Crafting the Group: Care in Research Management

Crafting the group: Care in research management

To be published in Social Studies of Science

Sarah R Davies Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Maja Horst Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract This article reports findings from an interview study with group leaders and principal investigators (PIs) in Denmark, the UK and US. Taking as our starting point current interest in the need to enhance ‘responsible research and innovation’, we suggest that these debates can be developed through attention to the talk and practices of scientists. Specifically, we chart the ways in which interview talk represented research management and leadership as processes of caring craftwork. Interviewees framed the group as the primary focus of their attention (and responsibilities), and as something to be tended and crafted; further, this process required a set of affective skills deployed flexibly in response to the needs of individuals. Through exploring the presence of notions of care in the talk of PIs and group leaders, we discuss the relation between care and craft, reflect on the potential implications of the promotion of a culture of care, and suggest how mundane scientific understandings of responsibility might relate to wider discussion of responsible research and innovation.

Keywords: craft; care; research management; responsible research and innovation; research groups

Corresponding author: Sarah R Davies, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Københavns Universitet, Karen Blixens Vej 4, DK-2300 København S, Denmark Email: [email protected] In this paper we reflect on what it means to become encultured into university science and, in particular, what it looks like to lead and manage a research group. Based on interviews with research managers and principal investigators (PIs) in Denmark, the UK, and US, we suggest that, contra accounts that emphasize the outward-looking and entrepreneurial role of the PI (Casati and Genet, 2014; Kidwell, 2014), the notion of caring craftwork is a key way to understand the role of the PI. In this view, the PI’s role is slow, unpredictable (in the sense that it depends on the immediate materials to hand), highly skilled in ways that cannot always be readily articulated and, crucially, predicated on notions of care and nurture. As such, we build on recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that has sought to draw attention to under- represented practices of care in spaces where they have traditionally been downplayed or devalued (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011).

Thinking of science in terms of craft is not new. A long tradition of research emphasizes the embodied, tacit, and craft-like aspects of scientific practice. Students within natural science laboratories and groups undergo enculturation processes, whereby they become adept both in informal knowledge and tactile skills, such as learning the bench skills that make an experiment ‘work’ or that enable the recognition of relevant data within a particular field site (Delamont and Atkinson, 2001; Hackett, 2005; Pinch, 1981; Polanyi, 1966). If craft is the ‘application of skill and material-based knowledge to relatively small-scale production’ (Adamson 2010, 2), then much lab work is certainly craft-like. However, many of the researchers with whom we spoke were no longer active in the lab. As PIs or managers much of their work consisted of enabling and supporting other people’s science. They spoke about their roles as operating at a more abstracted level than that of individual research projects, and in terms of planning, framing, or communicating research; they were, in Fujimura’s (1996) terms, doing ‘articulation work’. As successful leaders of groups and managers of grants they were entrepreneurial, adept at industry or policy engagement, fundraising, and strategic management (Law, 1994; Shapin, 2009). At the same time they continued to use language that tied their activities to craftwork. We therefore suggest that rather than seeing articulation work as something different to the craft skills of the bench (Fujimura, 1996; Hackett, 2005), we can understand it as another form of craftwork, one that is specific to the PI role. As we will show, many of the same conceptual resources – such as tacit skills learned through apprenticeship, flexibility in the face of unpredictable materials, and an emphasis on utility – are used to describe managing research and crafting a group as might be in framing bench skills.

In what follows we outline how research management is framed, by PIs, as a craft practice. We start by describing the context and methods of the research, before moving on to further develop the notion of craft upon which we draw; we frame it as a caring practice that involves skill and flexibility in the face of uncertain materials and situations. There are then two empirical sections within which we, first, explore how PIs talk about the group as a structure to be crafted and, second, describe the craft skills necessary to this process. We conclude by reflecting on three issues: the status of these narratives of care as performances given in a particular context; the potential implications of the presence of such narratives; and the implications for discussion of responsibility in science and, specifically, of responsible research and innovation (RRI). Research approach This research emerged out of an interest in how ideas of responsibility are articulated within science policy and the practice of scientific research. As part of wider developments regarding the governance of science and, in particular, emerging technologies (Kearnes and Rip, 2007), scientists increasingly find themselves called upon to act responsibly (Kjølberg and Strand, 2011; McCarthy and Kelty, 2010). The research we report on here involved 29 interviews with scientists working in emerging scientific and technological areas, including nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Their career stages ranged from assistant professors (or the locally equivalent job title) running their first research group to senior scholars with administrative and scientific responsibilities outside of the group, such as Heads of Departments or of Research Institutes. Interviewees were split evenly between three different national contexts: we spoke with 10 individuals in Denmark, eight in the UK, and 11 in the US. Interviews generally lasted about an hour, though some were much longer (150 minutes) and some shorter (45 minutes).1 A topic guide structured the conversation and included questions on participants’ research background and history, their relationships and responsibilities in their immediate work settings, and their awareness and response to broader policy discourses of responsibility. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and coded using the qualitative software tool MaxQDA. Coding was grounded in actors’ terms and meanings, and was used to organize emergent themes within the interview talk.

The differences between interviews from the different countries were slight, and largely related to the extent to which policy discussion of ‘responsibility’ had reached those with whom we spoke. Those in the UK tended to be most aware of, and referred most explicitly to, policy demands for responsibility. This was particularly noticeable in the context of synthetic biology, a discipline that has to a large extent been framed through reference to ‘societal implications’ (Lentvos, 2009; Rabinow and Bennett, 2012). This is not surprising given that the UK is seen as supporting ‘the wider sort of social responsibility side’ of science, as one of the UK interviewees put it (cf. Horst and Irwin, 2010; Tilli and Dawson, 2010). US and Danish scientists similarly used language tied to the situation in their own national contexts, with US interviewees often referring to National Science Foundation demands for ‘broader impact’, while in Denmark a key frame was responsible conduct in the laboratory, the need for which gained prominence after a high profile case of fraudulent Danish science (see Callaway, 2011). Aside from these differences in language and degree of awareness of policy discussion, however, the themes that emerged from the data cut across the three national contexts.

