Vem formar den stategiska forskningen? Institutionell dynamik och anslagspolitisk utveckling i KK-stiftelsen

Sammanfattning: Research policy is increasingly linked to social needs and to some extent integrated with industrial and innovation policy. The strategic research policy that emerged in Sweden in the early 1990's resulted in the establishment of a new kind of research funding both in form and direction: strategic research foundations. The purpose of one of these foundations, the Knowledge Foundation (Stiftelsen för kunskaps- och kompetensutveckling), was to build up research capacity at Sweden’s new Higher Education Institutions in collaboration with industry. This study discusses the empirical and theoretical implications of government research policy and public administrative innovations. Theoretically, the study combines STS studies with organizational institutionalist theory, analyzing how institutional conditions, as well as the internal actors of the research funding organization (RFO), shape the research funding policy. The study analyzes the regulation of strategic research funding with an emphasis on how coercive, normative and mimetic institutional mechanisms affect the internal actors of the RFO – scientific expert groups, funding administrators and members of the board – when they develop research funding practices. The analysis of the Knowledge Foundation indicates that strategic research and strategic RFOs include the dominant institutional logics in the research system: the autonomy model which builds on collegial norms and principles of academic self-regulation with its focus on basic research, and the corporativist interventionist model with its focus on the needs of society and industry. The trans-institutional model of research funding is an unstable institutional model of research support. This means that both strategic RFOs and strategic research can be viewed as matrices of the research system’s various interests and actors. Strategic research and strategic RFOs can be seen as a manifestation of research policy ambivalence.