Benedetto Lepori
Grant proposal writing as a social and argumentative process

Benedetto Lepori Lepori is titular professor in the Faculty of Communication sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana and co-director of the Laboratory of Science Communication. He holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the same university with a thesis on the Swiss research policy and research funding systems. His research interests cover the field of research funding and management, the development of indicators to analyze research systems and higher education institutions, as well as argumentative practices in science and their relevance for grant proposal writing. He has published extensively on these topics on journals such as Organization Studies, Research Policy, the Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, Research Evaluation, Science and Public Policy, Evaluation and Minerva. His work on research funding and grant proposal writing focus particularly on their nature as socio-constructed and argumentative processes.

Workshop contents and objectives

The course deals with grant proposal writing considered as a social process where grant applicants interact with reviewers and funding agencies within a highly-structured social setting. This interaction takes place through written documents, where applicants develop arguments to get funded within specific literary and social conventions.

The workshop aims at developing participant's understanding of the communicative processes involved in grant proposal writing and to help them developing effective grant writing strategies to acquire funding for their proposals.

To this aim, the course will be structured around four general topics:

• The importance of reputation and social hierarchy in science.
• Cumulative advantage and the link between reputation and allocation of resources.
• Grant proposals as literary genres.
• Proposal writing as a social and communicative process.

The course will include face-to face lectures by the instructor, presentation of selected papers on the topic by students and role games in the review and preparation of proposals.

Bibliography

a) Understanding the social structure of science: reputation, selective attention and allocation of funds.

• Merton, R. (1968), The Matthew Effect in Science, Science 159(3810), 56-63.
• Latour, B., Woolgar, S., 1979. Laboratory Life. The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press, New Jersey (one chapter to be selected)..
• Burris, V. (2004). The academic caste system: Prestige hierarchies in PhD exchange networks. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 239-264.
• Viner N. Powell, Ph., Green R. (2004), Institutionalized bias in the award of research grants: a preliminary analysis revisiting the principle of cumulative advantage, Research Policy, 33, 443-454.

b) Argumentation, literary genres and grant proposal writing

• Tardy Ch. (2003), A Genre System View of the Funding of Academic Research, Written Communication, 20(1).
• Tseng, M.-Y. (2006), The Genre of Research Grant Proposals: Towards a Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis" Journal of Pragmatics 43(8), 2254-2268.
• Bazerman, Charles, Shaping Written Knowledge, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, chapter 2 "What Written Knowledge Does: Three Examples of Academic Discourse".
• Myers, G. 1990. Writing Biology. Texts in the Social Construction of Knowledge. Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, chapter 2 "Social Construction in two Biologists' Proposals
• Lepori B., Greco S. (2018), Grant proposal writing as a dialogic process, in Dascal M., Lessmöllmann A., Gloning Thomas, Handbook of Scientific Communication, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, forthcoming

Prerequisites

No particular prerequisites are required.