Academic capitalism also stresses the growing engagement of academics in application-oriented and commercially funded research, but the extent of such engagement is limited based on the closeness of one’s discipline to the market (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). However, it distinguishes itself from Mode 2 because universities retain distinctiveness as the core knowledge institutions and the application orientation process is emergent, rather than complete (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000). Like Mode 2, it contends that the future legitimation of science depends upon application orientation and contribution to economic development. More recently, the triple helix model of university–industry–government relations has also had considerable impact on research policy (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000). Other conceptualisations, such as “finalised science” and “post-normal science”, also emphasise strong practice orientation, but these concepts are much more nuanced in their interpretation, limiting their implications to certain disciplines or policy-relevant fields (Weingart 1997). A similar conceptualisation, “translational research”, shares many of these characteristics, focussing on the harnessing of basic research for practical uses, particularly within the health sciences (Woolf 2008). However, strategic research retains a linearity between basic research and practical utility, including basic research as a cornerstone of its definition: “Strategic research basic research carried out with the expectation that it will produce a broad base of knowledge likely to form the background to the solution of recognized current or future practical problems” (Irvine and Martin 1984). According to Rip ( 2004), strategic research is the basic way of carrying out research in the regime of “strategic science”.

In the 1980s, Irvine and Martin ( 1984) identified the emergence of “strategic research”, combining academic excellence with an orientation towards future practical utility. Mode 2 is not necessarily new or unique, and it competes with other popular characterisations of the changing research agenda, some of which predate it. ( 2003) claims, yet the Mode 2 discourse has influenced higher education and research policy makers and has been cited in almost ten thousand documents, with the vast majority of scientific papers treating it as an accepted or background concept (Hessels and Van Lente 2008). To date, there has been little evidence to support or refute Nowotny et al. The exceptionally wide scope of the Mode 2 discourse has been criticised for its lack of coherence and empirical validity (Hessels and Van Lente 2008). The Mode 2 diagnosis is broader than just the decline of fundamental research, and it also includes shifts towards collaborative and transdisciplinary research, greater heterogeneity in the sites of knowledge production, deeper social accountability and broader forms of quality control (beyond discipline-based peer review). ( 2003) summarised: “… the research that is variously described as ‘pure’, ‘blue-skies’, fundamental, or disinterested, is now a minority preoccupation-even in universities” (p. Revisiting the Mode 2 discourse, Nowotny et al. Mode 2 knowledge, produced within the context of application, has become the dominant form. ( 1994), argued that disinterested, academic-oriented, disciplinary and autonomous research conducted exclusively within universities (Mode 1) is no longer the core mode of knowledge production. The Mode 2 thesis, first outlined in The New Production of Knowledge by Gibbons et al. However, the centrality of basic research has come under question. The “linear model” of innovation, popular during the post-1945 era, saw basic research as the primary contributor to innovation and economic growth, with universities as the institutional locus for public funding (Mowery and Sampat 2005).

Long-term scientific work is at the centre of this heartland.īasic research, or research undertaken with a primary purpose of the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, has traditionally been fundamental to university missions and their public funding. Only by protecting their so-called academic heartland can universities retain a degree of autonomy and a connection with widely shared values among their employees (Clark 1998). Many of these changes are described in rather pessimistic terms because they imply reduced funding, different activities and numerous tensions and challenges (Enders 2013). The higher education literature is bursting with examples of how universities are changing in response to societal transformations and new demands.

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