The research began in an interest in how calls from funders for responsibility in science – typically construed as responsibility to broader society (Owen et al., 2012; 2013) – are interpreted and used within scientific practice. It rapidly became apparent from the interviews that such calls, even when interviewees were aware of them (Kjølberg and Strand, 2011), were seen as largely irrelevant to the mundane business of being a scientist and PI. This is not to say that the scientists with whom we spoke were unconcerned with questions of responsibility, or that they didn’t support such initiatives. While some individuals expressed concerns that such calls might encroach on research independence, or spoke about the need for continued funding of basic research, interviewees were almost unanimous in supporting closer ties between research and wider society. But they saw the development of such ties as a very different kind of activity to that which comprised their day-to-day work of leading a group, planning its science, and supporting its members. And it was here, on these mundane activities, that their attention – and their articulations of responsibility – were focused. One UK synthetic biologist, for instance, was extremely familiar with the way in which his discipline is often portrayed as a multi-disciplinary, publically engaged, responsible science. Thus, he said, he felt:

…a bit of responsibility to the subject itself, and to [the university] to try and deliver things that will have a benefit in general, economically, or for the good of the world in some way, rather than just doing research for research sake … but the weight of responsibility that I feel day to day for that is significantly less than it is for making sure that the team, the individuals around me, do well and don’t fall into a hole where their results never work and no-one’s looking after them. (Ulster, UK)2

Ulster and the others PIs with whom we spoke talked frequently about how busy they were. They split their time between their lab or group, undergraduate teaching, department or university administration, dissemination and collaboration, and wider industry or policy outreach. Not unreasonably, their attention was therefore primarily on the sphere in which they saw themselves as being able to have an impact – where ‘responsibility’ became meaningful or ‘do-able’ for them (cf. Fujimara, 1996; McCarthy and Kelty, 2010). This sphere was the group.

The group emerged from the data as the key site where responsibility is performed. Moreover, our data shows that leading the group involves a particular kind of scientific practice, one that is – in contrast to more instrumental languages that have been reported elsewhere (Casati and Genet, 2014) – overtly caring. We discuss this notion of care, and its connection with craftwork, in the next section. Before doing so, however, we need to briefly outline how we situate our interview data. We are not treating these accounts as direct representations of how things ‘really are’ – as evidence that a particular way of performing the PI role, as caring craft, dominates the practice of research in emerging technologies. (Indeed, recent work suggests that many junior scholars experience their situations as exactly not tailored towards caring for them [Glerup, 2014]. Müller and Kenney [2014] discuss the intense pressures postdoctoral scientists represent themselves as being under, and argue that their interviews act as a moment of caring interference that can offer moments of reflection and disruption.) Rather, the interviews enabled a particular performance of ‘PI-ness’ to an attentive listener, and should be understood in these terms (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). At the same time, however, we adopt what we might call an ethos of generosity towards participants in this study, who gave up their time to talk with us and who attempted, in good faith, to describe their experiences as best they could (Fortun, 2005). We are not radically sceptical of the stories they tell – but we do view them only as examples of the stories that they could tell, at other moments and in other contexts (Macnaghten et al., forthcoming). We thus take an approach similar to that described by Delamont et al. (2000) in reporting on interviews concerning the PhD supervision process: ‘we regard’, they write, ‘these narratives … as part of the occupational culture of the academics we studied, not therefore as idiosyncratic or private experiences, nor as situated actions of no relevance at all beyond the interview context itself’ (p.136). Similarly, we view our interviews as providing insight into the ways in which research management can be performed and rationalized, and as giving a glimpse of a certain ‘occupational culture’ – a notion we return to in the conclusion.

Craft as care Recent work in STS argues for a re-evaluation of the importance of care within scientific practice. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011), for instance, makes a double move in her paper ‘Matters of care in technoscience’. She first suggests that Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ might be reimagined as ‘matters of care’, and builds on this to frame the scholar’s role as being ‘not only to expose or reveal invisible labours of care, but also to generate care’ (p.10; emphasis added). She is interested in bringing the presence of care to the foreground of sites where it is often ignored or rendered invisible; in so doing, she herself nurtures caring practices. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) argues that orienting towards care in technoscience highlights the affective within mundane scientific practice and maintains a commitment to that which has been marginalized or neglected. Recent scholarship has responded to this call by, for instance, examining the ways in which particular technological flows and configurations can embody relations of care (Lutz, 2013), framing listening as a key caring practice (Watson, 2014) and examining marginalized caring practices within science (Friese, 2013). Friese, for example, traces the way in which one scientist foregrounds notion of care within her laboratory practice and, specifically, through animal husbandry. For this scientist, care for the rats she works with in the laboratory is directly related to care for (eventual) patients by increasing the robustness of her data and thereby its usefulness for translation to a clinical setting. Care ‘becomes a way of enhancing or improving the potential of the model organisms scientists use and thus the findings that result’ (Friese, 2013: S130). As Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) suggests, such care goes beyond an intellectual calculation about how to produce the best possible data. Rather, it is both an ‘embodied emotion’ (Friese, 2013: S133) and a moral compulsion.

Annemarie Mol (2010) and the other editors of a recent volume on the practice of care tie lack of interest in care in the academy to a more general lack of interest in bodies, emotions, and the private realm. As these things have been reclaimed as, first, visible and, second, interesting, disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy (and STS) have begun to notice practices of care. For Mol et al. (2010) and the case studies that comprise their collection, care is less something to be rigidly defined than a style of thinking. It directs attention to what was once rendered invisible within scientific research – the private, emotional, embodied, messy, and insoluble, as opposed to the calculable and controllable. Though they focus on farming and health and social care, and do not enter either the lab or the workshop, their understanding of care offers a number of bridges to theories of craft and craftwork. In particular they frame care as a matter of tinkering, or ‘attentive experimentation’ (Mol et al., 2010: 13). Good care, they argue, is not something that can be codified, or rid of ambivalence; care is always performed in an imperfect world, and what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ not always readily apparent. Caring will therefore not always look the same. It is, rather, about ‘persistent tinkering in a world full of complex ambivalence and shifting tensions’ (Mol et al., 2010: 14).

