Excellent research is rarely sustained by individual brilliance alone. It depends on research groups: shifting constellations of expertise, autonomy, infrastructure, obligation, and shared problems.
DEVELOPING RESEARCH GROUPS starts on the rough ground of academic life, where groups form, thicken, fragment, renew, and sometimes disappear. Drawing on years of close work with research environments, it offers a pragmatic framework for understanding group composition, transitions, leadership repertoire, group dynamics, interdisciplinarity, and strategy.
The book shows how stronger collective capacity can be built by treating autonomy as a source of creativity and organizing it productively. A practicebased guide for research leaders and academic developers who want to make research groups more capable, coherent, and resilient.
In science, it has long been a persistent misconception that excellent research is the product of individuals. The narrative of the solitary geniuses. In reality, science is profoundly collective. It emerges through interaction, through tensions and collaborations, and within the communities of practice in which researchers are embedded. For this reason, it is essential to shift our attention beyond the individual researcher and toward the broader context: the relationships, organizational forms, dynamics, and everyday practices that make research possible.
This book does precisely that.
From the foreword by Søren Barlebo, PhD.
