The papers in this special issue examine the content and practice of interactive social science and its developing institutional context. Although the contemporary environment of academic research and funding is relevant, the papers engage with themes which have preoccupied social scientists for...

Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) in the public sector are intermediaries between the state and academic research. Principal-agent theory has been used to illuminate the relations between RFOs and state institutions. This paper explores the extension of principal-agent concepts to the study...

Four science policy issues are discussed — intervention, interaction, interdisciplinarity, and international co-operation — in relation to how they affect the processes of making science policy, and have been shaped by them. The principal-agent model introduces to science policy the...

Research programmes appear to represent one of the more powerful instruments through which research funders (principals) steer and shape what researchers (agents) do. The fact that agents navigate between different sources and styles of programme funding and that they use programmes to their own...

The UK Economic and Social Research Council's Global Environmental Change (GEC) research programme aims “to take the social sciences to the heart of environmental debate and to bring the environment to the heart of the social sciences”. The experience of researchers working within the GEC...

The UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has placed considerable emphasis on the users of the research it supports. Researchers have in turn pointed to the potential uses of the work they do as a means of demonstrating relevance. However, to date, researchers and research funders have...