Minerva (2018) 56:431–452
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9351-7
Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling
Concepts in Science Policymaking
Tim Flink1
•
Tobias Peter2
Published online: 26 March 2018
Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
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.
Keywords Science policy Discourse analysis Conceptual history
Excellence Frontier research European Research Council Metaphors
Language Concepts as Pacemakers of Science Policy Reforms
Many scholars of research and higher education policy agree—and sometimes join
those commonly accepted expressions of lament—that higher education and science
have been exposed to far-reaching reforms inspired by New Public Management
(NPM), especially in Europe since the 1980s. Flanked by formalized management
control mechanisms (Bleiklie 2005; Ferlie et al. 2008; Whitley 2011), these reforms
ironically called for greater self-steering responsibilities of scientific institutions
& Tim Flink
tim.flink@hu-berlin.de
& Tobias Peter
tobias.peter@uni-oldenburg.de
1
Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6,
10099 Berlin, Germany
2
Research Center Genealogy of Today, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Ammerländer
Heerstraße 114-118, 26111 Oldenburg, Germany
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T. Flink, T. Peter
(Dunleavy and Hood 1994). Moreover, financial cutbacks were accompanied by
calls for greater output, better quality and larger impact of research and teaching (de
Boer et al. 2007) as well as by an increasing pressure to produce more economically
(and socially) useful results (e.g., Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Gavroglu 2012).
However, whether a so-called ‘‘neoliberalist war’’ (Giroux 2014) with its ‘‘fetish
of competition’’ (Naidoo 2016) has really changed the nature of the science system,
remains inconclusive in the social studies of science. Here, questions about the
freedom, utility and accountability of science are still openly debated, partly
because scholars are convinced that language concepts structure expectations about
how society and science interact. The best examples are given by the social contract
for science (Guston 2000) and the linear model of innovation (Godin 2006),
narratives that are still working despite the mode-2ism and post-normalism of the
1990s (for critical summary, see Weingart 1997; also Rip 2010). And this is due to
the polymorphic linguistic properties of those concepts they pivot on (Flink and
Kaldewey 2018), in particular ‘basic research’ (Pielke 2012; Schauz 2014) and
‘applied research’ (Bud 1993; Kline 1995), which allow for boundaring and
tailoring (Calvert 2006) as well as for contestation and consensus (Jacob 2005: 198).
In this article we follow suit with studying science policy concepts as regards
their structuring effects on the relationship between science and politics by
highlighting the importance of two somewhat less obvious concepts that have
arguably empowered recent science policy reforms. We canvass ‘excellence’ and
‘frontier research’ as prominent auxiliaries in science policy. While ‘frontier
research’ was a paramount concept for the institutionalization of the European
Research Council (ERC) in 2007, ‘excellence’ has arguably become a major
conceptual driving force of a reform process and settled in with nearly every fiber of
science and higher education policy, especially in the European context.1 The
question we follow is why ‘excellence’ and ‘frontier research’ were attached with
such importance. In what context did they become meaningful, how did they
percolate into science policy, and how did they proliferate from the United States to
Europe justifying competition-oriented policy reforms? By following these
questions, we can illustrate how change in science policy co-evolved with a
change in the use of language. In this respect, we argue that it is vital to understand
the metaphorical properties and the socio-historical processes that have charged
both concepts with specific and comparable meaning: Cherished by the public in the
United States—the frontier concept as of the late 19th century and excellence as of
the late 1950s—both concepts initially conveyed the positive image of individual
self-mobilization. But then it is vital to understand how these concepts—whilst
travelling contexts—made inroads into science policy and finally crossed the
Atlantic to function as ‘‘euphemizers’’ of competition in Europe.
The article is structured as follows. First, we will outline the need for combining
discourse and cognitive metaphorical analyses under the heading of ‘‘travelling
concepts.’’ We will then portray the individual conceptual journeys of ‘frontier
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.
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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts
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research’ and ‘excellence’ and conclude with methodological suggestions on how to
further study concepts in science and adjacent policy fields.
Travelling Concepts as Bridge-Builders in Science (Policy) Studies
There seems to be a permanent issue between the social studies of science and the
history of science as regards the most adequate methodology to treat their common
empirical interest, and their debate is reflected in the many turns that the field of
study has undergone (Jasanoff 2000; Daston 2009). Once again, taking to language
concepts seems to be en vogue2, as a new conceptual turn aiming to overcome
disciplinary quarrels and methodological boundaries can be observed. It contends
that central (language) concepts in science and policy matter, insofar as they reflect
‘‘a condensation of historical meaning and experience’’ (Bud 2013: 416). Concepts
are studied as regards their historical-contextual meaning of what provides a bridge
between conceptual history of science (especially genealogy), the sociology of
science and science policy studies. More than tokens of cheap talk or strategic
‘‘boundaring’’ and ‘‘tailoring’’ (Calvert 2006), concepts are held to provide actors
with identities (Somers 1994) that co-develop with them throughout a narrative
process, no matter how strategic they act.
