The SAGE Handbook of Research Management

Robert Dingwall, Mary Byrne McDonnell, Robert Dingwall, Mary Byrne McDonnell, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781446203187
• eBook ISBN: 9781473914445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of Research Management is a unique tool for the newly promoted research leader. Larger-scale projects are becoming more common throughout the social sciences and humanities, housed in centres, institutes and programmes. Talented researchers find themselves faced with new challenges to act as managers and leaders rather than as individual scholars. They are responsible for the careers and professional development of others, and for managing interactions with university administrations and external stakeholders. Although many scientific and technological disciplines have long been organized in this way, few resources have been created to help new leaders understand their roles and responsibilities and to reflect on their practice. 

This Handbook has been created by the combined experience of a leading social scientist and a chief executive of a major international research development institution and funder. The editors have recruited a truly global team of contributors to write about the challenges they have encountered in the course of their careers, and to provoke readers to think about how they might respond within their own contexts. 

This book will be a standard work of reference for new research leaders, in any discipline or country, looking for help and inspiration. The editorial commentaries extend its potential use in support of training events or workshops where groups of new leaders can come together and explore the issues that are confronting them.  

Part I Getting Started

An academic career is marked by the expectation of stages of growth and increasing levels of responsibility. Initially, a promising young person learns how to excel as a graduate student and from there, how to undertake an initial dissertation research project. If successful, the gifted scholar may move on to a good, tenure track, position in a research university where he or she becomes a proficient teacher, begins to conduct additional individual research projects – building on the dissertation or exploring new lines of work, starts to mentor graduate students and takes on service tasks on behalf of the wider university community.

As a talented junior academic enters mid-career, it is common for them to be approached to take on roles such as department chair, centre director or associate dean. There is also an increasing expectation that such a person will build on their body of individual research by participating in collaborative team projects. On the basis of this experience, they should, ultimately, come to be seen as someone who can rise to the intellectual and management challenges of being a Principal Investigator (PI) and leader of a group working on a collective research endeavour. Successful leadership of research groups, centres, institutes or programmes is increasingly a prerequisite for advancing to more senior levels, both within the organizational structures of universities and the professional cultures of many academic disciplines.

At the same time, the social, economic and political issues that form the basis of our research inquiries are growing in complexity and can rarely be apprehended by a single individual within the perspectives and knowledge of a single discipline. Multiple disciplines must be brought to bear. A university that is seeking a strong research profile must demonstrate the capacity to win competitive bids for collaborative projects – and gain a reputation for their successful execution. The original project of most social sciences was predominantly domestic, focused on understanding the investigator's own society and those others in direct contact with it. In a globalizing and increasingly interrelated world, there is a growing demand for comparative research and the exploration of transnational research questions. Mixed methods are often needed to gain sufficient insights to explain the whole picture around a complex issue. Moreover, while it was once relatively straightforward to obtain research funding by choosing a topic that promised to fill a gap in scientific knowledge in a single field, and making a sound scientific argument for how to go about its investigation, today's PI must identify and engage with public or policy audiences, and demonstrate to them the project's importance, benefits and impact.

The types of skills and knowledge that PIs need are becoming more diverse, and the demands on their time are increasing. These changes are emanating from those who fund our research, our home universities and external institutions involved in our work, and from the members of the research teams that we are creating. A PI must be adept at expanding knowledge on a topic across one or more fields; at managing time, money and people; at coordinating diverse sets of actors across disciplines and national boundaries; at negotiating and garnering financial and other material resources; and at supervision and mentoring. Importantly, the PI must become a master communicator within the team, with those whose support is needed for success, and with the broader audiences and stakeholders in the work.

Despite the increase in the range and intensity of demands on those aspiring to move up the ladder and become PIs of major research groups, neither graduate school nor on-the-job learning as junior scholars systematically prepare academics to be effective at the full array of competencies required to develop fundable, feasible, collaborative research projects or lead teams of peers and junior researchers in their successful implementation.

