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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts in Science Policymaking

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Abstract

Excellence and frontier research have made inroads into European research policymaking and structure political agendas, funding programs and evaluation practices. The two concepts travelled a long way from the United States and have derived from contexts outside of science (and policy). Following their conceptual journey, we ask how excellence and frontier research have percolated into European science and higher education policies and how they have turned into lubricants of competition that buttress an ongoing reform process in Europe.

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Notes

  1. To name but a few, this includes the EU-funded Networks of Excellence (2002–2006), Germany’s Excellence Initiative (2006–2017) and its consecutive Excellence Strategy as of 2017/18, the European Research Council (as of 2007), France’s Initiatives d’excellence (as of 2010), and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (as of 2014), as a replacement of the Research Assessment Exercise.

  2. This is reflected inter alia in the very recent foundation of the research network “Conceptual Approaches to Science, Technology and Innovation” (www.casti.org). There seems to be a revival of conceptual history within the history of science (e.g., Godin 2006, 2017; Shapin 2012; Kaldewey 2013; Schauz 2014; for a compelling state of the art review, see Schauz 2015).

  3. Including the archives of Nature, Science, Jstor, Web of Science core collection and existing discussions of excellence and the frontier and adjacent variations of these terms in scientific and non-scientific literature, including speeches, policy documents etc., which we refer to over the next pages.

  4. As greatly mistaken for a border by Gibbons et al. (1994): 1, 20, 40, 43, 93, 160.

  5. Turner integrated his original treatise on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ from 1893 as the first chapter of his lifework, a monograph entitled ‘The Frontier in American History’ (1921).

  6. The historian zealously borrowed from the biological vocabulary of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), in particular evolutionary ideas of plant biology, and applied them to describe societal developments in the US. Turner’s new American frontiersmen were called “germs” that need to burgeon on barren soil, as the only way to ensure the prospering of a robust social organism: US society (Coleman 1966: 24–26).

  7. A full text search in the American journal Science reveals that the term ‘frontier’ (or frontiers) appears since 1887. Until 1903, 302 publications refer to the literal, i.e., the geographical frontiers, be it in the US, in Siberia or elsewhere. In the same year, few references started making use of the frontier metaphorically, e.g., when scientists called for overcoming disciplinary and national boundaries in the fields of physiography (Hobbs 1903: 539) and meteorology (Shaw 1903: 491). Others employed the term to discuss differences in university qualities, e.g., by pressing for financial endowments for “frontier colleges” (Chamberlin et al. 1903: 581). One year later, the frontier was used to argue that intellectual and industrial undertakings should not be regarded as a trade-off, as “progress in any department of human activity is followed by gains at other points along the frontier of the domain of the known” (Russell 1904: 843). Still, these examples remain exceptions.

  8. https://ki.mit.edu/approach/frontier (last accessed 05.01.2017).

  9. https://science.energy.gov/bes/efrc/ (last accessed 05.01.2017).

  10. About one third of researchers have come from abroad, the average age of all participating researchers is 35 years (http://www.riken.jp/lab-www/tera/OLD/english/frontier.html; last accessed 10.01.2017).

  11. The European Science Foundation was founded in 1974, but ever since it lacked institutional and financial backing, to say the least (Darmon 1997).

  12. The integration of new member states actors into collaborative research projects and the Marie Curie mobility schemes were also linked to this rationale, as they were designed to enhance the quality of R&D-entities from the new and often weak member states.

  13. Needless to say, the principle of subsidiarity required that supranational actions were not to be taken, if they already existed on lower levels governments (regional, national) or could arguably be taken by these.

  14. The Commission does not only argue that distinctions between basic and applied research have become blurred, but dramatizes the old technology gap between Europe, the US and Japan in that it would have exacerbated to a science-technological gap, so that the EU must heavily invest into all kinds of research activities including basic research.

  15. The title obviously presents a blend of Vannevar Bush’s (1945) Science: The Endless Frontier and Servan-Schreiber’s (1968) The American Challenge calling for an utmost urgency for Europe to tackle the technology gap against the US.

  16. That does not mean ‘excellence’ was not used as a term in scientific writings. From 1845-1958 only Nature mentions ‘excellence’ in 5,206 articles, whilst almost exclusively with regard to the quality of technical devices or research activities and hardly with respect to persons or that heavily laden meaning we will uncover.

  17. That education reform program had been in the hands of Gardner himself, who became Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

  18. See Majone (2006); with respect to science, technology and innovation policy, see, e.g., Lloyd Spencer (1970) and Guzzetti (1995).

  19. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM:i23027. The central concept in the legal decision is translated as ‘recherche exploratoire,’ whereas the ‘frontier’ is used literally to denote that research should be done independent of geographical borders (“indépendamment […] de frontières géographiques”) and that the frontiers of knowledge (“frontières de connaissance”) simply mean that researchers themselves should choose their subjects of study. In the German legal text, the term ‘Pionierforschung’ is closer to the American English meaning, as the pioneers are also in the center of the literal and metaphorical concept.

  20. This point has been emphasized by one of our anonymous reviewers whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Tim Flink

  2. Research Center Genealogy of Today, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118, 26111, Oldenburg, Germany

    Tobias Peter

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Flink, T., Peter, T. Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts in Science Policymaking. Minerva 56, 431–452 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9351-7

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