The Strategic Responses to English and Dutch University Life Scientists to the Changes in their Institutional Environments

The governing of publicly-funded research in the Western European countries has become multi-dimensional and multi-layered (De Boer et al., 2007, Leisyte et al., 2010, Whitley et al., 2010). Increasingly, the role of various intermediary bodies, such as research councils, has become important in external funding of university research. Competition for resources and changing state steering of research through various policy mechanisms, such as performance-based funding, accountability, quality control and performance measurement have been brought to the fore. In part, higher education and research reforms, largely inspired by New Public Management approaches, aimed to make the systems and their organisations more efficient and effective by providing more power to managers in public universities. In such a context, the initiatives and actions of external funding bodies and university managers are likely to have changed the rules of the game for researchers. It is still poorly understood how university researchers respond to these attempts to change these rules. How are their institutional environments reshaped and how do they respond?