We take to the idea of travelling concepts (Bal 2002; Neumann and Nünning
2012; Hyvärinen 2013) for two reasons: First, as they are held to travel ‘‘between
disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between
geographically dispersed academic communities [whose] operational value differ’’
(Bal 2002: 24), we can employ them in order to avoid the afore-mentioned quarrels
on methods. Second, travelling concepts can be regarded as objects of empirical
study themselves. In this respect, we trace, where, when, why and to whom
‘excellence’ and ‘frontier research’ have become meaningful and then reconstruct
whether their travels between contexts have made actors assume the same or
different meanings. For a term ‘‘does not indicate the same concept or the same
content in different times and different contexts’’ (Hyvärinen 2013: 17), but if it
does, it will indicate a structuring effect of language and—with it—of underlying
social institutions that are co-shaped by language expressions. In this respect, the
travelling aspect of concepts adds flexibility to our genealogy (Foucault 1984: 81),
whilst sensitizing for context-specific conversions and recodings, construction
mechanisms and logics of order (Bevir 2008).
In light of a persistent proliferation of discourse, we identified key texts that
discussed ‘excellence’ and the ‘frontier,’ including scientific literature, published
policy documents, management literature and central self-descriptions of organi-
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).
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zations. This was done by (i) exploring scientific and non-scientific text corpora3
from 1890 until mid-2000 to determine the broadness, depth and temporal extent of
the discourse, (ii) identifying key texts for the individual discursive thread, often by
resorting to academic discussions (especially history, sociology, political science,
science studies), and (iii) interpreting the meanings of the concepts as part of their
narrative frames and their individual social context respectively. Our approach
matches with how metaphorical analyses are employed in science studies, as we
agree with Maasen and Weingart (2000: 3, 17–20) that concepts bridge intrascientific with political discourses and unfold specific meaning, which can even
format policies in those contexts that differ geographically from their original
application.
From the Literal to the Metaphorical Frontier
The ‘frontier’ is a prominent concept in the United States and it describes a central
element of the American way of life, i.e., the riskful venturing into the unknown to
find prosperous grounds. While US-American applications of the term date back to
the early 17th century, the frontier is most commonly associated with an era known
as the Wild West: the scouting and exploiting of territories lying west of the
Mississippi River in the 19th century (Lamar 2000). In order to understand its
metaphorical transformation, one needs to acknowledge that the literal frontier has
never meant a manifest border4 or demarcation line. Rather, it portrays a contact
zone in an incessant state of transition between the hitherto explored and the
unknown land lying ahead, with the latter being pushed back in a process of
‘‘exploration and exploitation’’ (Ceccarelli 2013: title). Moreover, the frontier was
both, reality for those who de facto tapped into the unknown—the frontiersmen—,
and utopia for those who did not dare doing so but glorified those frontiersmen in
their hard and bold ventures.
The utopian idea of the frontier is crucial for this conceptual genealogy, because
when most borders of the Americas were reached, it turned into a myth. Whereas the
negative sides of the frontier process were quickly forgotten or glorified via thrilling
stories, e.g., the agony of the Donner-Reed Party (Stuckey 2011), the frontier spirit
was built up in public to become one of America’s most prominent self-images: as a
‘‘tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples
and cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America’’ (Hine and Faragher
2000: 10). For over a century, frontier narrations were reverberated via folklore
(Hofstadter and Lipset 1968; Rushing 1986), and their mythical power is borne by a
popular though controversial idea: that the frontier process has forged a ‘‘special
American character […] marked by fierce individualism, pragmatism, and
egalitarianism’’ (Cronon 1987: 157).
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 nonscientific 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.
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The transformation of the frontier into a metaphorical concept and its overlying
idea of an American exceptionalism did not appear from nowhere but was
enthusiastically declaimed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who first
presented his treatise to the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893
and then modified it via presentations to academic and public audiences and via
numerous writings until 1921.5 Turner’s thesis was fiercely contested by his
academic colleagues, as the historian cherished some vague truisms6 about the
evolution of those allegedly exceptional American frontier character traits that
individuals would have received from experiencing adversary conditions of life at
the frontier: that they would have assumed ‘‘a new physical and spiritual
appearance’’ (Coleman 1966: 36). Inasmuch as Turner’s observation and—in
fact—call for an exclusive American frontier spirit could not convince his fellow
historians, it caused a hype in popular American culture, because Turner presented
his thesis at the American Historical Association’s convention, which was held in
public at the World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, to celebrate the
achievements of the young American nation. Another reason is that Turner’s heroic
characterizations of the American frontiersmen were greatly received by the
common people, not least because Turner had no interest in moral judgments but
simply admired practical assertiveness (ibid.): ‘‘To the frontier the American
intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined
with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to
find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but
powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant
individualism, working for good and for evil […]’’ (Turner 1921: 37).
Leah Ceccarelli (2013: 35) concludes that since Turner, American identity ‘‘came
to be seen through the screen of the frontier myth,’’ and his cherished notion of risky
pragmatism inspired notions of the American Dream (Adams 1931: 304). At the
same time, Turner’s frontier concept radicalized a liberal-egalitarian notion of
negative freedom: While the individual would thrive through self-mobilization in
the face of adverse conditions, governmental oversight was held inimical to society.
In particular, federal state institutions were outright depreciated as hampering the
individual in his course of self-realization—and this would ultimately inhibit US
society as a whole from forming a collective identity (Turner 1921: 271–272).
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).
