Using the Cultural Web Model to Analyse Early-Career Research Culture

Abstract

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.