The Gravity of the Status Quo: The Response of Research Governance to System-Level Shocks

Using semi-structured interviews with n=69 global research stakeholders, this research explores the ways in which stakeholders within system-level research governance organisations conceptualised, responded to, and reasoned the realities of disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they positioned procedural changes to their governance mechanisms. Given that shocks to systems present critical challenges to established practices and embedded institutional norms, we use neo-institutional theory as a heuristic device to examine the relationship between the exogenous shock of COVID-19, trajectories of institutional norms and cultures, and the role institutional stakeholders play in managing responses.  Across all the research systems studied (with particular focus on the UK, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Hong Kong SAR and Italy), participants were concerned about how the shock provided by COVID-19 had both revealed and entrenched deep inequalities (between individuals and between organisations) inherent in their research systems and globally.  There were tensions in how participants centralised the concept of the ‘normal’ as part of a process of recovery permeating all system-level responses, often with a sense of nostalgia for pre-pandemic structures, modes of operation, and embedded norms.  Aspirations for short-, medium- and long-term plans for research change echoed a dependency on returning to ‘normal’ and reflected an inevitable pull of the norms of the pre-pandemic status quo. Despite the desire of individuals involved in research governance to ‘build back better’, the pull of institutional norms and the gravitational force of the status quo appear too strong for meaningful change to happen in recovering research systems.