What’s the relationship between research culture and research-related policy? I recently had some encounters that made me want to write about these things, which brought me to an interesting conclusion: telling stories about policies might be an effective long-term method for changing culture (for good and for bad).
Some background.
Back in November, I was at a conference that had no relation to university matters or academia (it was EndWell, a death, dying and grief conference in Los Angeles) and had an insight in a workshop on policy-making, where the facilitator dissuaded us from attempting policy change at a high-level, national level.
You’ll never get anything done in this issue at that level, she said. (This was in the US.) Instead, she encouraged us to look at churches, neighborhood organizations, companies, and other local spaces. There people might have a better chance of effectively saying how things will be done, because it’s closest to how they organically want to do things.
Some age-old questions came back to me at that moment: Does policy create culture? Or does culture precede policy? Surely this is a simplistic formulation, and a quick web search turns up a mountain of literature on the puzzle. But I realized that at those small scales, maybe culture and policy are indistinguishable from each other. Get enough local dog parks to make rules about off-leash dogs, and there you could have enough evidence to support, say, a city-wide policy about leashes and dogs.
After the conference, I came back to my day job as funding advisor at a Dutch university, where I was reminded of a few things. Now I’m no longer certain that small-scale policy is equivalent to culture, not in any reliable way.
What is culture? I find useful a quick definition I learned working at a business consulting firm: culture is “the way we do things around here.” Sometimes it’s more accurate to add that culture is “the way we think we do things around here, along with the way we actually do things.” Culture exists as a set of models that we have in our heads for guiding action, making decisions, processing new information.
By contrast, policy is guidelines, frameworks, rules. It exists not in brains but on paper. It is composed of normative statements about how resources will be used and by whom. It’s the black and white. It’s explicit. By contrast, culture is often tacit. It may even resist the explicitness required of policy. That’s one reason that culture isn’t just more granular policy, nor is it policy at scale.
Cultural forms exist on multiple levels, it’s also necessary to say. There’s the local organizational culture. Then there’s the broader regional or national culture outside the organization, which the local organizational culture often draws heavily from.
If you’ve ever worked in a university setting, you might recognize a couple of things about culture and policy.
One thing is that lots of people are in charge of policy. Very few are in charge of culture. The implicit assumption is that one creates the other. But this isn’t necessarily true. Another assumption is that culture arises on its own and needs no tending. This is also not true.
Another thing is that “culture” is often defended at the organizational level. Where I work, each faculty (basically the college) insists on its own way of doing things, which it deploys in order to resist any top-down, centralized effort to coordinate, consolidate, or share resources. It resembles, in many ways, the country of Belgium.
This is not as glib as it seems: many of the cultural attributes that are said to belong to this or that unit may in fact reflect regional or national ways of doing things. I’m not saying that this should or shouldn’t be the case; I work at a university funded by Dutch taxpayers, after all, so if it’s Dutch, fine. However, I’m simply noting that unless you acknowledge the mere existence of alternate cultural defaults among the people in your population–I’m not even saying you have to take them into account–there will be friction.
(One example from my workplace that I found extraordinarily irksome: the ballots for university elections look like Dutch election ballots, which come with zero instructions about how to fill them out; in the mind of university designers, the voters are, by default, Dutch and therefore know what to do. This at a proudly, vocally, and self-advertised “internationalised” university !)
One final point: I’ve been fortunate to play some role in drafting, elaborating, evaluating, and implementing policy related to research funding. Over and over, I find that where the policy works, it’s because it is consistent with or parallel to what the culture already was. However, the policy doesn’t work where it goes against the culture grain. Part of that cultural aspect is the freedom of people with power to find ways to do what they want, regardless of policy. But it’s other things, too.
Culture is when people who should benefit from a policy don’t know about it.
Culture is when people who should enforce a policy can afford not to.
Culture is sometimes ways of doing things that you don’t want encoded in policy. That someone wants to keep tacit. There are many reasons for this, few of them pretty, none of them consistent with transparency or fairness.
Apparently management guru Peter Drucker never actually said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” but it seems closer to the truth that culture is the thing that eats policy. Yes, when it comes to strategy, “Culture is the web of shared meanings that gives strategy its life,” but when it comes to policy, it often has a more oppositional relationship to culture. Policy never eats culture, not by itself. It can only sit down for a meal with culture, if the culture is headed that way anyway. Slowly, over a long period of time, it might be possible to get culture to see things in the light of the policy. The question is, how to do that?
For some reason, my undergraduate alma mater, Williams College, came to mind. Williams is a small liberal arts college, founded in 1793, which undertook major culture change via policy change when it abolished fraternities as a part of admitting women to the college. As a retrospective in the Williams Record noted:
The College’s move toward coeducation commenced when then-President John Edward Sawyer ’39 determined that coeducation and Greek life could not coexist, he said in an oral interview with the Williams Alumni Review. Much of the College’s social structure, including intramural sports and student government, was built around Greek life, prompting the abolition of fraternities in 1962.”
