Transforming excellence? From ‘matter of fact’ to ‘matter of concern’ in research funding organizations

Excellence is omnipresent in the research ecosystem but the narrow focus on excellence is increasingly controversial. One of the key actors in the research ecosystems are research funding organizations, yet their activities are comparatively little studied in relation to excellence. This paper aims to contribute to the excellence debate through an empirical study of how notions of excellence are used, and what functions they serve, in eight research funding organizations. Our study shows research funding organizations have recognized critical voices and are taking steps to address some of the problematic aspects of excellence. However, because research funding organizations are shaped by the excellence regime, and constrained by both governmental policy and scientific elites, research funding organizations cannot simply resort to a debunking critique and do away with excellence altogether. In their efforts to navigate their ambiguous relationship to excellence we show that in many of our case study sites the approach to excellence has shifted from it being taken as a ‘matter of fact’, that is rather taken for granted, to a ‘matter of concern’, that needs to be unpacked and reconfigured. We find funders resort to three mitigation strategies, patching, pluralizing and transforming, in their attempts to reconfigure excellence. Our findings suggest, however, that the current mitigation strategies adopted by funders aimed at reconfiguring excellence leave underlying assumptions about competition and meritocratic ideals largely unquestioned. A transformation of the research ecosystem is unlikely to happen when these ideals are not also problematized.