By Michael Erard, Funding Advisor in the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University and author of Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (MIT Press, 2025).
This is part one of a two-part series on the relationship between policy and culture.
What’s the relationship between research culture and research-related policy?
Back in November of 2025, I was at a conference, the focus of which was not on universities or academia. I attended a workshop on policymaking, where the facilitator dissuaded us from attempting policy change at a high or national level.
“You’ll never get anything done on this issue at that level” she said. Instead, to harness an American spirit of civic agency, she encouraged us to look at churches, neighbourhood organizations, companies, and other local spaces. She seemed to be saying that at that small scale, the people making decisions are the same people affected by them. Their interests are aligned; they know how things work. As a result, they could more successfully create policies that served themselves.
Some age-old questions came back to me at that moment. Does policy create culture? Or does culture precede policy? A quick web search turned up a mountain of literature. I considered that at this local scale, culture and policy might be indistinguishable from each other. Get enough neighbourhood dog parks to make their own rules about off-leash dogs, and you could have enough evidence to support a city-wide policy about leashing dogs in public. If only it were so easy.
Culture at many levels
After the conference, I came back to my job as funding advisor at a Dutch university, where I was reminded of a few things. Now, I’m no longer certain that small-scale policy equates to culture, not in any reliable way at least.
What is culture? I find a quick definition I learned while working at a business consulting firm useful: culture is ‘the way we do things around here.’ Sometimes it’s more accurate to add that culture is ‘the way we think we do things around here, along with the way we actually do things.’ Culture exists as a set of models that we have in our heads for guiding action, making decisions, processing new information, and so forth.
By contrast, policy is guidelines, frameworks, rules. It exists not in our brains but on paper. It is composed of normative statements about how resources will be used and by whom. It’s explicit. By contrast, culture is often tacit. It may even resist the explicitness required of policy. That’s one reason that culture isn’t just more granular policy, nor policy at scale. I should say that simply describing culture doesn’t make it policy—a policy also must have prescriptive force.
Culture exists on multiple levels. There are local organizational culture and broader regional or national culture outside the organization, which local organizational culture often draws heavily from.
Who oversees culture?
If you’ve ever worked in a university setting, you might have noticed a few things about the relationship between culture and policy.
- Lots of people oversee policy. Very few oversee culture. The implicit assumption is that one creates the other. This isn’t necessarily true.
- The practices that people identify as part of their culture are often defended at the organizational level. Where I work, each faculty insists on its own way of doing things, which it deploys to resist any top-down, centralized effort to coordinate, consolidate, or share resources. So do others at the university. In this way, the place resembles the country of Belgium, which is right over the border, in that parochial stakes are defended at the expense of advancing shared interests.
- This is not as glib as it seems: many of the cultural attributes that are said to belong to this or that unit may in fact reflect regional or national ways of doing things. I am not saying that this should or shouldn’t be the case. However, I am simply noting that unless you acknowledge the mere existence of different cultural defaults in your community, there will be friction.
I have been fortunate to play a role in drafting, elaborating, evaluating, and implementing policy related to research funding. Repeatedly, I find that where the policy works, it’s because it is consistent with or parallel to what the culture already was. By ‘works’, I am thinking of how a policy is implemented without friction and can be shown to deliver desired outcomes, either qualitatively or quantitatively.
Conversely, policy fails where it goes against the cultural grain. Sometimes this is where the policy isn’t aligned with the existing way of doing things. Sometimes it concerns governance and the use of power. If there is a culture in which individuals in certain roles can override stated policy on an ad hoc basis, without feeding back into the policy-making process itself, then the policy fails – often because addressing power and governance was outside the scope of that policy.
- Sometimes policy fails because those who are meant to benefit are unaware of it, and others can ignore it without consequence. This too is culture.
Culture eats policy
The story goes that management guru, Peter Drucker, never actually said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,”. The idea that ‘culture eats policy’ is closer to the truth. Policy often has a more oppositional relationship to culture. The opposite is not true; a policy can’t define a culture on its own but with time it might influence it.
In the second part of this series, I explore the how of story-telling with and about policy and its role in culture change.
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 