Such an understanding of care – as a continuous process of creative experimentation – can also be framed as an act of craftwork. Craft is similarly ‘a set of concerns’ that might be used in different sites and with different emphases (Adamson, 2010: 3); like care, it is best understood as a way of thinking, or as a tool for re-imagining particular practices. The vast majority of such thinking, and of the literature on craft, is carried out in the context of art history and theory. The central concern in writing on craft is the tension between craft and fine art practices (Peach, 2009). Adamson, in his book Thinking Through Craft (2007), focuses on this context. But he is also clear that craft is a process, and as such its characteristic features are relevant to other contexts (see Dornan and Nestel, 2013). These features include, first, being supplemental rather than autonomous. Works of craft are, in other words, instrumental. In contrast to fine art, they do not stand alone, but are crafted for a particular purpose (Adamson notes that the old term ‘applied arts’ conveys this well). Second, craft is organized around material experience, and implies a deep engagement with the properties of different kinds of materials. This relates to the sense that craft is something beyond language; that it is ‘subconscious, instinctive or experiential’ (Adamson, 2010: 303). Third, craft requires skill. Thus for Dornan and Nestel (2013), a skilled craftsperson is one who can ‘respond to variability in the materials they work. No technique or piece of apparatus can guarantee a standard result, because judgement, dexterity, and care rather than technology per se determine the result of a craftsman’s [sic] work’ (p. 36). Fourth (and combining Adamson’s final two principles of the pastoral and amateur), craft has traditionally been understood as subordinate – as second-class, under- valued, or low-status, through, for example, its association with the feminine.

There are thus a number of commonalities in the ways in which care and craft are discussed. Both are concerned with the subordinate or under-represented, take a bricolage-like approach to the situation at hand, and are concerned with embodied experience and affect. Indeed, we argue that care is inherent to craft. Skilful engagement with particular materials is always careful, and despite contemporary craft’s position within capitalist markets it continues to be understood as a practice imbued with a passion not present within economies of mass production (Adamson, 2010; Levine and Heimerl, 2008). We formulate a model of craft as a caring practice, often rendered invisible or made subordinate, which brings together skill, a focus on utility or purpose and a particular emotional orientation (care, passion, commitment). We also take seriously the call from Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) and others to expose, and by exposing to generate, care by highlighting its existence in sites where it has been under-represented (Müller and Kenney, 2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). The contemporary university generally, and research and development of new and emerging technologies in particular, has been represented as a place under particular pressures – such as that of ‘academic capitalism’ – that render care difficult, or as something that must be explicitly legislated for (Hackett, 2014; Lam and Campos, 2012; Müller, 2014; Owen et al., 2012). We thus use our model of craft to reflect on narratives of research management, aside from those of enterprise and entrepreneurship (Law, 1994; Shapin, 2009), that are available to those working in science. In the following two sections we explore our empirical data in order to put this understanding of craft to work.

Crafting the group If scientific practice is a craft, what is its product? On the one hand, of course, it is knowledge: experimental set-ups are read, papers produced, and facts constructed (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). The craftwork of the laboratory is used in the production of publishable findings, from which the tacit skills that created them can be carefully edited out (Delamont and Atkinson, 2001). However, academic research structures can also be understood as producing things other than knowledge: careers, highly trained individuals, networks and collaborations (Delamont et al., 2000). Hackett (2005) argues that research groups, for instance, are:

filter feeders. Graduate students, postdocs, and technicians pass through groups, contributing labor, skill, and ideas while acquiring publications, techniques, research acumen, and access to spheres of inquiry. Their chief aim is to attain sufficient ‘velocity’ to escape the orbit of the lab head and establish independent careers. (Hackett, 2005: 793)

What is produced through, for example, a postdoctoral appointment is (hopefully, and eventually) an independent career (Fochler et al., 2015; Traweek, 1992).3 Through the lab skills developed as a student and further honed as a post-doc, one may construct a CV weighty enough to reach ‘escape velocity’ and attract funding and lab space of one’s own. The group, as Hackett (2005) discusses, is a rite of passage towards independent research. And indeed the research group was also a key point of reference in this research, in which PIs emphasized not their own career, nor the development of particular research opportunities, and not even the science in and of itself. Rather, they described themselves as producing and tending to groups. This structure was central to their imagination of their role, and was the focus of their creative (constructive) and caring efforts. It was striking, for instance, that being a PI or research leader essentially meant, to interviewees, working with students and postdocs and managing a set of projects – in other words, operating through and with the research group structure. Thus, when asked what their current role involved, one UK lecturer replied that ‘it involves parenting three PhD students and supervising the career of one post-doc’. As someone whose job involved undergraduate lecturing, and who had responsibilities and activities beyond the group, there were certainly other ways he could have described his role. For this interviewee – as for others – there is an immediate recourse to the group as the context for their activities and responsibilities.

This is not to suggest that they were unconcerned with the quality of the science they were associated with, and which their groups produced. Rather, ‘taking care’ of science and taking care of the group were so tightly intertwined that they could not readily be separated. It is by crafting a group, interviewees argued, and taking good care of it, that one ensures the production of good science. For this reason the group was the primary focus in their articulations of their role.

Crafting the group The group was thus seen as the locus of interviewees’ interests, agency, and responsibilities, with many accounts framing it as something to be constructed with care and thoughtfulness. Just as craft, as discussed above, involves ‘persistent tinkering’, reflection on utility and purpose, and creation with a definite aim in mind, the group was often described as being carefully put together – crafted – for a particular purpose. For some, group size was the primary concern: what is the optimum for myself, as PI, at this point in time? Others focused on personality: a good group should be comprised of people who mesh well with one another and ‘fit’ together. Others saw it as an issue of the science, arranging skill sets and abilities so that group members complemented each other. In all these cases the emphasis is on intentionality. Interviewees self-consciously reflected on the way in which their groups were constructed, talking about the planning and thought that had gone into it. Lisa, for instance, had spent time considering both group size and the kinds of people she needed and wanted in the group at any particular point in time.

I knew it can’t get any bigger … yes, I’ve thought about it, and I don’t bring any students in that I can’t pair with somebody into a project that’s ongoing because they can’t just start up a new project on their own. And I’m logistical about dividing between the different projects and finding people who – I try to match skills to the project and, in particular, in my lab, the two major skills – and, I think, they’re very different laboratory skills – is protein work and cellular work … It’s a different skill-set and, and I find you’re usually really good at one or the other. I’m a protein person more than a cell person. (Lisa, US)

Lisa was thus engaged in a continual bringing-into-being of a balanced and healthy group. She had at least two considerations in doing this. Numbers were important (‘it can’t get any bigger’). Her group consisted of about 12 full-time members and an additional number of undergraduate and postgraduate students. She enjoyed the flow of students through the lab but it required her constant attention to ‘pair’ them with existing projects. She was also concerned with the skill sets of those in the group, in a way that went beyond a simple matching of CVs to projects. Those who joined her lab generally had the base technical skills to work on either the protein or cellular-based projects. To her, however, these were ‘very different laboratory skills’, and being ‘really good at one or the other’ told her something about the personalities of her students. Identifying someone as a ‘protein person’ or a ‘cell person’ thus enabled her to understand how those individuals (and, relatedly, the science) could flourish.