The chapters in Part I assist aspiring PIs to get started on the road to becoming successful at developing, funding and leading major team research projects. Authors provide advice and ‘how to’ demonstrations based on their own experiences as funders, PIs and senior university research administrators as they examine the skills needed and demonstrate how to obtain them. These chapters address the challenge of positioning yourself and your work so that you will have a strong research profile to show potential funders. They supply guidance in creating a convincing research plan. The funders' perspectives are front and centre in Part I with chapters enhancing our understanding of how to read calls for expressions of interest and do the groundwork necessary to respond effectively to them; how to figure out what topics a funder is interested in and whether and how those interests can be meshed with yours; and how to craft a proposal from the perspective of the way funders will read it. A final contribution uses a case study of a successful submission to a highly competitive national government competition to demonstrate step by step how to tie all the pieces together as you move into the business of developing and attracting funding for a major team research project.

As you consider the advice offered in the chapters in Part I for getting started as a PI, you may also find it useful to take a look at Chapters 15 and 16 in Part III. They will give food for thought if you are considering collaboration across disciplines or comparative research. Jacqueline Williams Kaye's contribution (Chapter 40) might usefully be read alongside Robert Anderson's (Chapter 2) as assessment and strategic learning is one of the key uses a funder has for a research plan and should be considered as the plan is drafted.

In Chapter 1, David Stone and Robert Gutierrez focus on things you will need to do to enhance your chances of a successful bid well in advance of writing your first proposal for major research funding. The actual writing, they suggest, is the end goal of the process they outline. They argue that, early in your career, you must think seriously about your long term professional goals and then begin to position yourself over some period of time to be able to make a successful bid for large scale funding by making yourself known in key dimensions considered by those who judge a PI's suitability for the responsibilities of team project management. In their experience, PIs whose applications will be successful will have positioned themselves in three ways: as scholars, researchers and grant writers.

The problem is that while at least these three sets of skills are needed, graduate and postgraduate training has only helped potential PIs to be good scholars. Training as researchers is uneven at best. Some departments provide methods training while others do not; some disciplinary traditions will emphasize instruction in how to do fieldwork, whether qualitative or quantitative, while others leave it to your mentor and your own intuition. And universities do not subsequently train their scholars to be cross- disciplinary and comparative researchers, grant writers or research managers.

David and Robert's goal is in part to fill this gap. They define ‘positioning’ and discuss what is required to be seen as eligible for research leadership roles. Their analysis will permit you to judge how well placed you are along their three dimensions and identify specific steps to take to improve your position where you recognize that you are lacking. They outline the skills that you will need and suggest concrete strategies for obtaining those skills. For example, you can improve your credibility as a scholar through strategies to ensure your scholarly profile clearly demonstrates how your work fits alongside other well-regarded scholarly contributions to the debates in your area of work and to raise your standing in the literature. Devising a long term research agenda, and taking steps along that path, will support positioning yourself as someone able to engage in the thinking and planning required to deliver a large scale, multiyear team project. Their discussion of positioning to show yourself as a competent grant writer emphasizes how to develop a well-crafted literature review.

Chapter 1 touches on finding the right funder for your work, figuring out what the funder wants and aligning your project with the funder's interests. These themes are taken up in greater depth in subsequent chapters.

Robert Anderson overviews how to plan a large scale research project. He argues in Chapter 2 that the research plan is a critical management tool to be developed at the outset, revised and used continuously throughout the project. He details the elements of a typical plan and suggests how to go about drafting one that will be convincing and sufficiently flexible to be adjusted easily as you go along. The process of developing your plan will help you identify challenges at the outset and along the way; see and realign relationships between inputs, outputs and outcomes; and design arguments for the proposal, and for changes in strategy once the project is underway.

As a living guide, the research plan must be useful to you, to team members, to funders and to stakeholders. Each will take away something different from viewing your plan. Robert helps you understand the ways research plans send messages, both intended and unintended, about feasibility and the buy-in you have for the work. Drafting a convincing and doable plan that will meet your management needs, your team's need for guideposts and checkpoints and the uses of various stakeholders requires several balancing acts and Robert demonstrates how to navigate these. For example, since plans typically include benchmarks and milestones that mark the progress of the work, and against which the project will be reviewed, he urges you to avoid promising too much while providing value for the resources granted. Funders and reviewers are quick to spot the unrealism of a proposal that promised to deliver the moon and stars for sixpence – or ten cents. You must be convincing that your plan is doable within the timeframe while maintaining the flexibility and wiggle room to adjust as a result of unexpected serendipitous learning along the way.