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Turnerism in US Science Policy
With its popularization, the frontier metaphor also percolated into science7 and
science policymaking, and this relates to two aspects. First, in order to make the
frontier live on, Turner needed to contrive new frontiersmen, and these were
‘‘university men’’ that the historian imagined as experimental scientists rather than
as (European) bookworms. With this distinction, Turner distinguished bold
American scientists from European scholars, who—for him—constituted a
pejorative category of an academic: hamstrung by tradition and dull of contemplation. Second, with ‘‘[t]he test tube and the microscope’’ substituting the old
pioneer’s axe and rifle ‘‘in this new ideal of conquest’’ (Turner 1921: 284),
scientists-as-frontiersmen were to be separated ‘‘from the safety and familiarity of
civilization to seek the unlimited opportunities that exist beyond the horizon of the
known and established’’ (Ceccarelli 2013: 8). In this respect, Turner filled a
metaphorical breach by arguing that the frontier spirit would endure (through
science) and nurtured the idea of a social contract for science in a radical way:
frontier scientists are the avant-garde and must be unfettered from society, if they
want to explore and exploit the unknown for the latter’s sake. And this was to
inspire politicians and science policymakers in the US.
Whenever public spending on science, especially new programs containing high
degrees of uncertainty, needed extra rhetorical justification, US Presidents and
science policymakers resorted to the frontier metaphor, laid out by Frederick
Jackson Turner. The first prominent example was provided by Herbert Hoover in
1922—at that time serving as Secretary of Commerce—with his book American
Individualism, alluding to one of the frontier’s central leitmotifs of tapping into
boundless opportunities: ‘‘The great continent of science is as yet explored only on
its borders, and it is only the pioneer who will penetrate the frontier in the quest for
new worlds to conquer’’ (Hoover 1922: 64). As US President, Hoover often resorted
to the frontier metaphor—so did further Presidents (Ceccarelli 2013): When John F.
Kennedy campaigned as a presidential candidate, he vouched for the space program
to be enlarged by promising ‘‘[b]eyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science’’
(Kennedy 1960). In 1979, Jimmy Carter requested an expansion of federal R&D
investment, saying ‘‘[w]e are pushing back the frontiers in basic research for energy,
defense and other critical national needs’’ (Carter 1979).
The most influential document in US science policy referring to Turner’s frontier
thesis though is Vannevar Bush’s report of 1945, Science – The Endless Frontier:
‘‘Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science
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.
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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts
437
remains. It is in keeping with the American tradition—one which has made the
United States great—that new frontiers shall be made accessible for development by
all American citizens’’ (Bush 1945: 11; also 12, 74). With WWII coming to an end,
inter alia revealing the US’ technological supremacy due to heavy investments into
war-related research, the Bush report fell in ‘‘a highly political context which was
generated by a growing debate over a major policy issue—the issue of how the
federal government should advance science for the general welfare in peacetime’’
(Kevles 1977: 5).
Despite numerous other issues being addressed by the Bush report under the
heading of the frontier, the most important aspect for our purpose is that its frontier
metaphor shuffles together two political rationales: first, a geostrategic demand in
that the US need to claim new lands of discovery, whilst competing with other states
globally and, second, that in order to do so, the ‘‘independence of scientistfrontiersmen from the government […] that funds those explorations’’ needs to be
protected (Ceccarelli 2013: 45). The travelling of the frontier into the metaphorical
spectrum of science policy has not only backed academic science to do basic
research, but proliferated an image of an egoistic self-organization in science, based
on fierce competition that will cater to the best of society (ibid.). In fact, different
from what is associated with the linear model of innovation and its sequential steps
of action, though nowadays widely contested (e.g., Rosenberg 1991: 335; Fagerberg
2005: 8–10), the very risk-taking attitude expressed in frontier terms is regarded
immediately fruitful for the whole of a society.
Today, numerous scientific institutes and research programs in the US pay
reference to the meaning of Turner’s frontier. One of the best examples of the
sustained impact of the frontier metaphor is provided by the Koch Institute for
Integrative Cancer Research (MIT, Boston) describing its Frontier Research
Program: ‘‘Creative exploration at the leading edge of cancer research has often led
to important, transformative new discoveries […] Yet early-stage ideas all too often
do not qualify for funding […] The Koch Institute is deeply committed to
supporting boldly conceived, highly innovative, and highly collaborative
research.’’8 Also, the US Department of Energy’s Frontier Research Centers argue
in this vein: ‘‘History has demonstrated that radically new technologies arise from
disruptive advances at the science frontiers.’’9 Thus, what these and most other
applications of the frontier metaphor have in common is their positive framing of
risk and boldness. By this meaning, the metaphor could be translated from the US to
Japan as part of a transnational learning process, as will be discussed below.
The Intercontinental Travel of the Frontier
As a metaphorical concept in science policymaking, the frontier did not rest in the
US. Japan, for example, employed the concept, given that the US’ occupation
authority also influenced the country’s science policy landscape and its programmatic orientation in the course of the democratic restructuring process after WWII
8
https://ki.mit.edu/approach/frontier (last accessed 05.01.2017).
9
https://science.energy.gov/bes/efrc/ (last accessed 05.01.2017).