For anyone who knows fraternity culture in American higher ed, it is vast, powerful, and deeply embedded. For one college, on its own, to make such a move probably seemed quixotic at the time. On the surface, it worked: over decades, social life was re-organized around co-ed residential houses, and any single-sex exclusive organization was strictly banned. When I attended in the late 1980s, the absence of Greek organisations felt entirely normal, and visits to friends at other universities confirmed to me that campus society was healthier without fraternities or sororities. The culture of Williams, for most students, was built anew.
Such culture change is probably easier in matters of student life because the population refreshes so rapidly, but there’s another dynamic: the change was also achieved through consistent, continuous storytelling about the policy, its origins, and its rationale, along with consistent enforcement of the norm.
I remember hearing this over and over as a student, among other things. One was, don’t pull a fire alarm needlessly, which will get you expelled immediately, no chances for appeal. (This happened to someone in my hallway; the morning after he pulled the alarm, his room stood empty.) Another was, we don’t allow fraternal organizations because we want campus life to be cohesive, and we’re unique about small colleges for that.
Probably this storytelling never went far enough, at least when I was there. The danger posed by frats isn’t just that they fragment the community, it’s also that they pose threats to the health and safety of women, as has been proven over and over. Maybe that’s the way it’s told now.
One could also question whether the policy truly worked, given that the frats simply went underground, as documented in this Williams Record story, which tells how Williams fought against them well into the 21st century. (Maybe it still is.) Greek affiliations and social activities were so embedded in experiences of older alumni, often rich ones, that there were always funds to push the limit. However, I’d argue that Williams culture did change as a result of the policy. Any anthropologist will tell you that cultural forms are rarely homogeneous; practices and beliefs can differ and even conflict, and the existence of renegades disproves nothing. For the most part, no one goes to that school expecting to join a fraternity or sorority. If you want that experience, you’ll go somewhere else. That’s culture change.
My point is that the policy, no matter the scale, didn’t do the work, not by itself. Once the policy was set, frats experienced immediate material consequences, including giving up their houses. But that’s not culture. The culture of “we know how to build a campus community because we had the sense to kick out the frats” arose because of consistent storytelling about the policy. Why it’s there. What it’s meant to achieve. Telling stories about successes and bringing rule-breaking to light. Sure, there was enforcement. But you also had to tell stories about the enforcement actions too.
A policy without storytelling is like a lever system without a beam. There’s a perfectly good fulcrum there, which is the policy and enforcement actions. The storytelling is the beam.
It’s now come out that the new career development and assessment system at Maastricht University, Recognition and Rewards, has not succeeded at rooting out old cultures of favoritism and opacity. According to a recent report in the university newspaper, academic staff report that the high ideals of the program have not yet been implemented properly. Old assessment criteria persist; older professors, often white men, run the show. The report (which I haven’t seen), makes some recommendations for change:
One of [Maastricht Young Academy’s] recommendations is mandatory training (at the moment only on a voluntary basis) for all managers, which the report identifies as a prerequisite for cultural change. Clear assessment criteria and promotion frameworks (when does someone qualify to take the next step in their career, whether vertically or horizontally?) are also essential, as are simpler procedures and effective communication. “Make it clear that R&R does not automatically lead to promotion, but it can influence it”, the report advises.
To me, all these are necessary interventions, but they all amount to more policy. You can’t bring a policy to fight a culture war. To really begin to change the culture–which, unfortunately, is probably going to take decades of sustained effort–there needs to be storytelling, over and over, not only how this system is different but what will be achieved through the changes and how everyone will benefit.
This is key. You can’t just make people do things; you have to connect it to a broader moral universe. Similarly, you can’t just expect people to do things; you have to connect those activities to a a broader vision. Remind them why they are doing them. Not because it’s the job that will keep them cozy but because they’re spending major portions of their lives engaged in something broader.
What do you do if there’s no culture of storytelling? This is where the influence of the national culture may play into things. It’s true that Americans love their myths and mythologizing; perhaps this is why I can land so easily on storytelling. And I’ve had conversations recently with people about how telling such overarching stories is anathema to the Dutch, who see them as restrictive impositions on an individual personal freedom. Thus, there’s no articulated common good. I don’t know if I buy all of this–I don’t necessarily believe that the Dutch are so individualistic or that they don’t operate according to a shared societal purpose. If so, it pales compared to Americans.
One solution might be meta-policy: you encode in policy the telling of stories about the policy and its effects. Every year, someone has to tell the foundational myth. Every year, the results of an evaluation are made public, and are publicly discussed.
Put it this way: if you’re a leader who doesn’t tell stories, people are going to tell their own stories. And you might not like the culture that comes out of that, because it’s definitely going to eat your policy for breakfast.