Lisa was interested in understanding how different individuals, with different skills and interests, related to the lab’s projects, and how best to organize these combinations of people, projects, and capacities. Other interviewees similarly thought very deliberately about the composition of their groups – for instance pruning where necessary, choosing the right moment to expand, or choosing to limit size or even budget.

Maintaining the group The PIs we spoke with framed the group as, first, central to their activities, and, second, something to be deliberately constructed with thought and attention. (Few people had ‘fallen into’ having their particular group.) But once constructed, the group also had to be maintained. This process of maintenance foregrounded a particular set of emotions, such as generosity, on which we focus in the following section; it also involved certain routinized behaviours and processes. The group had to be tended to through mundane labours: the search for funding, training of students, enculturation of behaviours and norms through a process of ‘passing on’ a particular ethos (Campbell, 2003; Delamont et al., 2000; cf. Merton, 1973 [1942]). In particular, the scientists we spoke with framed the group as the site of apprenticeship.

The research group as a training ground or site of apprenticeship has been well documented (Hackett, 2005; Traweek, 1992). However, in contrast to these accounts, which often depict strong competition and tense intra-group relations (see also Fochler et al., 2015), our interviewees emphasized features such as mutuality, generosity, and patience. The basic structure of the training process remained the same; the group is ‘more-or-less stable and continually changing’ (Hackett, 2005: 793), as research students enter the group, become trained up as knowledge and know-how are ‘passed on’ to them, and go out into the world to embark on independent careers (not necessarily in academia). In interviewee accounts the well- functioning group is both a mechanism for enabling individuals, allowing them to learn, flourish, and depart for the right career for them, and for maintaining the skills and environment necessary to carry out good science. As trainees, less senior members of the group were expected to be treated with indulgence. Their role was ‘to do the science that they’re supposed to do’ (Vincent, DK) without being distracted by anything else. This could be useful to the group as a whole – it meant, as several people noted, that the students became experts in a particular technique or field – but this stage was generally framed as something that was resource-heavy, and as a time at which junior researchers could be self-indulgent in focusing on science above other responsibilities. Leif, a Danish nanoscientist, talked about the role of Masters students in his lab in these terms:

They have to be good, well-behaved Master’s students, in the sense that we want them to learn, obviously, and contribute to the lab. But because their project is for a year max, they don’t get major tasks of any kind. So they can actually focus on their science and annoy the rest of the group with their questions. (Leif, DK)

The students’ focus, Leif says, should be on their immediate project (‘their science’) rather than wider research questions, and they don’t get ‘major tasks’ beyond this. Similarly, they have permission to ‘annoy the rest of the group’ by asking questions and generally getting all the help that they need. For Leif and other PIs, though, the expectation is that students (at all levels) gradually become more independent. They learn the skills of their work, including, but not solely, the hands-on craft skills of experimental or bench research, and increase both their responsibilities and degree of intellectual and practical independence as they do so. ‘Becoming independent’ could involve a number of things: the development of original scientific thought (designing experiments, planning research that the PI might themselves not be interested in, submitting research proposals), being familiar with and adept in the knowledge of the field as a whole, and mentoring and leading others. Though this development has been framed as fundamentally involving the leap to research leadership (Hackett, 2005; Müller and Kenney, 2014; Traweek, 1992), interviewees talked about this more as a stage of personal development rather than a question of whether or not one happens to have gained independent funding (often noting that such independence might involve a different career track to that of academia). This process of development is exactly derived from an apprenticeship model: it comes from being immersed in the lab or group, rather than from explicit training. Knowledge of what denotes maturity as a researcher is rarely written down; indeed, several interviewees emphasized that the skills and dispositions inculcated in students through engagement with the group took the form of ‘a whole codex’ of ‘unwritten rules’ (Vincent, DK).

The craftwork of the lab was certainly an important part of this. But it is clear that what Merton once framed as ‘an emotionally toned complex of rules, prescriptions, mores, beliefs, values, and presuppositions’ (1973 [1938]: 258) is more important. Becoming independent through progression through the group entails becoming a particular kind of person, able to behave in particular ways and adept in certain language genres (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Traweek, 1992). This set of norms, or ethos, to revert to Merton’s term, is implicit and at times unconscious; it may, for instance, include how one moves one’s body through the lab or in conference presentations (Myers, 2008; Vertesi, 2012). The extracts below indicate some of the ways that interviewees reflected on such knowledges and ways of being:

I encourage them to be engaged in the process [of research] rather than pushing them to deliver results, because the last thing I want is them cutting corners to try and deliver something. (Hannah, DK)

If nothing else, I hope what I teach them, if they’re getting a bad review, that does not necessarily reflect in any way on your work, right? It could just be as simple as that the person doesn’t get it. (Kristoffer, DK)

I think I care a lot about transmitting my passion for research … you will never continue in research if you are not passionate about it. (Frederica, UK)

What is transferred to junior scientists thus ranges from the passion that they need to sustain a successful career to an ethics that avoids ‘cutting corners’ and an understanding of the vagaries of the peer review process (that, sometimes, a reviewer just ‘doesn’t get it’). The nuances here are important. A particular kind of science, often one which was seen as inflected by the PI’s own character and interests, is being modelled and reproduced. For some PIs, maintaining the group was about maintaining a personal direction, or orientation, in an area of research that might not otherwise be present. The group enabled them to develop and expand a particular sub-field, and – it was hoped – for research in that subfield to continue as students left the group to work elsewhere. (There is thus a strong sense of generational inheritance in this, also implied by the use of the ‘family’ metaphor we return to below.) Others were more explicit that they are interested in enabling a certain style of doing science. The Danish biophysicist Kristoffer quoted directly above was, for instance, committed to open access publishing; for him, the research group was a means of developing a community around this model of scientific research.

