Bureaucratization in Academic Research Policy: What Causes It?

In the U.S. and throughout most of the world, university research is becoming increasingly bureaucratized. Remarkably, there is almost no scholarly attention devoted to answering the question of what explains the continual growth in rules and regulations surrounding publicly funded research. Many efforts have been made to document the growth of rules and administrative burden in research policy - blue ribbon panels have been convened and made recommendations about reducing rules and their costs - but the causes of this bureaucratization have generated much less systematic explanation. Bureaucratization in Academic Research Policy: What Causes It? explains the reasons of bureaucratization and, in doing so, relies on theory and research about red tape and bureaucratic pathology. The monograph is organized as follows: The first section provides a brief, necessary preamble to organizational analysis - a review and conceptual demarcation of bureaucratization, red tape and formalization. After clarifying closely related concepts, the authors review some of the studies documenting the bureaucratization of research policy and administration in the U.S. and the responses to the bureaucratization, both institutional responses and responses and attitudes of individual investigators. The next section introduces theory of rules and red tape, the theory-base is used as a lens to asking the study's key question concerning the growth of rules in research policy and administration. After providing a theory base, the authors turn to the core question of the paper: What explains the continual growth in rules and regulations surrounding publicly funded research? And provide a conceptual model to answer this question. Finally, the monograph examines key elements of the conceptual model in terms of a variety of government rules and procedures promulgated, ones that almost always have good intentions but, when taken together, vastly increase administrative burden while only rarely demonstrating the social value purchased by the administrative burden.