Yes / The promotion of gender equality in research and innovation is a vital part of the GENOVATE project. The full participation of women and men in all aspects of research endeavour is key to positive career progression in academia. It is essential to ensure equal opportunities for women and men in access to promotion, research funding and decision-making positions in higher education institutions. This report seeks to provide higher education institutions, research bodies and funding institutions guiding principles on gender equality and diversity competent research excellence standards, ensuring in particular that the achievements of women and men researchers are assessed on the same basis. The report will help encourage a more systematic way of thinking about assessment of research excellence standards. / FP7

Yes / This article summarises the standpoint of the Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society regarding the current position of qualitative research in psychology in the United Kingdom. The article is in three parts. Part one documents the historical development of the section, outlining its rationale, remit, and current activities. These activities aim to champion and develop qualitative methods in psychology, supporting high quality work regardless of epistemological or ontological position. Part two considers the current context of our work, describing not only how qualitative methods are valued in the United Kingdom but also how this recognition is undermined, particularly through the operationalisation of our national research assessment (the Research Excellence Framework). We also consider the challenges that Open Science poses for qualitive researchers. Part three highlights some of the significant contributions of UK-based qualitative researchers to psychology, with a particular focus on feminist-informed research, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis, before pointing to future exciting possibilities based on research exploring the affordances of digital technologies and innovative synthesising across epistemologies and disciplinary boundaries.

In recent years, the UK higher education sector has seen notable policy changes with regard to how research is funded, disseminated and evaluated. Important amongst these changes is the emphasis that policy makers have placed on disseminating peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles via Open Access (OA) publishing routes e.g. OA journals or OA repositories. Through the Open Science agenda there have also been a number of initiatives to promote the dissemination of other types of output that have not traditionally been made publicly available via the scholarly communication system, such as data, workflows and methodologies. The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 introduced social/economic impact of research as an evaluation measure. This has been a significant policy shift away from academic impact being the sole measure of impact and has arguably raised the profile of public engagement activities (although it should be noted that public engagement is not equivalent to social/economic impact, but is an important pathway to realising such impact). This exploratory study sought to investigate the extent to which these recent policy changes are aligned with researchers publication, dissemination and public engagement practices across different disciplines. Furthermore, it sought to identify the perceptions and attitudes of researchers towards the concept of social/economic impact. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach consisting of a questionnaire- based survey and semi-structured interviews with researchers from a broad range of disciplines across the physical, health, engineering, social sciences, and arts and humanities across fifteen UK universities. The work of Becher (1987) and Becher & Trowler (2001) on disciplinary classification was used as an explanatory framework to understand disciplinary differences. The study found evidence of a lack of awareness of the principle of OA by some researchers across all disciplines; and that researchers, in the main, are not sharing their research data, therefore only the few who are doing so are realising the benefits that have been championed in research funders policies. Moreover, the study uncovered that due to the increased emphasis of impact in research evaluation, conflicting goals between researchers and academic leaders exist. The study found that researchers, particularly from Applied and Interdisciplinary (as opposed to Pure) disciplinary groups felt that research outputs such as articles published in practitioner journals were most appropriate in targeting and making research more accessible to practitioners, than prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. The thesis argues that there is still more to learn about what impact means to researchers and how it might be measured. The thesis makes an overall contribution to knowledge on a general level by providing greater understanding of how researchers have responded to the impact agenda . On a more specific level, the thesis identifies the effect of the impact agenda on academic autonomy, and situates this in different disciplinary contexts. It identifies that it is not only researchers from Pure disciplines who feel disadvantaged by the impact agenda , but also those from Interdisciplinary and Applied groups who feel an encroachment on their academic autonomy, particularly in selecting channels to disseminate their research and in selecting the relevant audiences they wish to engage with. Implications of the study s findings on researchers, higher education institutions and research funders are highlighted and recommendations to researchers, academic leaders and research funders are given.

