The Institute for Higher Education Management would like to invite you to the upcoming lecture: Just following the money? How research funding shapes the governance of university research
Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 4pm CET
Speaker: Jürgen Janger, economist at WIFO, the Austrian institute of economic research
Location: online via MS Teams livestream.
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Abstract:
Two main reforms have taken place in many European university systems: first, universities have supposedly become autonomous strategic actors. Second, research funding has changed to a complex mix of often performance-based block grants and competitive project-based grants. However, literature so far has barely investigated how different research funding characteristics affect universities’ capacity to act strategically. We build a novel conceptual framework to argue that funding arrangements impact university leadership’s strategic space to steer research along three dimensions: the locus of the governance of research activities, how strategies are implemented, and which directions research takes. We investigate this in a comparative analysis of how research is governed at universities in Sweden and Austria, providing a systematic account of the effects of varying characteristics of research funding on strategically steering research at universities. Our results inform the discussion on whether and how financing can be used to govern university research.
About the speaker
Jürgen Janger is an economist at WIFO, the Austrian institute of economic research, where he has also been research group coordinator and deputy director for research in rotating, temporary management roles. His main research interests are science and innovation policy. A main research focus has been on the determinants of university research performance, attractive jobs and careers in academia, which he has investigated in many studies and research projects. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the large scale FP7 project WWWforEurope, coordinating research area 3 on innovation and science, which looked inter alia at the competitiveness of European science. He has also investigated research funding models, comparing the design of project-based funding across several large funders of basic research. Recently, he was an expert for the mutual learning exercise on research careers, responsible for the thematic report 3 on a balanced circulation of researchers.
