Conducting international projects has been for some time now a key element of higher education (HE) policies and practices. Internationalisation implies competitive environments, characterised by institutional performance-management of individual academics, and managerial forms of accountability. This paper discusses the challenges and dilemmas encountered by our research team in our efforts to secure funds and then conduct an international project within this competitive and performativity-driven culture. Placed within the field of critical inquiry, and as a way of illustrating such effects tangibly, the paper reflects on and discusses some of the complexities and dilemmas encountered by researchers involved in designing and realising international research projects in conditions shaped by performance management requirements and managerial accountability.

While previous research considers the challenges of international collaborations, there are no in-depth, self-reflective studies that investigate how the intersection between internationalisation and performativity as manifested in international grant bidding impacts what is researched and how. The available research that discusses the intersection between the two themes is concerned with the effective ways to secure grants as an international team (e.g., Proctor et al, 2012), managing the collaboration effectively (e.g., Jeong, Choi and Kim 2014; Zhou, Cai and Lyu 2020), the impact of securing grants on the productivity of collaborators (e.g., Jacob and Lefgren 2011), and how organizational features such as global ranking affect the practice of internationalization and international collaborations in HEIs (Buckner, 2020). This paper addresses the gap, by investigating the material and discursive impact (Anonymised reference; Ball, 2002)  of the imperative of performativity in the form of grant-bidding on international research collaborations.  

Adopting a reflective narrative methodology, we examine critically the process, from negotiating a research project attractive to funders, to ensuring that the strict accountability measures and, crucially, the tight timeline for the promised deliverables would not undermine our bona fide research objectives; in our case, the investigation of new forms of privatization in school education. In particular, these challenges are discussed with reference to the following issues: the fierce competition for securing research funds; the tight terms and conditions set in national and international calls for the bidding; the strict rules imposed by the funders concerning all aspects of the research process; the pressure to produce the ‘deliverables’ in the time-frame specified in the proposal, pressure which is exerted more forcefully on the Principal Investigator. The management of the budget is also discussed as a challenge, as there is no uniform process and varying levels of institutional support for negotiating and drawing up legal research agreements in the case of international projects. Finally, it is suggested that the externally imposed and instrumental criteria of what constitutes success and failure for a particular research study might provoke divergent responses from the researchers participating in such projects, depending on their position in the academic field, their values and their personal (and/or institutional) stakes associated with the specific research.

The paper illustrates how international grant-bidding, the under-researched technology increasingly promoted by HE institutions and governments to forge international collaborations and increase their economic and status value in the global market (Anonymised reference II), may inadvertently undermine collaborative efforts, and lead to mission drift, under an intense performativity and accountability system. Such dangers can be kept at bay only through critical self-reflection of the research process and constant navigation through pitfalls, which we identify phase-by-phase. It is argued that this self-reflective narrative could help scholars make informed decisions in their efforts to strike a balance between prioritising a funding opportunity and doing research that in their judgments are scientifically and politically important and of the highest possible quality.

This paper was produced through the experimental process of combining self-generated narratives and reflective co-writing. That is, individual contributors (team leaders from the four contexts of the comparative study) produced narratives upon pre-specified dimensions of our ongoing project, and then collectively wrote reflective pieces. The narrative analysis provides insights into the experience, beliefs and practices of the research collaborators. According to the literature (e.g., Seidenschnur et al. 2020), during the production of narratives, informants connect various events and give them meaning, a process which helps reveal a deep interpretative pattern that taps into hidden stories and assumptions they were unaware of. Researchers may use narrative inquiry to record a holistic, complex and rich experience (Bell 2002). This kind of inquiry helps identify the social, economic and political relations that shape individuals’ experiences and practices. The process of reflective co-writing helps the research collaborators reflect on the collective and individual experiences of doing the project. Reflective co-writing, we argue, is important not only for carrying out the project successfully, but also for sharpening the critical lens from which we address the topic under investigation, including the interrogation of our own (the researchers’) role in the definition of the object of research (Heimans, Singh and Barnes 2020). This process can be thought of as a written version of focus group research, using the synthesised narratives as a ‘prompt’ to help reflect on the inner workings of the project. Our approach followed a similar approach to that taken by Jandrić et al. (2017) and Pryor et al. (2009). The leaders of the national teams participating in this international comparative project produced individual narratives about the process of developing the proposal. The P.I. worked on them to produce a coherent piece out of the narratives, and then the co-authors developed collectively the present reflective piece. Our P.I. went back to the emails written by the team members to triangulate the final narratives created. The content of the revised paper was finally agreed upon by all the contributors. The timeline of this reflective paper comprises the period from the time the team agreed to conduct a comparative study until the second year into the project. The narratives were organised chronologically, phase-by-phase, i.e., during the (inter)national review of the research proposal set up by the university of the P.I., finalizing the bidding text, agreeing on the research tools, conducting the study, and reporting.

This study revealed that in the current conditions, framed by performativity and managerial accountability, international collaboration is not simply a comparison of national cases, but an intricate political manoeuvring process through emerging challenges in each phase of the project. The process in the design stage, for instance, involved selecting a fundable topic, allowing flexibility between contexts, and accommodating the differential needs and interests of different research teams, as well as the constraints and potentials of their research sites. It also involves managing power dynamics among related parties, e.g., team members, internal/external reviewers, and managing public perceptions of the project, if the topic addressed is sensitive. The experience involving team members from four countries (Hong Kong, Australia, Japan and Greece) suggests that, in the case of an international collaborative team inspected by an accounting system, researchers have to deal with constant tensions between the pressure to perform and the pursuit of genuine research interests. The tensions could be amplified if the research team is formed in a relatively short time and its members have not worked together previously. Team members must learn of and navigate through different cultural, systemic and personal assumptions, and build good relationships and trust, while doing the research itself. The efforts to foster such relationships, necessary in collaborative work, within the time-span of a project, will encounter multiple complexities, such as time zone and hemispheric differences in university and country calendars, and diverse career phases and attitudes toward the performativity pressure of each team member. Performativity and accountability are global realities, manifest in diverse forms. The findings reported in this paper could alert funders, governments and senior management of HE institutions of possible harm to researchers and research when it is ill-managed, and inform future design and management to foster original research and genuine collaboration.

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