Funding Panels as Declarative Bodies: Meritocracy and Paradoxes of Decision-Making in Modern Science

Abstract

In the middle of the twentieth century, bureaucratic organizations that aimed to appear democratic began using expert groups as a kind of decision-making technology. I call these groups ‘declarative bodies’ and funding panels are one example. Declarative bodies are distinctive types of groups because they have the power to make things in the world through declaration: their words bring new objects into being. Building on philosophy of language, this article theorizes and explains the unusual structural constraints that members of funding panels labour within by virtue of being part of a declarative body. The article argues that these constraints stem from three democratic ideals: impersonality, objectivity and truth. When put to work through declarative bodies, these democratic ideals create paradoxes that have fundamentally shaped how funding panellists labour together. Further, I argue that organizations use funding panels formally and intentionally to create the appearance that decisions were made by a disembodied actor to sanctify the legitimacy of the organizations’ choices. Declarative bodies, such as funding panels, have actively altered the processes of knowledge-making, the contours of scientific communities and the products of knowledge itself. By the twenty-first century, it can be hard to imagine other acceptable methods of making decision in science, despite growing worries about the unintended, undemocratic outcomes they produce. This article encourages a critical curiosity to imagine new ways of making decisions, to declare new futures and to bring other worlds into being.