Employees of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) hold a peaceful protest at the LIPI Auditorium in Jakarta on Friday (15/2/2019). They continued the action last week, demanding a moratorium on reorganization and redistribution policies at the research institute. About 100 employees took part in the protest.
The Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) is one of the houses of national science and a strategic asset of the nation that carries out important functions as a scientific authority recognized at the national and international level. Moreover, LIPI, which also guides researchers of all public research institutions in Indonesia, has written history in the development of science and technology.
Initially being like an oasis of science, LIPI suddenly plunged into commotion because of being rummaged by the head of LIPI as a new manager. One would never have imagined that the head of LIPI, after leading the institution for less than a year, would conduct a radical reorganization and restructuring of the institution. The head of LIPI seems to act like a company manager who applies textbook management methods in the style of New Public Management (NPM), which is not necessarily in accordance with what is required of the leader of a national science institution.
The root of the crisis
The application of business management textbook principles in public organizations (reinventing government) has been popular since the 1990s and early 2000s. Basically, there are two principles, namely (1) managers have the right and freedom to design organizations (downsizing, changing specialization and distribution) efficiently to make money (value for money); and (2) managers equipped with full powers centrally control the implementation of policies to achieve verifiable targets (measurable performance indicators). However, since the mid-2000s the "management" paradigm has been replaced with a whole "governance" approach in the public sector.
Now, the radical restructuring, which is not participatory in nature but carried out in a top-down way, is a time bomb exploding in form of a vote of no confidence from LIPI\'s research professors and principal researchers. The reorganization policy is not only met with strong rejection from LIPI’s academic community but also creates opposition among researchers, who either support or oppose it. If there is no appropriate solution, this internal LIPI commotion could aggravate the damage done to values, harm the professionalism of research and demotivate researchers in their work. That would put LIPI as a national asset is on the verge of collapse.
The LIPI crisis began with the head of LIPI, who forced the reorganization in a nontransparent process marked by the following characteristics. First, being monopolizing and authoritarian in the process of reorganization, without heeding criticism or input from structural circles or professional researchers. Second, engineering a super-efficient organizational structure with central control, thereby creating a culture of mistrust in the underlying structure, among deputies, research centers, technical implementation units and researchers. Third, building a culture of performance accountability, which is not based on institutionalized strategic planning documents but more on subjective directives of the LIPI head.
Imposing the NPM model of business management on LIPI\'s governance as a professional institution contains four fundamental errors. First, NPM is a management system on the basis of distrust in humans
by using a calculator to measure trust in performance. This is contrary to the love of the researchers on the basis of them being trusted as professionals.
A measurement-based performance evaluation is very good for companies and procedural bureaucracies that produce performance with a high degree of certainty. Measurement-based performance assessment is not useful in research, which is full of uncertainty and high risk of failure. Research performance is the accumulation of buildings in form of the “discovery” of science, "invention" of technology and "innovation" of products and commercial processes or of beneficial outcomes. Only 1-5 percent of research investment leads to products that enter commercialization.
Second, the head of LIPI suddenly implemented a super-efficient organization that quickly generates money. The super-efficient organization, which is deemed inhuman, has been executed through streamlining and distributing employees in a way that violates commitments in the moratorium. The quick way to make money has been and will be executed through a public-private cooperation scheme in the commercialization of LIPI assets.
Commercialization of assets that are considered inefficient is common in money-oriented companies. However, the commercialization of assets like research sites (botanical gardens, research campuses, publishing buildings) and research-supporting facilities (research vessels, seminar rooms) will disrupt the process and the quality of research. National public research institutions in the world generally commercialize processes and results of research through government-industry cooperation to reduce uncertainty of research results and improve research effectiveness. In essence, the research process always emphasizes effectiveness rather than efficiency.
Third, NPM which emphasizes unit segmentation and specialization of expertise to work efficiently, has been executed by the head of LIPI by purifying the range of scientific disciplines of researchers. This is good for encouraging an improvement of research outcomes of Scopus-indexed researchers, and to produce knowledge for science with short-term goals. However, this unit segmentation will prevent researchers from working in integrated systems (multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary) to create "innovation" of products and commercial processes or useful outputs. Innovation always includes multi-actor collaboration (among researchers, units, institutions and industries as well as among local, national and global governments). As a result, it is difficult for LIPI to be expected to contribute to achieving national goals, namely improving the quality and welfare of the community through collaboration in research, technology and innovation.
Fourth, the NPM emphasizes a rationality that is fixated on the goal of efficiency, ignoring the ethical and moral dimensions that are the foundation of professional and human relations in scientific organizations. LIPI as a national scientific institution, through restructuring under the head of LIPI, has lost its professional spirit, both in upholding the national scientific ethics code and in carrying out the functions of scientific authority holders nationally and internationally. LIPI in the future is no longer an institution of science, but is about to be reduced to a research engine bureaucracy.
Searching for solutions
Renewal upon renewal of the organization on an ongoing basis has been documented in the historical trajectory of LIPI. Now, there is a radical renewal of the organization that breaks away from the long history of the past, so it is ahistorical. This radical reorganization based on the above-mentioned analysis and description is taking place with a very narrow vision and short-term orientation and is detrimental to national interests, namely improving the quality and welfare of society through collaboration in research, technology and innovation.
In facing global challenges in the world of science, technology and innovation, including the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the solution is to restore LIPI\'s position as an oasis and at the same time home of science that has a function as a national and international scientific authority.
That means, LIPI needs a new leader who has the ability to be a "connector" that forms collaboration in LIPI\'s organizational systems that are distributive, autonomous and connected solidly with ICT (information and communication technology) networks in and out of the country. As a national scientific institution, LIPI is not suitable to be led by an authoritarian manager who only creates a chaotic atmosphere, division, demoralization, demotivation and a murky "oasis" that was previously clear.
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