Methodologies and measures for analysing informal decision-making and communication processes

This aim of this report is to address how to increase transparency and inclusivity in the informal decision-making and communication processes in the research units. Moreover it addresses how to enable/create an enduring transformation of the organisational culture favouring a more active participation of women in all the decision-making and communication processes. The process has two stages and this report describes and reports the advancement of the first stage where we directed our efforts towards two intermediate goals: a) Establishing an operational methodology for analysing the impact of informal communication and decision-making processes on the life of the basic (research and teaching) units of our target institutions. b) Formulating policy amendments aimed at changing the status quo in situations where participation and transparency where lacking. In order to achieve these goals, and coherently with the aim of this report, we decided to pursue these target by means of a participative technique, involving the members of our research case studies in both efforts. We believe that a direct involvement of actors at the research unit/department level was crucial because of their high contextual knowledge, which is necessary when trying to understand the impact of informal communication and decision-making processes, and because of their ability to actively suggest and implement policies to improve inclusivity and transparency. This need for participation also meant the need for a direct interaction of academic personnel at all levels with the FESTA team behind this report. This was achieved by: a) Selecting a meaningful (but manageable) subset of focal units to interact with; b) Selecting members from such units as informants of the research; c) Interviewing informants on the internal mechanisms of communication and decision-making of each unit/department, by using a common framework, in order to adequately map these processes; d) Summarizing the information thus obtained and verifying it with the interviewees in a second stage, so as to validate the information and to spur debate on possible changes (policies) to implement within each unit/department; e) Discussing these policies and helping proponents in their implementation. Examples of the proposed policies, as implemented thus far, are: - Sharing information about structural changes of units/departments in a pre-arranged way (i.e., mailing lists, newsletters). - Preparing official documents such as meeting agendas and minutes in languages accessible to all potential participants (i.e., normally add English as an official language for communication). ii - Organising celebrations in case of successes (i.e., PhD theses defences, obtaining large tenders, been awarded important funds for research projects) and propose leisure activities to reinforce camaraderie within the unit/department. - Establishing a common free timeslot in the weekly schedule to promote participation to meetings. - Developing informal strategies and open campaigns to promote the appointment of women in committees and boards. - Creating institutional support structures (for example, to initiate the establishment of a centre for gender studies, a gender office and a network of people interested in gender issues at the university) - Providing information about initiatives and solutions supporting female researchers from other European universities and research institutions. - Transforming some currently opaque decision-making processes into more transparent ones (i.e., establishing clear, ex-ante criteria in fund allocation; detailing the required activities of PhD students) - Continuing meetings with the units/departments to offer support to implemented changes which are underway. This work is part of the EU project FESTA (www.FGESTA-EUROPA.eu). Four research institutions are involved in the work of this report: FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler), an Italian institute of research employing around 500 researchers; ITU (Istanbul Technical University), a Turkish technical state University employing around 2300 academics and with an enrolment of around 30000 students, SWU (South West University), a Bulgarian University with around 14000 students and 800 faculty members, and UU (Uppsala University), located in Sweden and with a body of 45000 students and with a teaching staff of roughly 1800. The purpose of FESTA is to affect structural and cultural change in higher level education and research institutes, and particularly in their decision-making bodies and processes so as to create more transparent and inclusive decision-making processes, which will advance gender equality (FESTA, 2012).