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(Cummings 1990: 431–433). These interactions seem far more intense (Gerstenfeld
1982) than is commonly assumed in light of the countries’ intensified economic
rivalry (Nelson 1971) and Japan’s historical orientation towards the Prussian science
and education system of the 19th century (Odagiri and Goto 1993). Yet, it is not
reported until the early 1980s that Japanese science policymakers turned the frontier
into something programmatic (Abe et al. 1982: 171). Here, ‘frontier research’ and
‘frontier science’ became central leitmotifs to gear non-university research institutes
toward high-risk basic research in the natural sciences. In 1986, the Institute for
Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) launched the Frontier Research Program
to conduct multi-disciplinary basic research in ‘‘areas never before accessed’’ and
‘‘for bringing together world-class scientists.’’10
There is great similarity to the US in how Japanese science policymaking
implemented funding programs under the heading of frontier research, which comes
close to what is held ‘strategic research’ or ‘strategic science’ (Irvine and Martin
1984: 4; Rip 2002: 125). With respect to the travelling nature of the frontier, its
transnational spread is best reflected in Japan’s launching of the Human Science
Frontier Program (HSFP), a funding institution dedicated to biomedical research.
Proposed by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone at the 13th G7 Economic Summit
in 1987 as a transnational organization, the HSFP was from the beginning supported
by the US, Canada, the EU and five European states and it developed strong
linkages with the life science communities (Nathan 1999).
The last metaphorical travel destination of the frontier is Brussels. Here, ‘frontier
research’ served the institutionalization process of the ERC. Discussions about
installing a pan-European research funding council dedicated to basic research,
similar to the US National Science Foundation, are as old as the European
Communities, but never gained momentum (Flink 2016: 94).11 After the European
crisis of the 1970s, the revitalization of the European integration process was, for
most parts, geared toward realizing the internal market project (e.g., Peterson and
Sharp 1997). In this respect, the EEC and later EU research policy were set up
primarily to boost the competitiveness of European enterprises12, or put the other
way round: funding science for its own sake was out of question. This orientation
was buttressed legally, given that the Commission was allowed to finance R&D
only, if it served the so-called added value of the common market project.13 Thus,
the Framework Programmes (FPs) mainly followed demands from industry to help
advance their high-tech products and services, which ‘‘marginaliz[ed] alternative
perspectives’’ in EU science policymaking (Banchoff 2002: 13). Still, with the FPs
attracting an increasing share of publicly financed researchers and institutions, the
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&Dentities 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.
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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts
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Commission had to face increasing criticism with respect to the design and purpose
of the FPs, which were excoriated to be too bureaucratic and burdensome,
unscientific in terms of review processes and, in general, politically preconditioned.
In the mid-1990s, requests to finance politically unconditioned, i.e., scientifically
defined basic research, and thus the idea of creating a pan-European research
council were out in the open again (Nature 1994, 1995). The European Molecular
Biology Organization took the lead of an ever widening discourse coalition, later
entitled the Initiative for Science in Europe, that pressed for an ERC (Flink 2016:
106–113). The Commission could not neglect the public pressure anymore by the
time that conferences under EU presidencies—2001 in Sweden and 2003 in
Denmark—were discussing the ERC and that Research Commissioner Philippe
Busquin openly supported it.
The applied language in the following institutionalization process of the ERC
presented a surprising shift. During the phases of discourse formation, agendasetting and problem formulation (1994–2004) all actors resorted to customary
concepts, i.e., they discussed the necessity of funding ‘‘basic research’’ or
‘‘fundamental research.’’ Even the Commission, hitherto circumventing these
discussions, disseminated a communication on basic research (Commission 2004)
arguing for its supranational financing.14
Yet, in her legal proposal of FP7, the Commission proposed to establish the ERC
as part of the Specific Programme ‘‘Ideas’’ by substituting all references to basic or
fundamental research for the term ‘frontier research,’ which should be ‘‘carried out
by individual teams competing at the European level, in all scientific and
technological fields, including engineering, socioeconomic sciences and the
humanities’’ (Commission 2005: 3, 64). Two months before the start of the legal
co-decision procedure, this conceptual shift was flanked by an expert report (Harris
2005), entitled Frontier Research: The European Challenge, which the Commission
had ordered. This report portrayed a gloomy picture15 for European science, and so
it urged national science policymakers to take necessary action and support the
funding of a critical mass of basic research.
Until now, the ERC has fully adopted the Commission’s strategy to circumvent
basic research and has mainly imported the metaphorical meaning of the US’
frontier concept, i.e., it rejects a distinction between basic and applied research
whilst emphasizing the need for funding small pioneering teams of investigators in
their course of high-risk-high-gain research. Moreover, by employing frontier
research, the Commission seemed to justify the possibility of funding individual
research undertakings on the EU-level, which had by and large been a political nogo in light of the ideals of European integration; and so far these were translated into
collaborative research projects. Again, there is a strong parallel between the EU’s
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.
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usage of frontier research and what basic research epitomized in the US of the postWWII era, where ‘‘[n]ew (federal) support for basic research initially focused on
individual researchers’’ (Schauz 2014: 307). Still, the ‘frontier research’ metaphor
idealizes a slightly different type of a scientist: unlike ‘basic research,’ it does not
necessarily imply ‘‘moral superiority of academic research over benefit-oriented
industrial research’’ (ibid.), especially not in the context of the ERC, which follows
the objective ‘‘[…] to reinforce excellence, dynamism and creativity in European
research and improve the attractiveness of Europe for the best researchers from both
European and third countries, as well as for industrial research investment’’
(Council of the EU 2006: 17).
