Articles

Aggregated Governance by R&D Evaluation Mechanism - Case Study of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Junwen Luo, Gonzalo Ord??ez-Matamoros and Stefan Kuhlmann

Abstract

This article aims at increasing understanding of the role of R&D (Research and Development) evaluation mechanism in mitigating conflicts of governance under the organizational framework of Publicly Funded Research Institutions (PRIs). There has been a series of governance reforms within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the past eighteen years. These vigorous reforms over the years have improved significantly CAS’s stability of organizational research landscape and focused governance of complex R&D across varying institutes, disciplines and fields. Dynamics of evaluation mechanism, as a key instrument of governance reforms, has experienced four stages from zero, being purely quantitative towards strategic usefulness and categorized principles. Organizational governance of CAS has been learning to be increasingly aggregated from the institutionalization of evaluation mechanism and the growing stakeholders’ communication and interactions. The roles of evaluation mechanism are for governing complexity and mitigating stakeholders’ tensions in CAS, which perform varyingly at different levels of organizational framework. CAS study offers insights for governance of developing large-scale PRIs under similar organizational framework especially experiencing big reforms.?

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