particularly for those involved recently in residential property markets, the ticket. 'From Main Street to Wall Street' (Fannie Mae, 1990) may have turned out to be.
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Finance, property and "layers of newspaper ironies"(1) "We must not be misled into thinking that, because we have a substantial property securing our lending, the other principles do not matter. We are bankers, not property tycoons ..." (Buckler 1968, from an Autumn Lecture to the Institute of Bankers, London) Nigel Thrift (1990) wrote recently of his dismay at the general lack of any serious "attention ... paid to matters of money and finance in human geography" (page 1135). Several years earlier, Michael Ball (1986) noted the way that "urban development and the production of the built environment in general are regarded frequently as fairly isolated and specialised areas of study" (page 447). The residential and commercial property market crashes that have taken place on an international scale since the end of the 1980s (BIS, 1992, pages 139-140; 1993, pages 157-158) serve as a timely reminder of the need to bring together 'matters financial' and the production of the built environment, and to locate both more centrally within geography, planning, and economics. The collapse in property markets followed a period of quite amazing escalation in real estate prices that seemed to have little to do with the underlying 'real economy' of most industrialised countries. Between 1980 and 1989, residential asset prices in Sweden and Finland, for example, rose in real terms by 200%; similar residential and commercial asset price rises were experienced in Japan, the United Kingdom, large parts of the USA, Norway, France, and many other countries. The 1980s expansion of credit [perhaps one of the major causal factors in the dramatic escalation of real asset prices on an international scale (BIS, 1993, pages 165-166)], the deregulation of personal and wholesale financial markets that facilitated indebtedness in the context of market-led policies for structural economic change, all of which informed and shaped the booms, have left these countries with severe problems. 'Real estate price deflation' threatens both exposed financial institutions and national macroeconomic policy and "[G]iven the lack of relevant past experience, it is difficult to assess the potential danger of a vicious circle of declines feeding on declines" (BIS, 1992, page 7). These declines, however, are not confined to the spaceless world of economic policy, they describe very real geographies which reflect significant structural economic, as well as social, imbalance. The emergence of 'negative equity' and the rise in homelessness are two clear examples. Following the further deregulation of financial markets, the financing of property development and investment now connects domestic residential and commercial property markets to international capital markets and exposes what were relatively sheltered circuits of property finance to the turmoil of 'global' financial flows. Yet, particularly for those involved recently in residential property markets, the ticket 'From Main Street to Wall Street' (Fannie Mae, 1990) may have turned out to be (1)
Taken from a poem by Peter Reading who observed at the height of the property boom in the United Kingdom, and in central London in particular, people "Lying in layers of newspaper ironies—Property Prices" (1989 no page numbers).
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both an unexpected and an uncomfortable two-way ride. The benefits of access to new sources of housing finance may not be compensation enough when interest rate risk pulls-up unexpectedly outside homes along main street. As several authors in this and a forthcoming issue argue, in the face of such changes, there is a need to fuse not simply the production of built environments and the 'production of social space', but to bring into this account the implications of the use of and reliance upon a range of private sector financial institutions and instruments that 'enable' property (re)development. Moreover, in an economic and social environment that places the private sector centre stage in the initiation of structural change in economies, not least in property-led regeneration (Turok, 1992), this need becomes greater. There is nothing to say that the investment requirements of the agents that make up 'private finance' will map easily onto a highly differentiated geography of past and projected property investment returns. In a global investment arena, rapidly changing space economies mean that from an investor's viewpoint many places are out of time and out of place. As investment strategies are recalculated, there is a real danger, therefore, that investment 'needs' will grow out of sync with the particular property-investment requirements of different places. The ability of 'fragile local economies' to attract much-needed private sector development then becomes highly questionable, despite the enthusiasm of government policymakers. This is the theme of Patsy Healey's paper in which she focuses on the 'institutional' form of the property development markets in