(Cyber) Bullying by faceless bureaucracy in research funding: a case study from the Balkans

A shortened version of this paper, lacking the case study descriptions in Sect. 2.2, is published in: Haferkamp, R., Kilchling, M., Kinzig, J., Oberwittler, D. & Wößner, G. (Eds.) Unterwegs in Kriminologie und Strafrecht – Exploring the World of Crime and Criminology. Festschrift für Hans-Jörg Albrecht. Berlin; Freiburg, Duncker & Humblot in coop. with Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V., pp. 499-531.

Most of us in academia will have had their fair share of bureaucratic adventures throughout their research careers. Those among us with a more long-running track record might perhaps still remember the old days, when there was not a special administrative or financial form in need of filling out and someone’s preapproval for every step along the way of doing research. For my own part, I have no such memories. I belong to an academic generation that has been bred to regard such bureaucracy as given and as a crucial part of daily academic business. In that sense I might probably not even be fully equipped to question its meaningfulness – and so I won’t. However, with regards to its reasonability, alike any other fellow researcher, I am surely competent enough to question it. Moreover, as a criminologist and in case I have good reason to suspect such bureaucracy might be displaying harmful behaviour, I am essentially predestined to critically investigate it. The paper at hand is the result of such a criminological investigation and presents first findings on the phenomenology and aetiology of (cyber) bullying by faceless bureaucracy in the domain of public research funding.