Early-career researchers (ECRs) increasingly navigate interdisciplinary landscapes, where addressing complex societal problems requires crossing disciplinary boundaries before fully consolidating a scholarly and professional identity. Drawing on my experiences as an ECR in Applied Linguistics, which include engaging in research-informed teaching, mentoring, and collaborative projects across computer science, chemistry, medical education, AI and mental health, this article critically reflects on the practices, challenges, and opportunities of interdisciplinarity facing ECRs. These include negotiating identity as a disciplinary ‘outsider’, performing epistemological translation across differing research cultures, and managing the relational and cognitive labour of boundary-spanning. While such work can exacerbate precarity and divert focus from core disciplinary expertise, it also cultivates linguistic agility, epistemic humility, relational intelligence, and integrative problem-solving, the competencies of what I term ‘interdisciplinary expertise’. Supporting ECRs requires institutional structures that value cross-boundary contributions, provide longer-term stability, foster recognition and inclusive practices, and strengthen mentorship networks. By reframing interdisciplinarity as a site for cultivating adaptability, leadership, and integrative thinking, institutions can empower researchers to thrive as confident, future-ready scholars.
Developing and sustaining a thriving research culture for the long term is vital not only for researchers, but also for our ability to address global challenges. Yet several high-profile reports have highlighted concerns. Whilst sector organisations and universities alike have begun to address these issues, research culture can be a fuzzy concept with uncertainties about how it can be measured and improved. While psychologists have been examining work culture in other sectors for decades, including developing evaluation measures, the underlying dimensions, norms, and behaviours that constitute a positive research culture are less well understood. These studies of organisational culture from industry and healthcare offer opportunities for cross-sector learning. Taking an innovative approach, this Critical Reflection outlines lessons learned from organisational psychology that can be applied to the study of research culture, including understanding its underlying dimensions and enabling mechanisms and studying research culture using surveys. Specifically, key findings from developing and running three research culture surveys in a Scottish university are discussed, along with advice on conducting surveys and overall research best practices involving research culture.
This Critical Reflection explores how University College London’s (UCL’s) Research Culture Community Steering Group (CSG) integrates the individual voices and lived experiences of the research community and encourages researchers’ direct participation in governance as a way to foster a sense of belonging and promote inclusion within institutional research culture change. Launched in January 2024, the CSG works in partnership with the UCL Research Culture Programme (RCP). This article considers the CSG’s first two years, examining how member feedback in 2024 and 2025 shaped strategic priorities and plans, contributed to projects, and revealed systemic barriers relating to equity, wellbeing and research environments. Using change-management frameworks, it reviews the challenges of implementation, including the complexity of governance and balancing competing priorities within a large, decentralised institution. The analysis shows how early engagement, inclusivity and structured feedback loops build trust and support sustainable, people-centred organisational cultural change. Finally, the article considers how the CSG model informs UCL’s next phase of the RCP through strengthening alignment with governance structures, clarifying member roles, and sharing learning and best practice. It offers transferable insights for research-intensive universities embedding inclusive community voices within decision-making and strategies.
This Critical Reflection explores how Johnson and Scholes’ ‘Cultural Web’ organisational model can be used to interrogate institutional research culture, with a particular focus on whether the needs and experiences of early-career researchers (ECRs) are as culturally complex as institutional discourse may imply. Drawing on engagement with over 200 ECRs across four UK universities and reflections from presentations at the 2025 International Research Culture Conference held at the University of Warwick, the paper explores the following question: Which aspects of institutional research culture impacting on the lived experiences of early career researchers are genuinely complex, deeply embedded and resistant to change and which reflect tensions between well-understood researcher needs and established institutional priorities? It argues that ECR aspirations are largely straight-forward and uncomplicated. The issue may lie in how these aspirations interact with institutional paradigms, power arrangements, reward systems and resource constraints. The paper is intended as a call to action, using the Cultural Web model to make visible the relationship between an institution’s stated cultural ambitions and its organisational mechanisms through which particular research cultures are reproduced. In doing so, it argues for a more precise use of the language of complexity and for greater attention to the institutional choices and tensions that shape research culture and researchers’ day-to-day experience.
This Critical Reflection details the individual, institutional and national impacts of employment precarity in research-related roles, summarising findings from the University of Nottingham’s Revisiting Employment Contracts: Helping Under-represented Researchers Develop, Lead and Excel (REC HURDLE) project. Current sector-wide evidence and practices are summarised, and recommendations are made for changes to organisational processes and research culture to lessen both the extent and severity of employment precarity in UK higher education. Ongoing work to this aim through the national Research Precarity Working Group is detailed. The emotional and practical considerations of effecting change in this area, within a national research ecosystem under financial strain, are considered.