Tyne and Wear in North East England during the 1980s. And where regional property companies bypass the traditional source of institutional finance and link with domestic banks, the end result may be local concentrations of propertyrelated debt, an outcome that quickly puts a halt to longer term economic regeneration. In contrast to the plight of so-called 'rust belt' regions, the major cities of the industrialised countries have been subject to the impact of simply staggering booms and collapses in nominal commercial property prices from the beginning of the 1980s, to their downward spiral from 1990; staggering not only because of the pace and relative uniformity of their rise: 6 1 % in Tokyo, 25% in Frankfurt, 40% in London, 38% in Sydney, 37% in Helsinki, 50% in Madrid, for example, all during 1987; but also for the pace and uniformity of their collapse: - 1 9 % in Tokyo, - 2 4 % in Frankfurt, - 3 0 % in London, - 3 5 % in Sydney,-20% in Helsinki, - 2 8 % in Madrid, for example, all during 1992 (BIS, 1993, page 159). The investment and lending activity of international banks in particular, together with some other financial institutions, was largely responsible for stoking much of the rise in commercial property prices in these cities. For instance, Scandanavian banks reportedly accounted for 80% of the office deals in Brussels in one year; the buying activity of these and other banks reputedly knocked 2% off office yields in Madrid in less than 12 months. (These and related issues, some of which are touched upon below, are the concerns of papers by Michael Ball, Bob Beauregard, and Jerry Coakley in a forthcoming issue of this journal.) The result of momentarily forgetting that they are 'bankers rather than property tycoons' underpins the recent 'unprecedented' spate of downgradings within the international (and national) banking community. For example, banks' lending against real estate as a proportion of all loans to the private sector in 1992 stood at 43% in the USA, 30% in France, 32% in the United Kingdom, 51% in Canada, 46% in Norway, and 30% in Spain (BIS, 1993, page 168). Consequently, bad-loan provisions have risen, as profitability and asset quality have fallen with equal speed. And that is not all; in a relatively free-flowing, disintermediated international financial system, the effects of real estate defaults lead to downgradings amongst credit
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institutions and in turn, some might argue, even influence the nature of systemic risk within the financial system, and, as noted earlier, may well have a marked influence on national macroeconomic management (BIS, 1992, page 7). Needless to say, as the above indicates, property markets are now very much part of the financial system. This fuller integration has two immediate consequences. First, property markets present financial markets with a range of new credit and default risks that allow scope for the transmission of specific sector risks throughout the financial system. Second, integration may now spread propertyrelated risks from 'infected' regions to those regional property markets that should otherwise remain relatively unscathed. In a period when private sector financial institutions are being looked to to finance a range of property-related projects, including social housing, such contagion effects, whether real or imaginary, exact a heavy price as the supply of funds decreases, spreads increase, convenants tighten, maturities shorten, or property lending books simply close. The growing involvement of financial institutions in property development is well illustrated by the boom and collapse of Japan's commercial property markets. Between 1985 and the end of 1989 Japanese City, Long-term Credit and Trust banks had on average increased their lending to real estate and construction companies by between 23% and 25%. By the end of the first quarter of 1991 ¥84 trillion was outstanding against Japanese real estate (¥24 trillion of which was lent by nonbanks and only ¥0.6 trillion by foreign banks). And by the end of 1991 an estimated ¥9.62 trillion of loans were defined as 'problem loans' (that is, where interest payments have been reduced, postponed for six months, or a company has been declared bankrupt) (data from Bank of Japan Economic Statistics Monthly and Ministry Of Finance Quarterly Survey of Corporations and The Kinzai Weekly, 30 March 1992, and kindly supplied by Nomura Research Institute Europe Limited). Against this background, the paper by Eiji Oizumi makes particular reference to the role of financial institutions in fuelling Japan's property markets and their increasing domination of central urban land markets. He notes, too, the ways in which the public sector has now been brought in to attempt to lessen the damage of the collapse, a move that raises serious questions of so-called moral hazard within the sector. Two of the papers in this issue deal with aspects of property development in the global cities of London and New York. Writing towards the end of the recent property boom, Saskia Sassen (1991, pages 186-187) remarked that, although the dramatic escalation in commercial land prices in New York and London was