Such aspects of scientific life must be lived, rather than argued for. Ways of being such as ‘passion for research’ (to quote Frederica, above) are rarely, and perhaps cannot be, codified or even clearly articulated. The model is rather that the PI and senior group members embody such qualities and scientific styles, setting the tone for the entire group. The more senior one becomes, the more one is expected to have taken in specific styles and, in addition, to have taken on the responsibility of passing them to newer members of the group. The group, led by the PI, functions as a means of enculturation (Campbell, 2003), acting as a ‘social mechanism for the simultaneous enculturation of scientists, physical resources and research problems’ (Delamont et al., 2000: 12). It is a threefold means of (re)production, creating technically adept scientists, who have developed the necessary laboratory craft skills; individuals who are morally upright, ‘good’ scientists within the terms and norms of the group; and a particular style or direction of scientific research.

For PIs, ensuring that this mechanism operates successfully entails many small labours. They must craft the group such that its composition and set-up enables the apprenticeship model to operate. In addition, as we discuss in the next section, the group’s maintenance requires they embody particular skills to ‘take care’ of the group and respond flexibly to its needs. Much of this labour was viewed lightly by interviewees, who in the vast majority of cases represented themselves as enjoying their interaction with students and other group members. But an additional, less pleasant, labour entailed maintaining the group through funding applications. Such tasks were seen as key to the PI role but also as involving significant anxiety. Simon, a US professor, was, he said:

…definitely a parent, you know, I have to worry about continuing to finance the lab, so I'm the breadwinner if you like. … I am the one that is worried about it, I'm really trying not to burden the students with this. (Simon, US)

For Simon, financing the lab is about looking after its members; he wants to avoid ‘burdening’ his PhD students with concerns about their funding.4 Similarly, other interviewees saw their role as involving the protection of the group – and its members – through constant efforts to fund it. Though these efforts were time-consuming and often stressful, this task was generally seen as unique to the PI, and as a part of their responsibility to members of the group who were, altruistically, to be shielded from it. Maintaining the group can, therefore, involve significant labours, both emotional and intellectual. It is never settled or fixed, but requires ‘persistent tinkering’ (Mol et al 2010, 14). This process of checking, re-checking and fixing involves specific craft skills, which we now describe.

The craft skills of research management If interviewees regarded the group as something to be crafted and carefully maintained, the ability to do this was marked by particular skills related to such craftwork. Many interviewees were clear that intellectual capacity was necessary, but not the most important characteristic of a good PI. Technical expertise such as knowing how to define a project, or at what point to publish, was ‘something a lot of people can do … that’s not the magic part’ (Nanna, DK). Instead, what we might call people skills were valued more highly; these might include the ability to communicate, having ‘vision’ and being able to motivate people, or decisiveness and strong leadership. For some, being able to judge character and weigh up how an individual might fit into the group was key; for others, it was more important that they themselves set the right tone, embodying particular qualities in their interactions (such as ‘honesty, integrity, respect … creativity’, Lisa, US). Here we focus on two key aspects of the skillset needed by PIs: flexibility as key to skilful practice; and the repertoire of emotions viewed as necessary to the role.

Flexibility as skill Notions of craft, as discussed above, have emphasized that skill is integral to craftwork. Adamson’s (2007) discussion of the concept makes it clear that this is not an aspect of craft practice that is uncontested. Accounts of skill tend to ricochet between the mystical – skill as ‘beauty, talent, magic, or genius’ – and the mundane (Adamson, 2007: 71). For example, he quotes one writer on craft saying that ‘what laymen call skill is mostly a matter of taking very great trouble’ (Adamson, 2007: 71). Similarly, there is debate around skill as an intellectual and/or physical attribute. Is skilfulness about know-how, comprehension, or moral character, or simply about intuitive physical engagements with particular materials? However one resolves these debates (which might equally be applied to scientific practice), it seems that skill is particularly important in situations where there is no standardization, and where the outcome of a practice is not certain. Skill is, then, tested by the practitioner’s response to variability (Dornan and Nestel, 2013), and is to be applied where things may unexpectedly go wrong. It is this notion of skill that was particularly apparent in participant accounts of leading a group and in their emphasis on flexibility as key. This related to the way in which the group was viewed not as something monolithic or homogeneous, but as, first, frequently shifting and altering (hence the continual work of maintenance described above) and, second, composed of individuals, each of whom might be very different. The skills that are required – and the ability to craft a successful group – are therefore not uniform, but will vary depending on the people within the group at any one time, as well as on the PI’s own personality and style. Running a group, it was clear, required the ability to work with the individuals (the materials for making the group and therefore the science) available at any particular moment.

In craftwork, skill is developed through a deep engagement with a particular set of materials. Skilled craftspeople become intimately familiar with the properties of wood, or paper, or with the tricks and quirks of a particular laboratory technique, such that working with them becomes intuitive (Adamson, 2010; Collins, 2001). For our group of PIs skill involved an attention to individuals, and the ability to craft the group based on the needs of those individuals. The ‘people skills’ (such as communication, motivation or vision) that a PI might have needed to be deployed flexibly, in a manner dependent on the immediate context. For instance, Tajim, who worked in the US at the full professor level, spent a significant portion of the interview reflecting on the way in which his leadership had to take into account the individuality of those in his group. For him, negotiating different personalities was one of the key challenges of being a PI:

So as a PI that is the primary thing, dealing with people, you’ve got to really learn to deal with people. Everyone has a different personality. Same set of sentences … are interpreted very differently by these individuals. So the PI that’s a huge challenge; how do we communicate with individuals on their own basis … That’s something, you know, one learns to do over time. (Tajim, US)

Part of this individuality is that group members might understand, and respond to, his comments or suggestions in very different ways; they would hear the ‘same set of sentences’ but would interpret these differently. As PI he wants to deal with his team members on an equal basis, such that their experience was ‘uniform across individuals’. But doing this involves precisely not treating them in the same way, or communicating with them as a mass. Instead the onus was on him to craft his interactions with different individuals in the way that best suited their personalities and needs. This didn’t only apply to communication. His emphasis on personalized treatment also incorporated working styles, research interests, and interest (or not) in collaboration. Again, this personalization was something that needed to be done in an ad hoc manner and that had to be changed when and if the situation changed. Ultimately, he said: …people are surprising. Some who look like they want to be by themselves actually want to be with others. Others who look like they’re very outgoing, in their research don’t want anybody else’s intervention. … We just work with their style. It’s kind of difficult, to work with everyone’s style separately but you just have to do it. There’s no alternative to it. It’s not like they will change a lot. (Tajim, US)

Tajim saw his responsibility as being to accommodate the needs of the individuals that comprised his group. To do this he needed to know them thoroughly – to understand what they ‘want’ and what their ‘style’ of research was – and to adapt to them by, for instance, making sure he had time to meet with them frequently, if that’s what they wanted, or by setting them up in productive collaborations with others in the group.