Altogether, the discourse leading to the ERC employed frontier and excellence in
the metaphorical sense of the US, ironically to fight the latter geopolitically. But
excellence does not even seem enough for the ERC as Europe’s response to the US,
which reflects in the policy descriptions that ‘teams of the highest levels of
excellence’ should be financed (Council of the EU 2004: 27; Harris 2005: cover
text).
Excellence: Equal Rights and Duties of Self-Mobilization
Until the 1950s, excellence as a distinct concept was commonly used as a form of
salutatory address in the diplomatic protocol (for representatives of the state and the
church) and as an acclaim of the outstanding quality of items, activities and often
artistic performance.16 Then, in the US of the late 1950s, the term started being
publicly charged with distinct conceptual meaning. There was a rising concern that
while the US had widely benefited from the economic boom times of the postwar
era, a state of normalcy begun creeping into its society. Different from simple
complaints about people becoming idle, this concern rather pertained to a
conformist, propriety-oriented and puritan attitude, not allowing for deviations
from what the normalized ‘organization man’ (Whyte 1956) was expected to be
doing. In such normalized society, ruled by the middle-class’ mass consumption and
cushioned snugly by social security, so it was held, there was neither space for
individual self-realization nor for elites to develop, unless the latter would have
comprehended themselves as righteous representatives of the masses.
Excellence became the catchcry in the US: that mediocrity should be overcome.
Specifically, it was used as a wake-up call for the US-American society in the wake
of the Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957. While US citizens had
‘‘firmly believed that to live ‘correctly’ also meant to live ‘successfully’, ‘Sputnik’
and ‘Lunik’ startled them out of this certainty’’ (von Hentig 1960: 1). More than an
atomic threat, Sputnik meant a total technological deprivation of the US by the
Soviet Union. Accordingly, the importance of knowledge was accepted in general,
and the very pressure stemming from the technological footrace during the Cold
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.
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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts
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War spurred US-American elites on engaging into comprehensive policy reforms
(Rockefeller 1958: 19; Bell 1996; Drucker 1993).
In light of the Cold War’s friend-foe-logic, excellent performance was held
essential for survival, whereas being and doing only but good was deemed not good
enough anymore. And this credo was applied to the education system in particular.
Excellence, however, combined different discursive threads, and certainly a
prominent one revolved around meritocratic ideas of how to advance knowledge
society as a whole. William Connell (1959: 386) wrote in the journal The School
Review, ‘‘the excellence of a democratic society depends on the excellence of the
general education among its citizens. Let us hope that our secondary schools will
provide general education that will encourage the human excellence we desire.’’
There are plenty of other treatises sensitizing experts and the public on this issue
(e.g., Barzun 1960; Bertocci 1960; Hamilton 1964).
One of the most prominent figures in public policy at that time and a key
promoter of the conceptual idea of excellence was John W. Gardner, then president
of the Carnegie Corporation and its homonymous Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching. Gardner was responsible for a seminal report in 1958, which prepared
the launch of the famous educational reform program, called Great Society.17 In his
book (Gardner 1961: xii–xiv) Excellence: Can we be equal and excellent too?, he
asked whether the American people would have
‘‘lost their sense of purpose and the drive which would make it possible for
them to achieve excellence […] a problem that cuts across all the others. If a
society holds conflicting views about excellence—or cannot rouse itself to the
pursuit of excellence—the consequences will be felt in everything that it
undertakes. The disease may not attack every organ, but the resulting debility
will be felt in all parts of the system.’’
In numerous quotes, this early reference to excellence revolved but around the
geostrategic positioning of the US, while the whole of society was addressed.
Gardner (1961: 132) explained:
‘‘A rocket can still explode on its launch base because the constructor was
incompetent or the mechanic who installed the last valve was incompetent.
The same applies to everything else in our society. We need excellent
physicists and excellent mechanics. We need excellent ministers and excellent
primary school teachers. Every fibre of our society depends on the ubiquitous
and continuous pursuit of proficiency.’’
Moreover, the epistemic community around Gardner was convinced that the
bureaucratic overburdening and a misunderstood democratic egalitarianism would
hamper the people’s will to perform better. When Gardner thus filed out President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society reform program, excellence was translated into
a societal model almost entirely free of economically-oriented arguments but
equipped with strategies of individual mobilization and optimization. The core of
17
That education reform program had been in the hands of Gardner himself, who became Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare.
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T. Flink, T. Peter
this understanding of excellence was a meritocratic conception of society:
Differences were permissible as long as every individual changed his/her
performance for the better (Graubard 1962; Peyre 1962; Young 1958). In addition,
an increasingly meritocratic choice of leadership positions was regarded to have a
socially balancing effect, ‘‘as, in key institutions, technical competence becomes the
overriding consideration’’ (Bell 2008: 426). Hence, if managerialism defeated
family dynasties, if the old social elites were mixed up ethnically and technical
professions became more important in social decisions, it was not the (social) origin
anymore that mattered but performance only. Some moderate egalitarianism of
equal opportunities would thus allow for physical or intellectual differences to
enable top performance. Those striving for excellence had to overcome barriers.
This ideal corresponds to a pluralist, broad-based understanding of excellence along
the lines of ‘‘everyone can do it,’’ a conception applied horizontally and based on
the idea that there was a plurality of excellent abilities and talents (Gardner 1961:
132).
