concerns related to a softening of the project criteria that grant recipients had to fulfill. Increasing amounts of scientific funding are being distributed through grant funds, and the institutions that are of major relevance are dependent on them. If they are for some reason unable to fulfill the objectives they set out in the application for funding and that they are expected to meet, they cannot simply be labeled “nonperforming” (i.e., the “too big to fail” principle). According to a senior researcher, the mechanism works as follows: on the one hand, scientists tend to write evermore ambitious proposals to distinguish themselves from each other, and on the other hand, the funding body’s evaluators are aware of this strategy and thus are increasingly tolerant of scientists not meeting the outlined goals. A certain degree of adjustment of the (initially) intended content of projects is therefore becoming part of the research game in academic life (see Lucas, 2006).

However, the research grant described here was a significant, though perhaps unusual case. It was risky since it depended mainly on the development of a novel diagnostic device (which ultimately failed). According to Flyvbjerg’s (2006) case study typology, it would stand for an “extreme case” that tends to be richer in information and produce more insights than representative cases since it activates more actors and processes. The extreme case is valuable because it highlights common practices and tendencies in a dramatic way. As over the course of our fieldwork, we noticed researchers trying to employ “safer” strategies in their grant applications; in the following section, we will turn from an extreme case to increasingly common practices across many scientific disciplines and fields: strategies that would prevent projects’ content shifting from even occurring.

Strategy 2: Temporal Stretching

A significant concern of the project-based work environments is how to secure continuity between projects. According to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), the ability to secure continuation of projects is a key characteristic of a successful individual of the project era. Here, we would like to draw attention to how increasing chances of successful “bridging” one project to another (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995: 449) is often dealt with by the strategy of stretching time boundaries of projects. One such strategy—widespread far beyond the studied department—is to apply for a research grant with a part of the intended research already planned and prepared prior to the application (see also Serrano-Velarde, 2012 on “how [researchers] ask for money”). A seasoned scientist we interviewed explained to us that when he and his research team first applied for funding for a specific project, they put together a proposal built on yet untested premises and notions. After they were unsuccessful with this, they changed their strategy:

When it came to our latest project, we applied for funds when we had already completed a part of the planned research. This proved to be a significantly better tactic. It’s like, you are half a year or a year ahead, it’s easier then. Before, we asked with nothing; even some of the diagnostic equipment wasn’t functioning yet.

In this sense, researchers “manufacture” additional time, they were “half a year or year ahead,” within the temporal boundaries of the given project that, in effect, allowed them to operate in a partially decelerated and organic research fashion that is not strictly mirroring the time-pressed projectified research rhythms. Acknowledging this strategy, another researcher told us that he has gradually adopted a similar strategy: only once he had “something” completed would he apply for project funding. Usually this meant he had some preliminary results that he felt might “lead to something,” and only under those circumstances would he apply for project funding. Regardless of whether the portion of completed research work is mentioned in the grant application, it proved to be a common practice integrated into project work—an integral part of a tactical repertoire that is widely common outside this department as well.

Since the department operates with a perpetually decreasing share of institutional funding, it is rarely an option to experiment with something “in the meantime” after one project is completed and before the next has started. Researchers tend to be involved in projects continually and are often working on several at the same time. A common option, then, is to spend some of the current project’s research time performing research in preparation for the next project. This temporal tactic then allows researchers to “stretch” time in the forthcoming project, given that some chunk of it is already completed. This appears to be such a ubiquitous tactic that it was caricatured in a popular webcomic that we noticed in the files we went through with a former head of the department during an interview (Figure 1):

Figure 1.

“The grant cycle.” Source: http://www.phdcomics.com

In this way, the research project and the research process do not share the same “temporal window” or period. Kateřina Falk, a notable Czech astrophysicist based in Dresden, highlighted in an interview (January 2020) the diachronization of project and process and attributed it mainly to the rather short period of time in which grant projects are usually designed and receive funding for in the Czech Republic:

The problem is that if you submit a project to establish a research group in Germany, you get five years for it. In the Czech Republic, the grants are designed for three years and a person is already expected to publish after the first one. I am now publishing research I conducted in 2015. In the Czech Republic researchers submit grant proposals for things they have done already.¹⁰