For Tajim and other interviewees the skilful PI is one who knows their group well, and is able to respond to its needs at particular moments. Such a PI is therefore able to deal with uncertainties in how individuals will behave. This emphasis on uncertainty and the needs of the moment – that everything depends ‘on the person, on the project’ (Nanna, DK) – combined with interviewees’ sense that such skill becomes intuitive meant that they found it very difficult to describe the specific qualities that a PI would need. Indeed, they sometimes found our questions about this nonsensical, as it was understood that there were many different ways of performing ‘PI-ness’. Though interviewees might lay claim to particular characteristics, or to a personal style, they were generally clear that this was something that was individual rather than normative. The sense was, then, that ‘everyone has a different style of doing things’ (Keith, UK). Not only must the PI adapt their behaviour to the needs of their group – needing to ‘play it by ear’, to quote Keith again – but the repertoire of skills and behaviours available to that PI is itself deeply individual and personal. As one interviewee said, groups will all have ‘a different way of living’ (Frederica, UK).

Taking care Flexibility to accommodate different individuals was thus presented as key to leading a group. In addition a number of other skills were viewed as important. In particular, there was a shared emphasis not so much on the necessity of having a specific kind of personality, or on a single, fixed relation to the group, but on a particular repertoire of emotions and relations. Leading the group therefore represents a specific kind of emotional labour within science (cf. Hochschild, 2003; Pickersgill, 2012), which might be summed up as the need to ‘take care’ of the group. Treating people well was viewed as vital, both because it is the right thing to do and because it is, ultimately, good for the science. We see this in three areas in particular: in notions of selflessness or the PI ‘taking one for the team’; in the importance of practices of ‘looking after’; and in the prevalence of metaphors of the group as family.

Selflessness is a strong term, and one that interviewees did not use explicitly. We use it as a shorthand for the way in which, however hesitantly or humourously, a degree of altruism was presented as a key characteristic of a good PI. Thus, for instance, bad managers and PIs were presented as people who were selfish and who used the members of their group as ‘slaves’ to further their own careers. The PIs were clear that such behaviour is unacceptable. Their expectation was instead that members of their group could, and at times would, be a drain on them, without their necessarily getting anything back in return. Ultimately the welfare of the group – particularly as expressed through students’ and post-docs’ successful completion of the PhD and access to a career – was their responsibility. Such notions of generosity, and the sense that as PI one would at times need to ‘take one for the team’, are expressed well in one device that Leif’s group had: the so-called ‘professor task’. He explained that:

…my group has something they call professor tasks, and that’s probably different from what other groups have. Because the professor task for us is, if this goes wrong, it’ll be really expensive. So a couple of weeks ago I found myself strapped to one of our instruments … I was having to screw it apart to some extent and check it for some potential problems and I was told, I do it. I’m not better at it than the others are, but this was a professor task. Maybe it’s more of a joke (Leif, DK)

The ‘professor task’ was perhaps not entirely serious. But it materializes the sense that, ultimately, the buck stops with Leif, as group leader. If something were to go wrong – in this case, if a routine check were to result in damage to a very expensive piece of equipment – then he and his group, and anyone to whom it would become necessary to give an explanation to, were clear that it was his responsibility. There would be no question (he went on to explain) that it was anyone else’s fault. Others spoke in similar terms about, for instance, the constant battle to get grants to fund the group, or the way in which journal articles were produced by the group. In the former case it should be mostly the PI who takes on this task, protecting the rest of the group from it; in the latter, the PI might work to push a particular publication out so as to bolster students’ CVs.

Such generosity is ultimately about taking care of the interests of others before one’s own. As such, it is not surprising that other affective languages, and in particular notions of care, nurture, and ‘looking after’, were also used frequently by interviewees. Those with whom we spoke talked, for instance, of wanting members of the group to ‘flourish’ and feel ‘satisfied’, or of fostering an environment ‘where people look out for each other’. Both men and women interviewees used the language of care, nurture and family (see also Fochler et al., 2015). Group members’ emotional states were often a particular area for attentive concern: not only were overt pastoral issues, such as the death of a parent, mentioned as a point at which an individual might require special care, but also the highs and lows of the PhD process as a whole. The emotional trials of the PhD, including self-doubt and anxiety, were therefore seen as something to be tended to as much as the science (indeed, the two things were viewed as connected: unhappy groups, a number of interviewees noted, would not do good science). Ulster, the UK lecturer quoted at the beginning of the paper, made this particularly clear. His primary responsibility, he said, was to make sure that group members did well and that they didn’t ‘fall into a hole where … no-one’s looking after them’. He described the process by which he tried to do this as follows:

… you know, making sure regularly that I go to see them at their desks, see them at the lab, any problems, anything I can do to help. Again, that’s not going well, let’s try and arrange a meeting for tomorrow, bring me your results, let’s talk through the results. What don’t you like about your project at the moment? Every student, particularly the PhD students, will get to a point where they hate their project, they’re depressed because things aren’t working, they can’t see a way that they can end, they’re worried about the deadline looming at the end of their third, fourth year…it’s important that they get a good experience out of it. (Ulster, UK)

For Ulster, responding to group members’ emotional states requires his regular attention and emotional labour of his own: he needs to physically spend time with students (‘at their desks…at the lab’) to check on how they are doing, work through the science, and reassure them that ‘every student … will get to a point where they hate their project’. For him, leading the group involved practices of support and attentive care. Others discussed the need to create a group where this emotional labour is shared, and members are ‘looking out for each other’. In this way the production of care could be spread throughout the group as a whole, with the kind of nurturing practices Ulster describes carried out collectively. By seeing an individual through what one interviewee called ‘the dark hours’ of research, this support prepares group members not only intellectually but also emotionally for independent scientific research.