Chapter 3 focuses on how to read funders while Chapter 4 examines the elements of a research proposal from the standpoint of the funder. Rajika Bhandari and Jonah Kokodyniak use examples from their perch in the research development department of a major not-for-profit educational institution to advise on how to read the calls for proposals and the interests of those in different funding sectors – private foundations, government agencies at different levels in the system, multi-laterals and corporate foundations – and how to balance what you learn with your own research interests and strengths and the priorities of your institution in order to strike a match. Successful research projects will advance the interests of each of these.

Rajika and Jonah argue that well-informed and deliberate decision making is key to ensuring the right fit between your research strengths and interests, the unique qualities you and your institution bring to the table, and a funder's goals and priorities. They discuss strategies for doing the legwork to find the right match including the roles of professional networks. Through examples, the pair explore how to clarify your value added or unique strengths and leverage your track record, while recognizing that what you have done might be built on in several potential additional ways. The choice of exactly which of several possible directions your next project might take, the niche you decide to carve out, relates in part to the ever evolving agendas of your potential funders as their own boards and political masters grow tired of prior agendas.

Negotiating with funders, educating them, forming empathetic relationships, compromising, using planning grants, and even entering into partnerships are all part of the toolkit Rajika and Jonah explore. Doing the groundwork to map the playing field of funders, determining your niche in relationship to the funding environment at a given time, and crafting strong relationships with officers in potential agencies – all are key elements to a successful funding strategy.

However, Rajika and Jonah caution that there will be times when you come to believe that the compromises required simply make it impossible to do the work you want to do. Here they offer advice on knowing when to walk away from the pot of gold and how to do it in a way that doesn't burn bridges.

Successfully obtaining research funding for the first time is an important step in a young scholar's academic career. In Chapter 4, Daniella Sarnoff reminds us of the basic components of a good proposal and offers rare insights into how to craft each element from the perspective of the foundation or agency officers who will read your proposal – and many, many others. This chapter provides a clear and succinct tool for PIs to use in educating junior team members about the mechanics and execution of proposal development and how to make their submission stand out from the crowd. As Sarah Dyer and Kate Weiner underline in Chapter 25, the development of junior team members is a critical task for PIs in attracting and retaining talented people, as well as being a wider professional obligation. In some respects, the most important thing that any PI does is to ensure the replication of their scholarly community by their own contribution to the formation of its next generation. This is a personal responsibility rather than a matter of compliance with institutional policies, although, of course, institutions may have an important role in supplying resources and assigning value to this work.

Daniella makes two kinds of suggestions. On the mechanics of proposal development, her tips are common sense but often ignored by applicants. She urges careful preparation and execution of the proposal document and appendices. Here she includes doing the homework to show you are in control of the subject and have planned well for its execution, researching potential funders to be sure your work fits the guidelines of the agency, reading and clearly following proposal submission directions, writing tightly while explaining clearly, having the proposal reviewed by a non-specialist to be sure it is intelligible beyond your field, proofing endlessly, and submitting early.

Her advice then turns to the crafting of a convincing narrative – from how to use the opening to attract the reader's attention to explaining your thesis, choices of sites and methods and research plan, the use and abuse of literature reviews and letters of reference. A key part of the proposal will be about your own qualifications and Daniella offers suggestions on setting the tone between humility and showcasing your strengths and qualifications. A key mistake, in her experience, is failure to remember that a research project is supposed to be an inquiry. You do not have all the answers already. What you have is one or more hypotheses and it is important to show that you will be flexible and open minded about what you will learn during the research. Otherwise, why fund the work?

An academic's early research projects will likely be relatively short term and modest but much of the advice Daniella offers in Chapter 4 will be useful for every proposal you will write throughout an academic career. In Chapter 5, Paul Martin highlights the additional effort that must be made to scale up and attract major grant funding for collaborative team projects with multiple sub projects. Paul begins by reminding us of the advantages of undertaking such major research efforts including the importance of being able to focus on a career-defining, important topic, over a significant period of time, and the reputational and institutional recognition that can accrue to such an effort, if successful. However, he cautions that applications for major research funding have a low success rate that is sobering, making high quality preparation, planning and negotiation essential.

Based on his experience in 10 major research projects over the past 15 years, Paul suggests an aspiring PI begin by getting involved in projects led by others to better understand the ways in which major research grants differ from individual grants or even smaller team projects. Even if a bid is unsuccessful, the experience of participating, relationships cultivated and the referee feedback will provide important learning.