This tactic of diachronizing grant projects and the research process significantly stretches the time window in which to carry out research, so researchers are able to “manufacture” additional time. Researchers can then proceed to explore riskier topics and cope with related possible failures during the time before they submit a project application. And only after that do these topics (often a safer, already tested version of them) appear in grant proposals. This practice can then be understood as a specific way of coping with uncertainty (Sigl, 2016) in highly projectified research environments (with senior researchers having a clear advantage over early-career researchers since this strategy cannot be applied without previous successfully awarded projects). In its consequences, this strategy mitigates temporal strictness and linearity of projects. On the one hand, it reduces the pressure on scientists to deliver the results in a time frame strictly demarcated by projects. On the other hand, the generally high rate of successful project completion can be partly explained by the fact that some of the research work is carried out in the time preceding the project, with especially the riskier and often cutting-edge ideas being carefully tested before making it into grant proposals.

Not only are projects altered and stretched in their everyday use as the first two strategies demonstrate but they are also used to advance career and organizational politics as is the case of the following strategy.

Strategy 3: (De)consolidation

Some grant schemes, such as the major long-term large-volume funding administered by the Ministry of Education, serve as a de facto quasi-institutional source of funds: they are crucial for the everyday operation of the department. When it comes to standard short-term projects in the Czech Republic (usually three years) for which small research teams seek funding from a national funding body, they have until recently been considered as rather exclusive sources of finance and distinction that researchers could voluntarily apply for. There has nevertheless been increased pressure from department management for something we call “project performance” and on staff to seek and attract funding. With intense project performance being the new norm, applying for a project grant does not generate as much prestige and distinction as it used to. A seasoned researcher told us in an interview: “It is becoming a necessity, not a privilege, to be awarded a grant; it is no longer proof of uniqueness or excellence, but a necessity that is being forced on people owing to a lack of institutional funding.”

We noted that there is a set of project work practices employed in this respect. In relation to the department as such, the effects of a researcher winning project funding work in two opposing directions: consolidatory and de-consolidatory (or centrifugal and centripetal). On the one hand, getting a project grant can increase a researcher’s independence from their department as projects are used as a means of epistemic and financial autonomy. On the other hand, funded projects act as consolidators of research teams and of the agendas of the department.

As for the centrifugal effect, we observed that projects were used as a means of enabling and crafting more individualistic opportunities. We conducted two interviews with a senior researcher and each took on a very different shape. In the first interview, he said that he was demotivated and felt overwhelmed by the burden of administrative work and complained that his workday consisted mainly of “dealing with the (administrative) agenda” and that he felt guilty when “doing science” at the expense of administration. Then, in the second interview that took place nearly a year later, he was much more relaxed and positive. He told us that he had succeeded in winning a large grant for a project at his other job and that his new position would mean a significant decrease in administrative work.¹¹ Since he occasionally voiced criticism of some of the department’s management and administrative practices, we interpreted the improvement in his situation as partly connected to his heightened autonomy in relation to the studied department, which he attained by establishing a stronger connection to a different institution through the newly acquired funding. Projects can thus function as an accepted way of reducing one’s presence at a scientific workplace (or of distancing oneself more from specific agendas and research strategies) without disconnecting from it altogether. This strategy, again, tends to be an option for the experienced (and privileged) since one needs to be well established in the scientific field, have significant social capital, and have knowledge of various grant schemes and research opportunities to be able to create autonomy via use of funding.

As for the centripetal effect, we noticed the consolidation in both the personal dimension and research agenda due to projectification dynamics. So far, we have focused on project strategies of individuals and although we registered accounts of researchers describing projects as useful instruments of consolidating research teams, topics, and research ideas into coherent project grants, we will illustrate this strategy on a departmental level since a prominent change occurred during the final stage of our research stay. A large grant (the quasi-institutional type of funding mentioned at the beginning of this section) was awarded to the department to build a new experimental device—a tokamak—that most of the department’s researchers and technicians work with. This substantive change, which will lead to the department’s reorganization in the years to come, prompted lively discussions about how the department functions and the character of the knowledge and work it generates.