As regards science policy, excellence became not only a programmatic term in
higher education (National Science Teachers Association 1961) and funding by the
U.S. Government (U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of
Education 1962). In reflection of the Sputnik shock and jumping on the bandwagon
of President Johnson’s Great Society program, the National Science Foundation
started its ‘‘Centers of Excellence Program’’ to increase the number of institutions of
recognized excellence in research and education in the sciences (NSF 1965: 2). The
funding of grants for basic research appears to be motivated by strategic national
goals, which were decidedly anti-elitist: ‘‘Excellence in science is no longer a
prerogative of a few privately endowed institutions, but has become a goal which
more and more State institutions are achieving. In all such cases initiative at the
State level has preceded and catalyzed the granting of Federal support’’ (NSF 1965:
17). This funding strategy corresponds with the egalitarian understanding of
excellence of the 1960s. However, management discourse would soon give it a
different twist towards social selection and stratification, as will be discussed in the
following chapter.
Excellence and the Making of Elites
Apart from its initial grounding in meritocratic values, excellence was closely
linked to emerging theories of the knowledge society, which codified ‘‘a new social
order based, in principle, on the priority of educated talent’’ (Bell 2008: 426). Thus,
the reproduction of a society, it was held, would increasingly rest upon
academic/scientific outputs, while social advancement was linked to qualification
by education (Bell 1996; Drucker 1993; Steinbicker 2010). Moreover, the growing
importance of scientific and technological advancement not only required that
society should extend its knowledge foundations on a broad scale but also steered
the focus towards selecting only few talents that would hopefully bring about
scientific progress.
For Robert K. Merton, for instance, the need for and value of excellent scientists
was beyond doubt, and charismatic scientists were required not only to ‘‘strive for
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Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts
443
excellence, they have [also] the ability to awaken excellence in others’’ (Merton
1973: 452). In this respect, excellence was comprehended not an end by itself for
those possessing it, but it should cater for everyone qua effects of mobilization.
Building on the questions of the selection of excellent talent, Merton (re)formulated
a concept of scientific recognition that is still of significance and has formed the
meritocratic-though-selective understanding of excellence in science and science
policy ever since. And ideas, such as the promotion of reserve talents, the selffertilizing of excellence by means of pre-existing excellence and that difference in
performance was a prerequisite of vertically-thought excellence, spilled over to
other social fields, broadening the focus from individuals to groups and social
contexts (Jackson and Rushton 1987). Excellence, the argument was—and still is—
would trigger a perpetual motion machine: Research institutions that are excellent
themselves would breed excellent researchers that—again—would stimulate their
environments to become excellent (Zuckerman 1977). Accordingly, a central
question was: how can structures of excellence be triggered or organized to become
self-energizing? In research policy, this thinking is reflected by the setting up of
concrete instruments, such as ‘excellence clusters’ and ‘networks of excellence.’
A complementary thread of discourse, following the knowledge-society-rhetoric
of ‘‘potential,’’ was translated into human capital theory (Becker 1993). Institutions
were regarded as business and the individual as a self-entrepreneur ‘‘being for
himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the
source of [his] earnings’’ (Foucault 2008: 226). Thus, the social authority of
coordination is not the state but the market. Striving for excellence is thus by no
means obsolete, but its focus shifted to smaller units and was unmistakably adapted
to be further shaped by the language of neo-liberalism, a style well represented in
the worldwide bestseller In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman (1982).
Its authors, at that time consultants at McKinsey & Company, recommended a
paradigm shift to the mainstream of management in that the owner and each
employee of a company should become entrepreneurial, i.e., self-organizational and
highly committed. Peters and Waterman’s quasi-cultural turn in management
literature has shaped modern understandings of business management and outranged
the metaphorical impact of excellence to other social spheres, including public
policy. Specialization in and concentration on core competencies, flexibility,
simplicity and identification (or commitment) have become central catchphrases of
the discourse revolving around excellence. The entrepreneur has become a central
character for individuals and organizations, while the market is cherished as the
only coordinating authority.
With the neoliberal turn, individuals, organizations and entire states have become
subject to a ‘‘permanent economic tribunal’’ (Foucault 2008: 247), critically
examining all government activities in terms of their economic consequences.
Accordingly, governmental actions are expected to anticipate economic evaluations
and subordinate their programs to economics. Investment in human capital is held
central to this new growth policy (ibid.: 232) and the educational system would
develop from a marginal condition of the economy to the ultimate foundation of
growth.
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In this conceptual transformation of excellence, the US National Commission on
Excellence in Education (NCEE) was made responsible for changing education
policy in the 1980s. In its report, A Nation at Risk (1983), the NCEE portrayed the
US in a state of dystopia, whose former dominance in economic and technological
innovation would have dwindled in the face of strong global competitors. Starting
from the assumption that there was but a knowledge-based economy, it framed the
state of the education system as the ultimate existential question of the nation:
‘‘If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in
world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational
system for the benefit of all. Learning is the indispensable investment required
for success in the ‘information age’ we are entering’’ (NCEE 1983: 10).
