Arriving at a university today often comes with a strong sense of welcome. Colleagues are friendly, supportive, attentive. One is invited to become part of a team, a network, a scholarly community. This social warmth is genuine — and it matters. Research is demanding, frequently solitary, and at times deeply frustrating. Without social embeddedness, many would not endure it.
And yet, for some — students and researchers alike — a quiet unease emerges over time. Despite the friendliness, despite the conversations, workshops, and team formats, a question begins to surface: Where, exactly, is the research itself? Not in terms of output, but in terms of curiosity, inquiry, and the practice of genuinely asking one’s own questions.
This text is not an attack on individuals, nor on collegiality or care. Quite the opposite. It is an attempt to understand why social cohesion has become such a central pillar of academic life — and what this may reveal about the condition of research itself.
When Research Becomes Procedural
Across many fields today, research has become highly structured, standardised, and increasingly measurable. In the empirical sciences, this is particularly visible: datafication and quantification shape not only methods, but modes of thinking. Research questions are often formulated in ways that ensure statistical tractability, evaluability, and publishability. In itself, this is not problematic; it has enabled significant advances.
The difficulty arises when measurability turns into an end in itself. When research processes are primarily oriented toward fulfilling indicators, satisfying rankings, or maximising output, research can begin to feel procedural: precise, correct, efficient — yet internally hollow.
Importantly, this experience is not confined to quantitative disciplines.
Epistemic Narrowing and Monocultures in the Humanities and Social Sciences
In the humanities and social sciences, a different but related form of narrowing can be observed — not primarily through numbers, but through thematic and theoretical monocultures.
This is not a claim that certain topics are illegitimate. Every historical moment has its focal concerns. The problem arises when academic landscapes concentrate so heavily on specific themes, frameworks, or vocabularies that alternatives become difficult to articulate, let alone pursue.
Such monocultures often manifest through:
Thematic compression: Certain questions are widely recognised as “relevant” or “fundable,” while others quietly fade from view.
Curricular and project logics: Seminars and research projects repeatedly circle around similar topics, often aligned with the interests of particular chairs or research groups.
Early intellectual channeling: Students are shaped toward particular discourses long before they have had the opportunity to explore their own questions.
Reproduction over exploration: Research becomes the refinement of established conversations rather than the opening of new ones.
What emerges is a form of silent standardisation of thought — rarely imposed, never overtly coercive, but highly effective precisely because it operates through incentives, exemplars, and routine.
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| Picture: Po-Hsuan Huang on Unsplash |
The Psychological Dimension: Why the System Remains Stable
Given these structural constraints, one might ask: why does the system remain so stable? Why do many participants not experience it as a crisis?
Psychological perspectives offer insight.
Cognitive Dissonance
People need to perceive their work as meaningful. When everyday research practice leaves little room for genuine inquiry, a tension arises between professional identity (“I am a researcher”) and lived experience (“I am processing tasks”). This dissonance requires regulation — and social belonging provides a powerful mechanism for doing so.
Belonging as a Source of Meaning
Belonging is a fundamental human need. Where epistemic meaning weakens, social meaning can take its place. Collegiality, mentoring, and mutual support become primary sources of validation and orientation.
Emotional Labour
Academic friendliness is not always spontaneous; it is often professionalised. This is not a moral failure. It indicates, however, that social warmth increasingly plays a functional role: stabilising individuals within a system that does not consistently provide intrinsic epistemic satisfaction.
Groupthink — and Why It Is Not Simply About Harmony
At this point, a crucial distinction is necessary. Groupthink is not identical with collegiality or friendliness. It can emerge just as readily in cold, hierarchical environments.
Nevertheless, strong social cohesion can amplify groupthink where methodological or thematic conformity is already expected. The desire to belong can subtly inhibit fundamental critique. Dissent is softened, postponed, or never articulated.
This is particularly evident where certain methods — for example, strongly data-driven approaches — are implicitly treated as epistemic standards. The risk lies less in explicit exclusion than in gradual self-censorship.
Read our whole episode on groupthink
here.
Three Levels of Possible Reorientation
Rather than offering simple solutions, it may be more productive to think in terms of reflective reorientation — on three interconnected levels.
1. The Individual Level (Students and Researchers)
For individuals, this may involve:
consciously permitting oneself to pursue questions not immediately “useful”,
distinguishing between institutional research agendas and personal intellectual curiosity,
cultivating spaces beyond formal projects — reading, writing, thinking without output pressure,
valuing social support without conflating it with epistemic fulfilment.
Research does not begin with methods, but with questions. This insight can be preserved even within constrained systems.
2. The Level of Mentors and Teachers
Supervisors and lecturers play a crucial role — not only through content, but through intellectual posture.
Potential practices include:
🔸explicitly communicating that not every good question needs immediate applicability,
creating spaces where uncertainty and not-knowing are legitimate,
🔸teaching research as a mode of thinking, not merely a production process,
🔸making one’s own theoretical and methodological commitments visible — and therefore contestable.
Good mentorship involves not only support, but the encouragement of intellectual autonomy.
3. The Institutional Level
At the institutional level, reflection might include:
🔸integrating the history and philosophy of research more broadly across curricula — not nostalgically, but orientationally,
🔸actively fostering methodological plurality rather than implicit narrowing,
🔸critically examining evaluation criteria: what counts as good research, and why,
🔸protecting spaces for slow, exploratory inquiry, even where outputs are difficult to quantify.
None of these steps is simple. But even articulating them can shift perspectives.
Closing: Collegiality Is Not the Problem
It bears repeating: collegiality, social warmth, and mutual care are not failures of academia. They are often its most humane features — and for many, the reason they remain.
The difficulty arises only when social cohesion begins, unintentionally, to compensate for epistemic emptiness. When it obscures the question of whether research itself still offers orientation, challenge, and intellectual vitality.
Perhaps the central task facing contemporary academia lies precisely here: preserving human warmth while reclaiming the courage to ask, seriously and openly, what research is meant to be.
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