confined to the central areas of these cities, where "bidding for space was confined to specific locations", the rise in land prices was nevertheless drawing in, through rehabilitation and reconstruction, the previously 'undesirable' fringes of these central financial spaces. These 'undesirable fringes', the places in such global cities where the spatial dualism of the 'global and the local' is perhaps most marked, are the subject of the paper by Susan Fainstein. She draws on empirical work conducted in Spitalfields, located just to the east of the global financial marketplace of London, and Brooklyn, lying in 'the shadow of Manhatten'. Paying attention to the different 'ideological and institutional traditions' at play in both cities, she discusses the effects of government-sponsored attempts to leverage private sector property investment and thus to draw these two 'marginal' places into the spatial ambit of financial services. The financial space of the global City of London is the location of the paper by Michael Pryke. He provides an interpretation of the ways in which a range of economic agents capitalise both the established spatial practices—the socially and culturally specific demand curves—of the City of London's financial markets, how these agents then realign in the midst of changing investment criteria to develop a
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new 'global' financial space, and points to some of the main effects of the collapse of the City's office markets. As several authors in this issue argue, the past decade has witnessed a thorough mixing of national and international financial systems, and the production of built forms and social space. Papers in a forthcoming issue take up this theme. Jerry Coakley discusses the rapid transformation of residential and commercial property into a 'quasi-financial asset' in the United Kingdom. David Harvey's concept of 'capital-switching' is the subject of a paper by Bob Beauregard, who draws on data relating to the building boom in the USA from the early to the mid 1980s. Michael Ball examines what he feels to be the range of factors responsible for the recent booms and slumps. He concludes that no one factor can be blamed. Instead a mixture of uncertainties brought about by financial liberalisation and changes in planning regimes, the surge in service sector employment, new construction techniques, for example, together should inform our understanding of the booms. The previously 'specialised areas' that these contributory factors represent need now to form key elements in future explanations of urban and regional change. M Pryke References BallM, 1986, "The built environment and the urban question" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 4 447 - 464 BIS, 1992 62nd Annual Report Bank for International Settlements, Centralbahnplatz 2, CH-4002, Basel, Switzerland BIS, 1993 63rd Annual Report Bank for International Settlements, Centralbahnplatz 2, CH-4002, Basel, Switzerland Buckler E J W, 1968, "Bank finance for property development", in Lending against Real Property Autumn Lectures (revised edition), Institute of Bankers, 10 Lombard Street, London EC3, pp 37 - 51 Fannie Mae, 1990 Community Banks: Main Street to Wall Street through the Secondary Mortgage Market Customer Training, Fannie Mae, Washington, DC Reading P, 1989 Perduta Gente (Seeker and Warburg, London) Sassen S, 1991 Global Cities (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) Thrift N, 1990, "The perils of the international financial system" Environment and Planning A 22 1135-1140 Turokl, 1992, "Property-led urban regeneration: panacea or placebo?" Environment and Planning A 24 361-379
The stealthy tyranny of community spaces Over 32 million people in the United States currently live in a residential community association—about one in every seven households in metropolitan areas (Community Associations Institute, 1993). Effectively, most of the new urban tissue that has been added to US cities since the 1970s has been equipped with an infrastructure of private governance in the form of one of the more than 150000 residential community associations that now exist. More than half of the housing currently on the market in the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United States and nearly all new residential development in California, Florida, New York, Texas, and suburban Washington, DC, is governed by a common-interest community, a form of residential community association in which membership is mandatory (Dilger, 1991; 1992). As a result, postsuburban America is a web of servitude regimes that regulate land use and mediate community affairs in what often amounts to a form of contracted fascism. Their inherent privacy and autonomy contributes in large measure to the stealthiness of contemporary urban affairs. This stealthiness may not have received as much attention as some of the other dimensions of the contemporary city—
