Untangling research culture: reflections from a university culture change project

Abstract

Research culture is often used as a broad term to describe the conditions, behaviours, expectations, and systems that shape researchers’ experiences. In practice, however, many of the issues raised under the banner of research culture are not unique to research. They are also shaped by wider organisational culture, institutional processes, and the day-to-day cultures of teams, departments, and research groups.

This reflective paper draws on learning from I-REACCH, a university-wide research culture change project, to explore how the project team came to question the boundaries of “research culture”. As the project developed, stakeholders increasingly looked to I-REACCH to respond to a wide range of concerns, from career development and recognition to wellbeing, communication, inclusion, workload, and local working practices. This prompted the team to ask whether these issues were best understood as research culture, organisational culture, team culture, or some combination of all three.

Through structured reflection, the core project team attempted to map culture-related issues across these domains. Rather than clarifying neat boundaries, the exercise revealed that most issues sat in the overlap. This paper argues that the value of such mapping lies not in producing a fixed categorisation, but in exposing the interconnected nature of culture change work. Research culture interventions are likely to be limited if they focus only on research-specific norms and incentives, without recognising the organisational systems and team-level experiences through which those norms are enacted.

The working paper offers a practitioner perspective on the challenge of defining, managing, and communicating the scope of research culture work within a complex institution. It suggests that research culture may be most usefully understood not as a bounded domain, but as an interaction between research-specific expectations, organisational structures, and team-level lived experience.