Fusion research departments establish their position among other fusion laboratories by creating strategic similarities (to create links to departments) and strategic differences (to distinguish themselves from others) (Hackett et al., 2004). Strategic choices are then built into the ensemble of fusion research technologies (such as plasma properties, design characteristics of the device, and diagnostic instruments) and form and direct the department’s research program (ibid.). The planned design for the experimental device in the studied department included distinct and original features intended to create a suitable combination of similarities and differences to attract attention and funding and to avoid being perceived as obsolete in the years to come. The novel characteristics and features were decided upon by the department’s manager in consultation with international fusion research institutions and would make the new device indispensable in future European research. The design was novel and risky, both in terms of the actual construction of the device and its future operation, and many department researchers and technicians raised concerns about the feasibility of the project. The epistemic uncertainties turning into existential risks described by Sigl (2016) in the case of young scholars extended here with building a new risky device across the department and its hierarchies. Nevertheless, as the deparmental manager explained in a meeting, the device with unique global parameters would have a secure and strong position in the European research area and would improve their chances of obtaining stable European funding, thus overcoming the current state of fighting “for a couple thousand Euros every year” with small-scale projects.

The complicated design of the tokamak was justified (surprisingly) by the director as yet another of its potential advantages: not only would the majority of scientists not need to change their research topics and fields but they could also continue with their line of work without dramatic changes on a much-advanced device. This bold new device was presented in his narrative as a secure means to enhance one’s career and epistemic security. Researchers would be safe with continuing their ongoing work and the new design, and altered material conditions were themselves imagined to amplify scientific novelties. The researchers’ and technicians’ worries about the stress they expected to experience as a result of doubts about the feasibility of the construction process and how the machine would operate later on, given the many unknowns, were reversed by the manager. Only a risky and indispensable design would be able to attract European funding structures and thus stabilize researchers’ and technicians’ careers and create attractive research opportunities since the department, as a result of their commitment to build and operate this device, would grow in size and importance within the international scientific community.

Leaving aside the question of whether the new device would lead to more or less epistemic (and existential) security, it is clear that this project results in a new ensemble of technologies and will influence the careers of a number of researchers and technicians significantly—and in the long term (see Hackett et al., 2004). When we were leaving the meeting, one of the researchers noted with excitement: “This new research shift will change the course of my life till retirement!” In circumstances where institutional funding is low, projects become instruments of changes of all sorts, even the substantial ones—causing strategic, expensive, technoscientific shifts. A large project with the capacity to fund a significant part of the department’s work for a number of years functions as a feasible way to remedy a situation in which fragmented, short-term, and insecure projects are required as a significant source of external funding for the departmental budget.

Although the opportunity to break free from the “project race” this provides is temporary and limited (and as such does not represent a solution to over-projectified science), it at least allows a partial escape from the race and strenghtens (at least temporarily) successful reproduction of the department, enabling it to move and grow, and consolidating it along the lines of new research agendas.

Stabilizing contexts

In this analysis, we identified three project work strategies. Members of the studied department were able to modify projects, stretch their temporalities, flexibilize them, or otherwise slacken the straitjacket projects are assumed to represent as temporal, managerial, and accountability devices. Projects are also being used as productive instruments for increasing one’s autonomy as well as tools for consolidating research teams and agendas. However, projectification does not act alone: it is a context-dependent process. Projects always take place in a specific socio-material context that both enables projectification and constrains it; they are history-dependent and organizationally embedded and shaped by a variety of aspects, forces, issues, decisions, and solutions occurring outside or beyond an individual project (Engwall, 2003). We argue that in the case of the department we studied, there were forces and efforts, both unintentional and orchestrated, that accompanied, soothed, and mitigated the effects of projectification—especially those of the more detrimental nature frequently mentioned.

We would like to highlight three of them that we consider prevalent in the studied department. First, there is the ensemble of research technologies and the operation of the fusion experiment that is the central focus of the department’s work. The assumed strictness of the project is relaxed by the (need to operate the) fusion device itself because it requires continual and collective maintenance conducted by a number of people and technologies, and the device does not always perform according to the plans and timetables inscribed in project applications. We witnessed a number of obstacles (as seen via Strategy 1), delays, and slowdowns throughout our research, never mind the instrumental framework and outputs and the overall “accelerative push” required by a project time-line.