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spectacle, surveillance, life-style fragmentation, social polarization, racism, and bunker architecture—but it surely deserves to (see Virilio's Aesthetics of Disappearance 1991). Caught in the radar of state and federal law, residential community associations pose some fundamental issues that bear directly on the sociospatial dialectic of postsuburban settings: questions of citizenship, representation, consensus, and coercion in local governance, equity and efficiency in service provision, life-style segregation, social reproduction, and so on. Seen in the broader context of the metropolitan area as a whole, these issues have all sorts of implications: for patterns of land use and economic development, for local politics, for metropolitan governance, and for social justice. Many of these issues and implications arise because their operational functions amount to a form of private governance. Through boards of directors elected through a 'citizenry' of homeowners, they levy taxes (through monthly or yearly assessments), control and regulate both the physical environment and certain aspects of people's behavior (through covenants, controls, and restrictions attached to each home's deed), enact development controls, maintain commonly owned amenities (such as meeting rooms, exercise centres, racquetball courts, and picnic areas), protect environmental features (such as lakes and wetlands), organize service delivery (such as garbage collection, water and sewer hookups, street maintenance, lawn mowing, snow removal, and neighborhood security), and participate in the system of intergovernmental relations (chiefly through representations to the agencies of state and county governments, such as highway and planning departments). The 'shadow governments' constituted through these operational functions owe their existence to a combination of a deep-seated ethos of privatism, a long-standing tendency toward exclusionary segregation, a more recent crisis of housing affordability that led to innovations in planning and real estate development, and the 'new conservatism' of local politics that led to municipal load-shedding. The earliest residential community associations (generally referred to as homeowners' associations), from the first examples in the 1920s through to the early 1960s (when there were still only about 500 in the whole of the United States), were chiefly directed toward exclusionary segregation. Formed for the most part in response to the Supreme Court's judgment against segregation ordinances enacted by public municipalities [Buchanan v Warley, 1917), they relied heavily on racially restrictive covenants to fence off a 'bourgeois Utopia'; until such covenants were in turn struck down by the case of Shelley v Kraemer (1948). The explosive growth of residential community associations in the last twenty-five years has been driven by the logic of the real estate industry. In the 1970s, higher energy costs and escalating land prices made compliance with the standard zoning ordinances developed for 1960s brushfire suburbanization an expensive undertaking. In response, the key innovation was Planned Unit Development (PUD) zoning, which enabled developers to build at higher densities in return for providing desirable amenities, at the same time allowing municipalities to avoid some of the costs of infrastructure provision. Developers saw mandatory residential community associations as the ideal means not only of managing these amenities but also of ensuring that ever-larger and more complex subdivisions would maintain their character until build-out and beyond. By 1980 a total of 35000 residential community associations had been established; by 1990, 130000. Initially concerned chiefly with protecting property values through preserving design aesthetics and promoting community development in their 'highend' developments, these associations soon found that public municipalities, in the grip of a phase of fiscal conservatism, were happy to let them organize their own services. Then, having become relatively powerful and autonomous, they became
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more aggressive in local politics. Across the country, residential community associations have taken up the vanguard of NIMBYism(1) to defend their residential niches against unwanted development—which, as the hedonic price of environmental quality has risen sharply, often means any kind of development. Davis (1990), for example, has drawn attention to the 'Sunbelt Bolshevism' of Southern California homeowners' associations that have become an important element in the no-growth/slow-growth politics of postsuburbia. We are thus presented with a skein of private governments that have been conceived with little regard for the broader issues of democracy or social justice and established with scant attention to their influence on metropolitan governance (ACIR, 1989). Because developers have established the constitution and bylaws of most residential community associations, they have effectively become benevolent dictators, setting up a tyranny of bourgeois taste and comportment. This tyranny is rooted in the covenants, conditions, and restrictions that constitute what in legal terms is known as a 'servitude regime', whereby property owned by one person is subject to specific rights held by others. It is maintained through boards which, though elected, are usually constituted