As with smaller projects, the PI must have determined and investigated a funder, and have a good and important idea and a well-designed and argued proposal. With these as givens, Paul takes us through the challenges of developing a proposal for major funding, and suggests strategies for developing the kinds of additional arguments that must be advanced in a proposal for major research funding, identifying the sorts of knowledge and skills the proposing PI will want to have mastered. For example, a strong narrative will have to show how the different parts of the project – the sub projects – fit with and make the whole project greater than the sum of the parts. The usefulness of the research for broader audiences and its impact on policy and practice will be key criteria in judging its value and thus its competitiveness in a strong pool. Overall research design and architecture will be more complex and more important while fewer methodological details would be expected. Significant capacity building must typically be included and the team leader/PI will need to demonstrate the ability to build the right team and promote synergies and facilitate integration across the project sub components.

Part I draws to a close with Amarjit Kaur's case study of a successful application to the prestigious Australian Research Council's National Competitive Grants Program, for a five year, multi-country research project related to migration and immigration in Southeast Asia. As she lays out her case, we see how the work and advice outlined in the prior chapters can be brought together in a single project. She takes us through processes such as finding the right funder, determining her niche, articulating her project's value to broader audiences and debates, and shaping the ways she will engage with them, positioning her expertise, designing the research plan and developing the elements of her proposal including a strategic literature review and budget – all with an eye to the requirements of her particular funder.

Amarjit discusses, for example, how, as an economic historian, she built on her prior body of work on labour migration to first identify the right funder and then position herself, and a project idea she believed to be intellectually valuable, so as to appeal to the interests of the funder. To be competitive Amarjit learned she would need to articulate both the national and international dimensions of migration and be able to express clearly implications for regional governance, security and state policy. This required her to gain knowledge she did not have at the start and grasp a range of relevant literatures.

Part I provides guidance on the many issues to be considered as an aspiring PIs prepares personally and then craft a funding proposal. The authors offer insights on how potential funders view academic careers, qualifications, proposal arguments and the written materials we prepare, and on how we can find the right funders for our research and work with them. In Part II, chapters will look more deeply at how to construct convinci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Getting Started
• 1 Preparing for a Research Career
• 2 Planning and Project Management
• 3 Responding to a Call
• 4 Getting Funded for the First Time
• 5 Winning Large Grants
• 6 Developing a Project and Choosing a Funder
• Part II Developing the Proposal
• 7 Developing and Managing Budgets
• 8 Supporting Management with Technology
• 9 Incorporating Gender and Diversity
• 10 Securing Access
• 11 Considering Ethics for Social Science Research
• 12 Managing Researcher Safety
• Part III Getting Organized
• 13 Organizing and Managing Research
• 14 Engaging the University Administration
• 15 Collaborating Across Disciplines
• 16 Developing and Executing Cross-National Projects
• Part IV Managing in Different Environments
• 17 Succeeding in a European Research Environment: Eleven Lessons from Denmark
• 18 Negotiating in a US University Environment
• 19 Managing Research in a Developing Country
• 20 Promoting Research and Development in Large Organisations
• 21 Working Outside Universities
• 22 Managing the Private-Sector Research Project
• Part V Managing the People
• 23 Promoting Teamwork, from Within and from Afar
• 24 Enacting Leadership in Research Programmes
• 25 Surviving and Progressing as a Research Fellow
• 26 Making Best Use of Research Administrators
• 27 Hiring, Integrating and Removing Team Members
• 28 Mentoring, Appraising and Ensuring Professional Development
• Part VI Planning for Impact
• 29 Achieving an Impact
• 30 Exchanging Knowledge in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• 31 Marketing the Team
• 32 Planning for Publications
• 33 Mobilizing and Disseminating Research Findings through Informal Mechanisms
• Part VII Delivering Impact
• 34 Planning and Executing ‘the Book’
• 35 Working with Print and Online Journalism
• 36 Working with the Broadcast Media
• 37 Crafting Strategic Events to Strengthen Research Outputs and Disseminate Results
• 38 Using Graphics in Print and Presentations
• Part VIII Beyond the Current Project
• 39 Developing a Research Strategy at a Research Intensive University: A Pro Vice Chancellor's Perspective
• 40 Using Research Process to Improve Research Practice
• 41 Moving On?1
• Conclusion: The Qualities of Successful Research Management
• Index