The Way we Ask for Money. The Changing Logics of Grant Writing in German Academia (1975-2005)

The growing importance of external funding in the academic world has affected individuals and research organizations in significant ways. Although existing scholarship offers a critical understanding of the working mechanisms and consequences of different funding regimes, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals: How did we actually learn to write grant proposals? This paper seeks to make up for this lacuna by examining how academic grant writing has evolved, historically, from a case-by-case negotiation between the applicant and the funding organization to a professional "shared practice" (Barnes 2001) involving the entire scientific community. We argue that by including peer review in the evaluation of grant proposals in the 1970s, peers became central agents in the allocation of both symbolic and material resources. Over time, individual grant proposals increasingly mirror the cognitive, normative and regulative orientations of the peer community, thereby furthering the rationalization and standardization of grant writing practices in the discipline. The study sheds light on these developments by linking practice theory and an institutional logics approach (Friedland and Alford 1991). While field-level dynamics have pushed competition as organizing principle of research work, we observe that peer communities managed to buffer central aspects of their research practices from radical changes by selectively incorporating "elemental categories" (Thornton et al. 2012) of the market into the dominant professional logic. The argument draws on a longitudinal study of archival data and interviews with applicants and funding organizations in Germany.