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Capacity-Based Evaluation
of DOE Research Centers
PI: Barry
Bozeman
Co-PI: Juan D. Rogers
Our work
continues to focus on “capacity-based evaluation” and scientific careers but
connects these aspects of our work directly to questions of management and institutional
structure. The unifying question for
proposed work is: “What is the impact
of different research management structures and institutional designs on,
generally, research resources and capacity and, specifically, on individual
researchers’ productivity, capacity, and career trajectories?”
Research
management and organizational design factors are often among the most important
determinants of whether research activities succeed or fail. This is especially
the case in “big science” efforts. While
most of those we interviewed seemed well aware of the impact of research
management and organizational design factors, these impacts are rarely given
much careful scrutiny by researchers, principal investigators and research
administrators.
What is
distinctive about our approach in the proposed research is that we look inside
the organization and we consider research management and design factors in
terms of not only traditional performance measures such as publications and
citations, but also research capacity, both the research unit’s capacity as
well as that of the individual scientists.
The question, then, is how does research management and organization
structure affect the on-going capacity for research effectiveness? We feel this is more important than, say,
relating organizational design to publications outcomes, because the question
gets at the long-term capabilities of research units, capabilities that
transcend immediate project activities.
We use
three methods to study the impact of research management and organization
design on the capacities of individuals and research units: case studies,
questionnaires (both face-to-face and self-administered via web survey) and
analysis of curriculum vitae, an approach our research team pioneered. Our analysis
will be conducted at both the individual and the institutional level. That is, our results will focus on the impact
of research management and organizational design practices on the research
performances of the research unit and on the individuals within the
research unit. We will pay particular
attention to the impacts on the capacities and scientific and technical human
capital of the research unit’s doctoral students, post doctoral researchers and
untenured faculty. Specifically, are the organizational culture and dominant
approaches to management facilitative for the professional growth of these
individuals?
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