This paper has three parallel ambitions: to consider the potential impact of large-scale use of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) through the device of an imagined ‘virtual’ research council (VRC); to discuss this imagined future from the principal-agent perspective of...

This article looks at a selection of significant episodes in the history of organizational and management research, and the policies in this field of the UK Social Science Research Council. The episodes begin in the Council's early days in the mid-1960s, and run through its high-profile efforts...

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...

This postscript is a reflection on the wider implications of this discussion of interactive social science. What lessons have been learned about new knowledge, legitimacy, theory, relevance, power and evaluation? What new questions have arisen? Re-invigorated by debate about interactive...

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...