Cette thèse a pour objectif d'analyser l'efficacité de la mise en place de nouvelles politiques de recherche visant à modifier le mode d'allocation des financements aux chercheurs académiques en France. Avec la création de l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) en 2005, l'orientation donnée concède un poids plus important à l'allocation des financements de manière compétitive entre les chercheurs, approche basée sur le modèle compétitif Anglo-saxon, en complément du système traditionnel d'attribution de financements récurrents aux laboratoires de recherche. De plus, en 2010 a été initié par le gouvernement le Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir (PIA), pour soutenir la recherche en France. Par ce biais, certains centres de recherche en compétition ont été sélectionnés, après évaluation de leur projet, pour obtenir des subventions substantielles afin d'améliorer leur visibilité au niveau mondial. Le premier chapitre porte sur l'étude de l'influence de l'originalité et de la nouveauté de la recherche menée sur la décision des chercheurs de soumettre un projet à un programme de l'ANR, et sur la sélection du projet et son financement par l'agence. Le second chapitre étudie les effets de l'obtention d'un financement sur projet de l'ANR sur divers indicateurs relatifs à la production scientifique ex-post des chercheurs sélectionnés. Le troisième chapitre est consacré à l'analyse de programmes d'attribution compétitive de subventions supplémentaires à des universités (IDEX) et des laboratoires de recherche français (LABEX), de manière à faire émerger des centres d'excellence. Nous étudions l'impact de cette politique sur les performances scientifiques ex-post des chercheurs et enseignants-chercheurs concernés, avec une application à l'Université de Bordeaux. / The objective of this thesis is to analyze the efficiency of the implementation of new research policies, which change the rationale of funding allocation to academic researchers in France. The creation of the French funding agency 'Agence Nationale de la Recherche' (ANR) in 2005 gives a higher weight to grants allocated in a competitive way, in addition to the traditional block funds allocated to laboratories. This approach is based on the rationale of introducing some competition between researchers and to award only those who prepare the best proposals. Furthermore the program 'Investissement d'Avenir' (PIA), initiated by the French government in 2010, has been implemented to foster research excellence. Thus some competing universities obtain high level of funding in order to improve their international visibility. The first chapter of the thesis studies to what extent do funding agencies support novel research. We investigate the influence of the originality of conducted research over the decision of the researchers to apply and over the evaluation of the projects by the agency. In the second chapter, we assess and quantify the impact of receiving a competitive grant from the ANR on several indicators measuring the ex-post research performances of grantees. Our study is based on a database covering all the applications to the ANR between 2005 and 2009. The third chapter studies the implementation of a policy based on the allocation of a substantial competitive subvention to some selected universities and research laboratories. We investigate how this policy impacts the ex-post research performances of the researchers and faculty members with an application to the University of Bordeaux.

Social science is in crisis. The task of social science is to study “man in situation”: to understand the world as it is for “man”. This thesis charges that this crisis consists in a failure to properly address the philosophical anthropological question “What is man?”. The various social scientific methodologies who have as their object “man” suffer rampant disagreements because they presuppose, rather than consider, what is meant by “man”. It is our intention to show that the root of the crisis is that social science can provide no formal definition of “man”. In order to understand this we propose a phenomenological analysis into the essence of social science. This phenomenological approach will give us reason to abandon the (sexist) word “man” and instead we will speak of wer: the beings which we are. That we have not used the more usual “human being” (or some equivalent) is due to the human prejudice which is one of the major constituents of this crisis we seek to analyse. This thesis is divided into two Parts: normative and evaluative. In the normative Part we will seek a clarification of both “phenomenology” and “social science”. Due to the various ways in which “phenomenology” has been invented we must secure a simipliciter definition of phenomenology as an approach to philosophical anthropology (Chapter 2). Importantly, we will show how the key instigators of the branches of phenomenology, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and Sartre, were all engaged in this task. To clarify our phenomenology we will define the Phenomenological Movement according to various strictures by drawing on the work of Schutz and his notion of provinces of meaning (Chapter 3). This will then be carried forward to show how Schutz’s postulates of social science (with certain clarifications) constitute the eidetic structure of social science (Chapter 4). The eidetic structures of social science identified will prompt several challenges that will be addressed in the evaluative Part. Here we engage in an imperial argument to sort proper science from pseudo-science. The first challenge is the mistaken assumption that universities and democratic states make science possible (Chapter 5). Contra this, we argue that science is predicated on “spare time” and that much institutional “science” is not in fact science. The second challenge is the “humanist challenge”: there is no such thing as nonpractical knowledge (Chapter 6). Dealing with this will require a reconsideration of the epistemic status that science has and lead to the claim of epistemic inferiority. Having cut away pseudo-science we will be able to focus on the “social” of social science through a consideration of intersubjectivity (Chapter 7). Drawing on the above phenomenologists we will focus on how an Other is recognised as Other. Emphasising Sartre’s radical re-conception of “subject” and “object” we will argue that there can be no formal criteria for how this recognition occurs. By consequence we must begin to move away from the assumption of one life-world to various life-worlds, each constituted by different conceptions of wer.