Second, the funding bodies that evaluate departmental research rarely focus solely on publication outputs and other quantitative criteria, as their more qualitatively-oriented evaluation mechanisms assess department activities not related to publishing, such as pedagogical and popularizing activities, international collaboration, and the overall “vitality” of the research environment. As such, the evaluations of funding bodies encourage supported institutions to focus also on nonquantifiable aspects of research performance (e.g., public engagement). Moreover, fusion research as a field of study has been gaining significant international political attention which means, among other things, an increase in the available funding that can be allocated through project schemes in the European Union.¹² Here, we offer an extension of Ylijoki’s (2015, 2016, see also Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003) findings that research projects colonize the (research) process as there is a need for nuance here: large projects (primarily, but not exclusively) in the department that we studied appeared to have the ability to embed and enable research processes and advance novel explorative research pathways.

The third aspect of the environment we investigated involves departmental governance and leadership, where there is a concerted effort to translate the instrumental aspects of project rationality into a stable research environment. There is an implicit tendency to a certain division of labor in the department with, for example, senior researchers (being experts on project management and administration) helping those younger or less skilled, who then deal with limited amount of administrative tasks.¹³ In addition, an annual evaluation of the department’s workers is conducted by the manager that follows the logic of doing “good for the department” and is not based solely on academic metrics such as publication output. We also noticed that the strictness of projects and related pressures were often filtered through and to an extent “absorbed” by the manager. On the one hand, he used projects to consolidate and accelerate the productivity of the department; on the other hand, his “absorptive leadership” acted as a strong stabilizing force when it came to mitigating pressures that arose from the project format. Many of the researchers we spoke to, however, supported the department’s “protective” management and continuous growth (in terms of technical and scientific personnel as well as funds) that secured jobs and (in exchange) seemed to have accepted the management’s directions and its organizational strategies concerning the labor force.¹⁴

Only with these strong individual and collective efforts were some of the negative consequences of projectification being mitigated. The question remains whether such a state is sustainable (especially with the new large project grant that the department has been awarded), and whether some negative effects of projectification would soon become much more pronounced. To answer this is a task beyond our analysis; nevertheless, our analysis has identified projects as malleable since they are open to various agentic gaming strategies that researchers employ and they are a mode of work in which it is possible to “negotiate” time—to stretch, exchange, save time, speed up, and slow down—within and beyond the project format (Guzmán-Valenzula and Barnett, 2013; Ylijoki, 2016).

Conclusion: between flexibilization and stabilization

Following studies of Fowler et al. (2015), Sigl (2016), Vermeulen (2015), and Ylijoki (2015, 2016), our analysis aims to contribute to empirical accounts of projectification in and of science. In our ethnographically driven analysis, we demonstrated that specific features of projects in fusion research might be adjusted and stretched, and projects might serve as devices for crafting research autonomy or consolidating agendas and research teams. We aimed to investigate projects beyond the claim that they are mere “tools” that are “efficient and influential in speeding up research activities and strengthening the instrumental, calculative and ‘alienating’ stance toward time” (Ylijoki, 2015: 103) and show that projects and project work are also mobilized for pursuing various (micro)political agendas and particular objectives.

Our analysis adds another layer of understanding to projectification focusing mainly on strategies of senior academics (and partly of the department) in a specific field of “big science.” Being the ones intensely exposed to projectification dynamics in the studied department, senior researchers often sit in strategic positions by having accumulated knowledge and experience with projects’ schemes and related opportunities. However, the departmental division of labor leaves them assigned to excessive administrative and managerial loads and other duties related to the operation of the department. As such, researchers employing identified strategies cannot be straightforwardly labeled as winners of the projectification game.

The three strategies that we identified are in dialectical interplay with the aforementioned context-specific forces as projects are always situated—“no project is an island” as Engwall (2003) notes. Our analysis stresses the stabilizing effects of these contexts that contribute to making the identified strategies possible and mitigating some of the often-mentioned detrimental effects related to projectification.