This dynamic – that the group is a space for nurture and care – is exemplified by the family metaphors that many interviewees used (including in the quote from Simon above; see also Fochler et al., 2015). This metaphor, in which the PI acts as the ‘parent’ to the rest of the group, was used to sum up the sense of responsibility that those with whom we spoke felt towards members of their groups. It had a number of valences: in different accounts and at different moments, the group was a family because of the PI’s parental responsibility; because of the pride group leaders took in the work their students and colleagues did; because of the close connections that were maintained even when group members ‘left home’ and worked away from the group; and because group members might bicker and argue, but ultimately constituted the place you felt you ‘belonged’. The group-as-family image, then, draws together notions and practices of care, suggesting that the group operated as a place of closeness, safety, and nurture, and that it was in large part the PI’s role, as ‘parent’, to enable or produce this.5 Thus in Merike’s exchange with the interviewer below the family metaphor is used to describe the process by which group members become independent; this, she says, is ‘like with your children’:

Merike:… I had a visit from [X company] this afternoon where they have just recruited one of the PhD students that finished in my group, and they thought that he had really relevant skills and so on, so that was, of course, really nice for me too! [laughs] IV: That’s good that they’ve been trained well. Merike: Yes, I sort of feel proud. It’s a bit like with your children, that they have to be able to stand on their own legs, and form their own career afterwards. IV: Yes, and go out into the world- Merike: Yes, yes, so I think that’s one of the responsibilities ... (Merike, DK)

For Merike the role of the parent is a responsibility – something you are called upon to do, and which requires effort on your part.6 This is indicated both by her final comment (that training students such that they can have a career is one of her ‘responsibilities’) and by her affirmative response to the interviewer’s suggestion that her students have been ‘trained well’; this is, then, something that is active on her part. Beyond this, however, it is also clearly an affective relationship. As with her own children, she feels ‘proud’ when they have reached independence and are positively assessed by their new employers. This is something that reflects well on her – such a positive assessment is ‘really nice for me too’ – but it is also a capacity, to ‘stand on their own legs, and form their own career’. The family metaphor is thus used to describe the apprenticeship process. It indicates a period of closeness and care, a time when one can (within certain parameters, such as your own hard work) rely on the support of those around you, before one enters ‘the world’.

Conclusion PIs’ talk about their roles as research managers and group leaders refers to a set of practices marked by care and craftwork. Interviewees discussed the group as the primary focus of their attention and as something to be tended to and crafted; further, this process required a set of skills that could be deployed flexibly in response to the vagaries of individuals and which were affective in character. In this final section we want to conclude with some wider reflections on the meaning and implications of these findings.

We first return to the context in which these accounts were produced, and the fact that they are, indeed, accounts – stories told within a particular situation (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). We have highlighted the ways in which interviewees expressed care and craft in their work of running research groups, presenting a model of research management that is affective, contingent, and (to some extent) altruistic. The fact that such narratives of the PI role are available, to be recounted to social scientists and others, does not, of course, mean that they are therefore straightforwardly articulated in caring practices. As Delamont et al. (2000) note, one ‘cannot assume that such narratives give us direct access to the actual practice of [academia]’ (p. 136). We did not speak with interviewees’ group members and have no way of knowing how ‘cared for’ and ‘looked after’ they in fact felt (cf. Glerup, 2014), or the extent to which the caring practices described to us were lived out. What we are not doing here, then, is using these descriptions of research leadership as care to suggest that PIs are uniformly caring, perfectly tending at all times to the needs of the individuals they work with. Instead we want to highlight the availability of a narrative of caring craftwork for those working in research management and leadership. We can only speculate as to how this shapes practice. One implication might be, however, that it is misleading to draw too sharp a distinction between craft and articulation work. Hackett (2005) concludes that getting too bogged down by the latter ‘draws the lab head away from the bench’ at the risk of losing control, since technical ‘craft skill is a powerful leadership tool, and its obsolescence may undermine control’ (pp.796-7). But our data suggests that articulation tasks such as accessing funding or managing people are also understood as craft skills, to be learned on the job and ‘passed on’ in the same way as the tacit knowledges of the bench. Both are forms of craftwork, and it is perhaps not always clear where one stops and the other begins.

It is also clear that, however much interviewees emphasized the disinterested nature of group interactions, and their personal need to express generosity and care in these interactions, the wellbeing of the group is ultimately closely related to the wellbeing and interests of the PI.7 We see this in the way in which interviewees connected tending to the group to tending to science and the production of stable knowledge. Rather than viewing these practices as separate, interviewees honoured their basic responsibility to do good science precisely by taking care of the group: as we have seen, a happy group was understood as a productive one. Similarly, the group was expressly seen as a mechanism for performing the scientific ideas of the PI, and for passing on a particular interpretation of the craft of research. Skilful crafting of the group thus has the long term strategic effect of developing a certain scientific line of enquiry, thematic focus, or ‘style’ of science. While the PIs we interviewed may want their junior researchers to develop into independent scientific researchers, then, they are also happy to imbue them with particular interests or ways of working, furthering their own careers and influence in the process.

We might also reflect, more critically, on the potentially normative effects of the promotion of a culture of care. As we have discussed, interviewees often described sharing and promoting caring labour within the group. The leadership skills of caring craftwork were understood as part of what was to be ‘passed on’ to junior group members, and all were implicated in promoting a group where individuals ‘looked out for each other’. Such studied construction of a particular ‘occupational culture’ (Delamont et al., 2000) is not unique to science. Indeed, it is perhaps more reminiscent of business and industrial environments, in which the promotion of a particular ‘culture’ is, as Gideon Kunda (2006) describes, an important means of exerting control. Kunda’s (2006: 71ff.) ethnography of a large technology company focuses on the self-conscious and tireless celebration of the company’s ‘strong culture’ – one in which employees are creative, committed, entrepreneurial, independent and moral – and the way in which that culture is ‘engineered’ (or, we might say, crafted). This culture was not simply about turning up to work on time; rather, Kunda writes, ‘the rules run deeper. The culture also includes articulated rules for thoughts and feelings, ‘mindsets’ and ‘gut reactions’’ (p. 7). What becomes legislated by ‘company culture’ is, then, a wholesale form of emotional labour (Hochschild, 2003). This involves not only employees’ intellectual skills and physical presence, but also their emotions, moral sense, and personal loyalties (the company as ‘religion’ or ‘family’, Kunda, 2006, p. 79). Work in such organizations:

is not merely an economic transaction; rather, it is imbued with a deeper personal significance that causes people to behave in ways that the company finds rewarding, and that require less use of traditional controls. The company, in this view, harnesses the efforts and initiative of its employees in the service of high-quality collective performance and at the same time provides them with ‘the good life’. (Kunda, 2006: 10)

‘Culture’ is used to claim more of employees’ lives (and hearts, minds and souls) than might traditionally have been the case. It enables control – through the promotion of behaviours that ‘the company finds rewarding’ – while holding out the promise of self-actualization and personal autonomy (in the form of independence, creativity and entrepreneurialism). Control is also at issue within research labs and groups (Hackett, 2005; Owen-Smith, 2001). We might speculate, then, on the work that the promotion of a culture of care might perform within scientific research, and what the behaviours and relations implied by the family metaphor, for instance, might demand of group members. Are narratives of research leadership as a practice of caring craftwork functioning to exert some measure of social control within the group, and to ensure acquiescent group members who feel ‘cared for’ and therefore personally committed to the group as organization? What cultures, of care or otherwise, are being promoted and experienced in practice within different areas of scientific research? And how are power relations articulated and negotiated when a PI – ultimately the group’s authority and ‘breadwinner’ – seeks to relate to their subordinates through practices of altruism and care?