Responding to increasing complaints as of the late 1970s about an alleged waste of
talents (Burroughs 1977), this report—informed by human capital theory—framed
learning as an economic investment. Thus, if the early Cold War arguments about
excellence had been justified by the geostrategic question of how to stay superior in
military technology and survive an atomic world war, then now it was employed to
argue that educated human capital was a scarce and fragile resource, and moreover
decisive for seizing competitive advantages in globally interconnected knowledgebased societies. In this way, the conceptual meaning of excellence became part of a
neoliberal narrative to make up leeway in global market competition (Keyworth
1982). US science and higher education policy employed excellence to draw off the
attention from cutbacks in public spending by arguing that only the excellent could
enjoy being selected and funded. With this came along arguments for greater
differentiation, for investing into economically useful applied research, interdisciplinarity and centralized research within the university (Barrow 1996). While
excellence has become a neoliberal euphemizer hallowing political cost-cutting
efforts, it seems to have been accepted (Rescher 2015: 93–95) as a ‘gold standard’
in higher education and science policy (Moore et al. 2017).
The original message of excellence to self-mobilize, and even its business
version of self-management, was zeroized by quantitative performance measurement regimes (e.g., Ederer and Manso 2012; Sauder and Espeland 2009), that—
once dragged into science policy—are most obviously represented by rankings of
institutions and ratings of scientific performance.
Excellence in European Science Policy
In the context of an allegedly increasing ‘‘global war for talents’’ (e.g., Michaels
et al. 2001), the concept of excellence and its embedded discourse have spread
transnationally. The unparalleled advancements of scientific research during and
after WWII have made the US appear a global role model, whose success was also
attributed to the institutional setup of the American science system (Herbst 2007).
Excellence travelled into the vocabulary of education and science policy on the EU
level, not least due to the linguistic proximity of the two policy fields (Ricken 2009:
199) and the permanent exchange of ideas between US and European policymaking
via transnational organizations, such as NATO’s science council or the OECD (e.g.,
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445
Guzzetti 1995; Krige 2000). As early as in the 1990s, the framework programs
under the Euratom Treaty implemented ‘networks of excellence’ (Commission
1996: 15, 44–45). Also, numerous ‘centres of excellence’ or ‘centres of research
excellence’ were founded in European states already in the 1990s (Sørensen et al.
2016: 218), whereas making explicit references to the term in scientific articles was
still low until the early years of the 2000s (Tijssen 2003).
Both, the geopolitical and the economic objective of excellence were adopted by
the EU as strategic goals to make Europe become the most competitive and dynamic
knowledge-based economy. In the Lisbon Strategy, the EU saw itself ‘‘confronted
with a quantum leap that has resulted from globalization and the challenges of a new
knowledge-based economy’’ (European Council 2000: 1), requiring better integration and coordination in terms of research activities, ‘‘in order to efficiently and
innovatively structure and ensure that Europe can offer attractive perspectives for its
best minds’’ (ibid.: 5). As far as the EU (and the Communities) were entitled to
define common goals in education policy, these traditionally followed an egalitarian
approach, e.g., to create wide access to information technologies and to ensure
comprehensive minimum skills of all EU citizens. In a similar vein, research policy
was driven by the political goals of the European Economic Community to serve the
member states’ business enterprises as well as to tackle pressing issues of Europe’
societies and, thereby, allegedly creating an integrative momentum via collaborative
research projects (e.g., Banchoff 2002; Flink 2016). However, EU research policy
has also turned to the concept of excellence, which is construed in its stratificational
manner. The aim of encouraging ‘‘top research and development in all member
states’’ to support an ‘‘increase in top performance’’ (European Council 2000: 5) is
connected to a comprehensive economic system of control, focusing on a more
intense and efficient use of available resources, and—at the same time—realizing an
increase in goal- and benchmark-oriented human capital (ibid.: 6).
The EU’s strategies unmistakably address global dimensions in the struggle for
seizing excellent science as part of a battle for an all-encompassing dominance on
the world market. Since its adoption, the Lisbon Strategy has followed the logic of
excellence in order to promote ‘‘cutting-edge research and development in all
member states’’ and, hence, ‘‘the dissemination of excellence’’ (ibid.: 5). There is a
striking parallel between Europe’s current usage of excellence and the US’
employing of the concept during the Cold War: Nowadays, it seems essential not so
much to win a material battle but to secure victory via decisive knowledge
advancements generated by the best minds.
The Commission’s adapted to US research funding strategies in FP6 (2002–2006)
in that its Centers of Excellence and Networks of Excellence were to focus on
‘‘building research centres and scientific locations that are recognized and have
equivalent standards worldwide through a concentration of initiatives, resources and
people’’ (Ricken 2009: 199). ‘‘Networks of Excellence aim to achieve scientific and
technological excellence in a single research area by concentrating enough
resources and expertise on a European level in order to achieve European
leadership in this area’’ (Commission 2003: 3). The EU strategy for excellence
neither strives for a continuous and broad improvement in performance nor a
scientific peak performance in basic research that is distant from the market. Rather,
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it aims at innovative leadership, which translates into market leadership. Similar to
how business management has excellence, the notion of ‘relevance’ was adopted in
neoliberal semantics as to gauge excellence in science (Maasen 2008: 25). Societal
relevance already became characteristic in the 1990s science debates (Gibbons et al.
1994), which—despite their shallowness (as criticized by Weingart 1997)—seem to
have co-shaped EU research policy. ‘‘Real science is excellent science’’—with this,
Helga Nowotny (2006), a prominent representative of the Mode-2-philosophy and
former president of the ERC, got directly to the heart of the connection between
post-academic science, Mode 2 and the ERC:
‘‘By challenging Europe’s brightest minds, the ERC expects that its grants will
help bring about new and unpredictable scientific and technological discoveries—the kind that can form the basis of new industries, markets, and broader
social innovations of the future ERC’’ (ERC Website).