Returning to the overall framing and rationale of the article, that is, the relationship between acceleration, projects, and projectification, we want to build on Rosa’s observations that acceleration is conditioned by stabilizing institutions, contexts, and forces. However, instead of rendering identified strategies as mere examples of tactical or functional deceleration, we suggest that there are particular dialectics in play, which take into account the strong projectification tendencies in and of research on the one hand, and stabilizing forces on the other hand. The strategies we identified emerge as a product of such dialectical interplay that yields novel opportunities for crafting (temporal) agency and negotiating time that go beyond the reductive fast/slow dichotomy that nowadays often characterizes contemporary accounts of temporality of research. As such, beyond contributing to existing debates with new insights from a specific discipline, our analysis also opens up questions that might be addressed in future research focusing on new opportunities and strategies cropping out from the interplay of fast and slow forces and tendencies.

Needless to say, the fusion research department investigated above is not a representative case of scientific organization. It is highly projectified on the one hand and strongly stabilized by an ensemble of research technologies and organizational management on the other hand. This almost extreme nature of our case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) implies limitations in terms of the generalizability of our findings that do not aspire to unfold projectified working and researching in the general sense. In line with this, it would be interesting to conduct further empirical studies in disciplines where the stabilizing forces do not play such a crucial role and investigate what sorts of sacrifices, deals and benefits are negotiated in environments where the increasingly powerful project-driven forces prevail.

The question remains as to whether identified strategies serve as evidentiary material of “healthy” and ethical development in research organizations or whether they are the manifestations of systemic dysfunction; whether they are marks of scientists’ empowerment, or signs of coping and survival; and whether they strengthen researchers’ capabilities and abilities or rather deepen their victimization while concealing structural malfunctions in current research systems. We want to leave such ethical evaluations aside and instead encourage further thinking in what adequate theoretical frameworks and conceptual grounds might be deployed when striving to understand navigating and strategizing in structurally changing (scientific) landscapes. The dichotomies such as the fast/slow academy (Vostal et al. 2019), though increasingly popular, do not seem to be particularly productive in providing an understanding of the (temporal) dynamics of research and the role of the project therein.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank researchers, engineers and managers of the studied department. We also thank Tereza Stöckelová for her comments on earlier draft of this paper and Robin Cassling, Douglas Shields Dix and Xing Su for proofreading and editing the paper. We are particularly grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions and constructive critique improved the paper significantly.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work on this article was supported by two grants awarded by The Czech Science Foundation, namely grant no. 16-18371Y and grant no. 19-15511S.

ORCID iD

Tereza Virtová

Notes

Authors biographies

Tereza Virtová is a researcher at the Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and a doctoral candidate in general anthropology at Charles University. She has conducted research in the fields of science and education and is interested in the study of work and technology.

Filip Vostal works as a research associate at the Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Accelerating Academia: Changing Structure of Academic Time (Palgrave, 2016) and editor of Inquiring into Academic Timescapes (Emerald, 2021). He currently runs a project that examines visual and temporal aspects of knowledge production in molecular biophysics.

References

Alhadeff-Jones

(2021) Time and the rhythms of academia: a rhythmanalytical perspective. In: Vostal

(ed) Inquiring Into Academic Timescapes. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 21–37.

Barondeau

Hobbs

(2018) A pragmatic sociological examination of projectification. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 12(2): 282–297.

Boltanski

Chiapello

(2005) The Spirit of New Capitalism. London, UK: Verso.

Bromberg

(1982) Fusion: Science, Politics and the Invention of a New Energy Source. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clegg

Baumeler

(2010) Essai: From iron cages to liquid modernity in organization analysis. Organization Studies 31(12): 1713–1733.

Cockain

(2018) Regarding Mr. Wu, a Dragon and conversations in traffic: social acceleration, deceleration and re-acceleration in Shanghai. Time & Society 27(3): 363–383 DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15611394.

D’Ambrosio

(2019) From present to presentation: a philosophical critique of Hartmut Rosa’s “situational identity”. Time & Society 28(3): 1061–1083 DOI: 10.1177/0961463X18787059.

Dakka

(2021) Rhythm and the possible: moments, anticipation and dwelling in the contemporary university. In: Vostal F (ed) Inquiring into Academic Timescapes. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 39–57.

Dakka

Smith

(2019) An exploration of rhythms in the contemporary academy: time, space and affect. Theory and Method in Higher Education Research 5: 153–171.

(2018) Temporal conditioning and the dynamics of inter-institutional projects. International Journal of Project Management 36(2018): 673–686.

11.

Engwall

(2003) No project is an Island: Linking projects to history and context. Research Policy 32 (2003): 789–808.