These are, of course, empirical questions, which should be addressed in further research. Similarly, we are very much aware that this study can only ever be a snapshot into a certain subset of academic cultures. The deep differences between different disciplinary cultures are well established (Barley, 2006; Delamont et al., 2000; Knorr-Cetina, 1999); it seems unlikely, then, that notions of caring craftwork will be expressed in the same way within different research contexts. Research environments, though often explicitly ‘globalizing’ or ‘internationalizing’ (Etzkowitz, 2000), are also inflected by the national and regional contexts in which they are situated (Nunes, 1996). The extent to which research management as caring craftwork is a general narrative, drawn upon in different universities, disciplines, and national contexts is, then, an open question.

What is clear, however, is that there is currently a widespread move within research policy towards the promotion of a particular kind of care (Owen et al., 2013), one framed through the language of responsibility. Responsibility, at least in the context of ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI; see Owen et al., 2012; Von Schomberg, 2013), tends to be framed as something that is absent from scientific practice and which therefore needs to be legislated for, in the shape of funding requirements, policy incentives, or more thorough integration of social sciences and humanities with natural science research. The research reported here has indicated that those leading and managing research groups do, in fact, articulate a highly developed notion of responsibility; one that even, in the emphasis on the necessity of caring practices, echoes recent theoretical discussions of RRI (Owen et al., 2013). The difference is, however, in where responsibility is understood as being articulated, and in the language used: for our interviewees, responsibility-as-care is fundamentally focused on the wellbeing of the group, through which robust science and (perhaps) positive wider effects would be achieved. Policy frameworks for RRI tend to imagine responsibility as being articulated on a much larger scale, that of innovation trajectories, stakeholders, and societies (Koops et al., 2015). Care, in this notion of responsibility, is directed less at individuals than at society as a whole. While we agree that efforts to increase the social robustness of technoscientific development are vital, there seem to be missed opportunities here with regard to integrating the language and practices of scientists themselves into policy notions of RRI. It therefore seems important to pay further attention to the way in which RRI and other such concepts can become meaningful to scientists themselves, in order to avoid a situation of, at best, irrelevance, or at worst explicit hostility. We have found that researchers are more than able to draw upon language that emphasizes the value of care, carefulness, and emotion in scientific practice; there is ample scope, it seems, to experiment with ways of developing, widening or extending these narratives to sites beyond the group.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research. We would like to thank Cecilie Glerup and Max Fochler for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, and the editor and four anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful feedback.

Author biographies

Sarah R Davies is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, where her work focuses on science communication and public engagement with science. She is currently working on a book on hacker and makerspaces, and one on science communication (with Maja Horst).

Maja Horst is Professor of Science Communication and Head of Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. She has been engaged in a number of research projects on public understanding of science, science communication, research management and the social responsibility of science. In 2012 she was the chair of the organization committee of the joint 4S-EASST annual meeting at Copenhagen Business School.

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While the research therefore engaged with individuals in a range of different institutions, disciplines, and organizational structures, then, it remains important to raise a note of methodological caution. 29 interviews spread across three different countries can only ever provide a snapshot into academic culture(s). While the key themes that we discuss – and specifically the use of notions of care as a frame for research management – emerged from interviews across the different universities, disciplines, and national contexts we engaged with, the dataset was not large enough to produce a fine-grained analysis of the ways in which these themes were articulated in different contexts. The sample sizes of 10, eight and 11 interviews conducted in, respectively, Denmark, the UK, and the US also preclude a more detailed comparative analysis between national settings. Further research may, then, identify much greater local differences in the imagination of the PI role than we discuss here. In addition Denmark, the US, and UK can provide only a narrow picture of university culture as it is articulated around the world. As Stephen Shapin has noted (2009), there is no singular ‘university’. Studies in, for instance, semi-peripheral or majority world universities may result in different findings (Nunes, 1996). 2 All interviewee names have been changed. 3 As one of the reviewers commented, this process is not just a filter feeder (Hackett, 2005) but a ‘leaky pipeline’; the production of independent scientists through the laboratory enculturation is in practice a gendered one (Clark Blickenstaff, 2005; Müller and Kenney, 2014). 4 Many of the US scientists with whom we spoke ran labs in which PhD students were funded in a piecemeal manner, from different projects. Thus a student might have an RA (Research Assistant) post for a year on a particular research project, take a TA (Teaching Assistant) job to fund them further, and carry out their own research in between these commitments. This is in contrast to the situation in Denmark and the UK (and Europe more generally), where students tend to be funded from a single resource stream for the whole PhD (three or four years). Anxieties around funding also, of course, existed in these contexts, but tended to be focused on finding, rather than maintaining, money for studentships. 5 Of course, one can question the extent to which family is a useful metaphor for such caring practices; for many, the family (or a family) is exactly not a place where nurture and tenderness are found (Ahmed, 2008). In addition, and as we discuss in the conclusion, this portrayal – of the PI as parental breadwinner with responsibility for family well-being – nurtures a structure, then transferred to the group, of a patriarchal and deeply hierarchical form of family. Regardless of the problems of using such a metaphor – its troubling dissonances and oppressive normativities – it was operationalized in this way within this dataset, and we use it based on the terminology of our informants. 6 Delamont et al. (2000: 138-143) report the use of similar metaphors around the supervisor-student relationship, with one of their interviewees talking about the period at which there is ‘that conflict, like my relationship with my daughter’. 7 We know, for instance, that the PI is often seen as a deeply emblematic figurehead and representative of the group as a whole – one who is able to ‘stick’ together an otherwise diverse group, manage tensions and multiplicities and represent the group’s work to the wider world (Brosnan and Michael, 2014; Fochler et al., 2015).