Contesting contests: How contests determine knowledge structures in different organizational fields

Knowledge structures in a globalized world are shaped very differently. However, focusing on academia competitions became more and more important for the governance of knowledge. The question how funding contests and competitions shape the academic system is potentially one of the big questions at the time in higher education research (Krücken 2021; Musselin 2018, Naidoo 2018). However, even if the role of funding contests in higher education is subject of current research projects (Stark 2020, Waaijer et al. 2018), this research focusses on academia only and if it includes a comparative perspective, these comparisons are made between countries or systems but not between different organizational fields. In this research we address this research gap and aim to analyze how organizations and its members are shaped differently by funding contests depending on different field structures. In a comparative approach, we focus on organizations from three different fields (the economic field, higher education, and the field of modern arts) and analyze in how far the elements and constellations of competition are similar or different. By elements, we refer to the actors competing for a scarce good, the scarce good these actors compete for, and the third parties involved in the distribution of the scarce good (Simmel 1908, Werron 2015). By constellations, we mean the relations between these elements. Additionally, internal competitions such as contests can be better understood by analyzing their role in games of power in organization (Crozier & Friedberg 1979). Building a bridge to micropolitical research we compare how the role of contests differ in games of power in different organizational types and thereby offer additional insights for the question of how contests shape the governance of organizations and the creation of knowledge structures partly in the same way and partly different in different organizational fields.