12.

Eurofusion (n.d.) History of Fusion. Available at: https://www.euro-fusion.org/fusion/history-of-fusion/ (accessed on November 2019).

13.

Flyvbjerg

(2006) Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry 12(2): 219–245.

14.

Fowler

Lindahl

Sköld

(2015) The projectification of university research. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 8(1): 9–32.

15.

Gershuny

Sullivan

(2018) Speed-up society? Evidence from the UK 2000 and 2015 time use diary surveys. Sociology 52(1): 20–38.

16.

Guzmán-Valenzula

Barnett

(2013) Marketing time: Evolving timescapes in academia. Studies in Higher Education 38(8): 1120–2113.

17.

Hackett

Conz

Parker

, et al. (2004). Tokamaks and turbulence: Research ensembles, policy and technoscientific work. Research Policy 33(5): 747–767.

18.

Hodgson

Fred

Bailey

Hall

(2019) Introduction. In: Hodgson D, Fred M, et al. (eds) The Projectification of the Public Sector. London, UK: Routledge, 1–18.

19.

Hsu

(2014) The Sociology of sleep and the measure of social acceleration. Time & Society 23(2): 212–234 DOI: 10.1177/0961463X13486729.

20.

Iparraguirre

(2021) Cultural rhythmics inside academic temporalities. In: Vostal

(ed) Inquiring Into Academic Timescapes. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 59–72.

(2016) The projectification of everything: projects as a human condition. Project Management Journal 47(3): 21–34.

22.

Kreiner

(1995) In search of relevance: Project management in drifting environments. Scandinavian Journal of Management 11(4): 335–346.

23.

Kreiner

(2014) Restoring project success as phenomenon. In: Lundin

Hällgren

(eds) Advancing Research on Projects and Temporary Organizations. Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press.

24.

Latour

(1987) Science in Action. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press.

25.

Lefebvre

(2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

26.

Lucas

(2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

27.

Lundin

Söderholm

(1995) A theory of the temporary organization. Scandinavian Journal of Management 11(4): 437–455.

28.

Lyon

(2018) What Is Rhythmanalysis? London, UK: Bloomsbury.

29.

Max Planck Society (2016) Angela Merkel switches on Wendelstein 7-X fusion device. Available at: https://www.mpg.de/9926419/wendelstein7x-start (accessed on March 2020).

30.

Montero

Torres

(2020) Acceleration, alienation, and resonance: reconstructing Hartmut Rosa’s theory of modernity. Pléyade: Revista de Humanidades y Ciencials Sociales 25 (enero-junio): 155–181.

31.

Rosa

(2005) The speed of global flows and the pace of democratic politics. New Political Science 27(4): 445–459.

32.

Rosa

(2010) Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmo, Sweden: NSU Press.

33.

Rosa

(2013) Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. New York, USA: Columbia University Press.

34.

Rosa

(2015a) Capitalism as a spiral of dynamization: sociology as social critique. In: Dörre

Lessenich

Rosa

(eds) Sociology, Capitalism, Critique. London: Verso, 67–97.

35.

Rosa

(2015b) Temporary workers and active citizens: what is wrong with late modern capitalism? In: Dörre

Lessenich

Rosa

(ed) Sociology, Capitalism, Critique. London, UK: Verso, 164–180.

36.

Rosa

(2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

37.

Rosa

Dörre

Lessenich

(2017) Appropriation, activation and acceleration: the escalatory logics of capitalist modernity and the crises of dynamic stabilization. Theory, Culture & Society 34(1): 53–73.

38.

Saini

(2017) Inferior. London, UK: Fourth Estate.

39.

Schöneck

(2018) Europeans’ work and life - out of balance? An empirical test of assumptions from the “acceleration debate”. Time & Society 27(1):3–39. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15577286.

40.

Sharma

(2014) In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, USA: Duke University Press.

41.

Sigl

(2016) On the tacit governance of research by uncertainty. Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(3): 347–374.

42.

Vermeulen

(2015) From virus to vaccine: projectification of science in the VIRGO consortium. In: Penders

Vermeulen

Parker

(eds) Collaboration Across Health Research and Medical Care: Healthy Collaborations. London, UK: Routledge, 31–58.