To summarize, the neoliberal semantics of excellence have existed on a European
level since the 1990s and aim at turning universities and individual researchers into
agents of a knowledge-based economic development. Since the economic competitive advancement of a knowledge-based society is only possible on the foundation
of education and research, the focus on excellence has become an imperative of
European science policy, which straddles the national discourses on the management of higher education.
Conclusions: Excellence, Frontier Research, and Conceptual Analyses
in Science (Policy) Studies
By reconstructing the travelling of ‘excellence’ and ‘frontier research,’ we suggest
that auxiliary concepts, hitherto rather unattended, may provide for alternative
interpretations of the relationship between science and society, in particular as
regards the coexistence of old and new narratives (see Flink and Kaldewey 2018).
Also, tracing the journey of the two travelling concepts, we revealed how specific
meaning was carried from one context to another.
First of all, both concepts became popular within public discourse, and only then
did they veer toward science and policymaking. Interestingly enough, this is
antipodal to the flow of metaphorical meaning in Maasen and Weingart’s (2000)
comparative study on ‘paradigm,’ ‘chaos’ and ‘struggle,’ concepts that were born
within distinct scientific disciplines before percolating into other disciplines and
proliferating in non-scientific contexts.
Second, ‘excellence’ and ‘frontier research’ remained dominant in the science
policy context as geopolitical tokens, and specifically the United States18 worked as
both a competitor and a role model for European science policymaking. Not only
was US science admired for setting so many examples of unparalleled success but
also did this seem to correspond with the idea that responsibility of scientific actions
18
See Majone (2006); with respect to science, technology and innovation policy, see, e.g., Lloyd Spencer
(1970) and Guzzetti (1995).
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would need to be fully assigned to the self-enterprising individual (e.g., Brady 2012:
13). Moreover, the reconstruction of both discursive threads illustrated how
different ideas of competition were obscured and glorified: The frontier stipulated
that individuals should not expect (social/state) protection when taking the risk of
venturing into the unknown and competing against others for new discoveries; the
liberalist belief was that they would not develop their necessary fitness and boldness
to become successful. As regards the travelling of this idea of competition, one can,
for instance, see in continuous debates about whether the ERC should favor people
over projects: Only few, i.e., venturesome projects, can expect funding, but since the
nature of scientific uncertainty makes it hard for reviewers to tell apart potential
success from failure, reviewers tend to believe in proposals made by those
applicants whose track record promise ‘achiever’ qualities. Since frontiersmen
would fight all adversary conditions to become achievers, in a quasi-market
environment, such as the science system, this would entail fighting (i.e., competing)
against others, as reflected in the ERC funding schemes.
While excellence had initially been connected to the idea of competition as a
self-implicating struggle, i.e., getting the most out of one’s own potential, its
meaning changed in management discourse so that competition between individuals
was added and emphasized. The combination of these two ideas of competition
whilst remaining silence about their detriments made excellence a sainting concept
for many science and higher education policy reforms in Europe that have justified
the distributing of limited resources on a selective basis.
Apart from euphemizing competition, the concepts of ‘excellence’ and ‘frontier
research’ further obscure clear social distinctions, hitherto prevalent in science
policy. For example, in the old days of linear-model-thinking you would either state
that you carry out (and be judged accordingly) ‘basic’ or ‘applied research’ and be
categorized accordingly (see esp. Calvert 2006)—nowadays, it doesn’t really matter
what kind of research you do, as long as you are ‘excellent,’ part of a ‘grand
challenge’ and standing at the ‘frontiers of knowledge production.’ In other words,
different from the old discourses that veered toward dichotomous distinctions, the
new discourse in science policy employs concepts that can hardly be negated (Flink
and Kaldewey 2018: 20): Who does not want to be excellent and who would not
want to be described as a pioneer at the frontiers? Also, concepts, such as excellence
and the frontier, are not confined to the hallways of science but can travel and
proliferate across many functional systems, often at the same time.
In this respect, the social studies of science could profit from integrating new
concepts in their portfolio of empirical objects in order to study how these unfold
meaning in and across specific social contexts, how they relate to overarching
narratives—old and new ones—and how they interrelate to each other. Here, we
would like to point out two courses potentially worth studying. One raises the
question of how meaning gets translated when concepts in science (policy) are taken
up and processed in different language contexts. While the US-American ideal of
frontier research got translated into the Japanese RIKEN institutes without using
different words and without meaning something different, the ERC, for instance,
shows that in the French version of the EU’s legislative decision, ‘frontier research’
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is not the central term but ‘recherche exploratoire.’19 Professional organizational
contexts are not about playing on words, but if language is functional, it is pivotal to
understand why some organizations take to the original phrases while others need to
translate them. The question that would ultimately follow this observation of
adaptation and variation is, if the meaning of concepts would change accordingly.20
Linked to this are (practical turn) questions that would dig deeper into the daily life
routines of the science system: To what extent do concepts govern those working in
and around the science system and how is the daily practice of carrying out and
publishing research shaped by language concepts and—vice versa—how does the
daily routine of science shape concepts?
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