Multiple Competitions in Academia. The Role of Competitive Funding Schemes in Research and Education.

Competition in academia is by far not new, but in the 21st century its relevance in the field of higher education has reached a new level (Szöllösi-Janze, 2021). As part of this development, various state-initiated competitive funding schemes have been established in Germany. In our study, we address the two largest competitive funding schemes which address teaching and research as the two core missions of universities: The Excellence Initiative and the Quality Pact for Teaching. Theoretically, we refer to two major considerations. First and foremost, we will explore the relation between competition in funding schemes and wider competition as ways of organizing academia. Here, we refer to Stark (2020) who summarizes differences between competition and competitions. On the one hand, Stark describes competition as an ongoing, seamless, and seemingly endless process in which individual and organizational actors compete for scarce goods (Stark, 2020, p. 3). On the other hand, competitions are described by him as discrete, bounded in time and space: Competitions are relatively (though never perfectly) separated arenas of rivalry that seek to identify differences of worth in some reasonably consensual and organized fashion (Stark, 2020, p. 3). The two competitive funding schemes we focus on can be understood as competitions according to Stark’s distinction. However, individuals and organizations participating in these competitions will also have goals in the wider and more general competition for scarce goods like reputation, resources, and talent/jobs. Therefore, we suggest that to participate in competitions always relates to goals in the more general competition. The second theoretical consideration we want to refer to is the crucial role of third parties in competition. Competition is characterized by different elements (Werron, 2015). The first element are the actors that compete for a scarce good. The second element of competition is the scarce good for which these actors compete. The third element are third parties or audiences that become important for the distribution of the scarce good (Werron, 2015, p. 195). In terms of the EI and the QPL, different audiences seem to be relevant. The political government and the ministries of education, intermediary organizations that compare and evaluate performances in competitions, peers in the selection process as reviewers and referees, and potential partner organizations since cooperation can be helpful or even necessary to succeed in competition (Luijten-Lub et al., 2005). Given the important role of the audiences as referees, distributors of the scarce good or potential partners, it is highly important to learn more about who they are and how they are perceived. Thinking about these different audiences, it becomes apparent that not all of them can be easily addressed – potential researchers and students, for example. The way how decisions in ministries are taken and who contributes to them is also often not transparent, and the persons who participate in selection committees of the German Research Foundation are not always known beforehand. This raises the question, how audiences are socially constructed and ‘imagined’ as groups and how related strategies are organized and developed by the universities.