so as to act as administrative, legislative, and quasi-judicial bodies, all rolled into one. Not surprisingly, this has already brought a new legal specialty: the homeowners' association lawyer. Their staple is the occasional outburst of individuality that transgresses 'architectural' controls. These not only cover building styles, materials, allowable styles and colors for doors and windows, allowable detailing (for example, whether house numbers have to be in Roman numerals or script), and landscaping (allowable trees and shrubs, type of fencing, frequency of lawnmowing, color and style of mailbox, etc) but also aspects of domestic life-style and behavior (for example, no outdoor laundry lines, no external television antennas, no kennels, no political signs or flags, no holiday decorations visible from the street). Other covenants can intrude more directly into domestic life and social interaction: no pets, no children, no lovers or lodgers. A few of the larger and more selfconsciously upscale community associations even employ inspectors whose job it is to cruise around, looking for infractions, sparing neighbors the uncomfortable task of confronting one another over unswept leaves or unsuitably colored recycling bins. Although all this has been proven to lead to significant gains in property values (compared with identical subdivisions that lack architectural controls), it raises some important issues in the area of law and geography. The stealthiness of residential community associations means that we only get to see the tip of the iceberg that reaches the courts, where the authority of association boards and the legality of their covenants, conditions, and restrictions have generally been upheld (unless there is evidence of inconsistency in their application). This reflects an interpretation of associations as consensual undertakings on the part of homeowners. There is, however, a perspective within critical legal studies that the servitude regimes of common-interest community associations are coercive (Natelson, 1990). There also arises a key aspect of the spatiality of the law identified by Delaney (1993) with respect to racially restrictive covenants. This is the doctrine of changing conditions, which holds that covenants, conditions, and restrictions may be redundant— invalid—if the surrounding geographic area has so changed that they have lost their original meaning. Legal issues aside, this doctrine points to the inherent rigidity and potential inflexibility of homeowner-association neighborhoods as elements of the urban mosaic. W NIMBY—not in my backyard.
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Meanwhile, the petty tyranny of community spaces has been carried over into the broader arena of urban politics, where residential community associations have been active as regular correspondents with public agencies and officials and frequent participants at public meetings of municipal councils, school districts, and planning boards. Complaining about encroachment and undesirable development, petitioning for public highways to be gated, opposing proposals for affordable housing and group homes, and challenging zoning ordinances, they have quietly become principals in the parapolitical structure. Dilger (1991) cites the example of a hearing on the location of a proposed new high school in Redlands, CA. All but one of the thirty citizens who spoke at the hearing identified themselves as officers or members of a residential community association, concerned that the high school would hurt property values and diminish their quality of life by increasing traffic, litter, noise, etc. The school was eventually built in a location well away from neighborhoods with homeowners' associations. P Knox (Secretary, Woodland Hills Homeowners Association, Inc.) References ACIR, 1989 Residential Community Associations: Private Governments in the Intergovernmental System? Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 800 K Street NW, Suite 450-South Lobby, Washington, DC 20575 Community Associations Institute, 1993 Community Associations Factbook (CAI, Alexandria, VA) Davis M, 1990 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, London) Delaney D, 1993, "Geographies of judgement: the doctrine of changed conditions and the geopolitics of race" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 4 8 - 6 5 Dilger R J, 1991, "Residential community associations: issues, impacts, and relevance for local government" State and Local Government Review 23 1 7 - 2 3 Dilger R J, 1992 Neighborhood Politics: Residential Community Associations in American Governance (New York University Press, New York) Natelson R G, 1990, "Consent, coercion and 'reasonableness' in private law: the special case of the property owners association" Ohio State Law Journal 51 4 1 - 8 8 Virilio P, 1991 The Aesthetics of Disappearance translated by P Beitchman (Semiotext(e), New York)
For a few guilders more During the 1980s the Ministry of Education in the Netherlands developed a new policy for funding academic research. At first many policymakers at the Ministry and in academic institutions thought that it would be very difficult to influence and change the research traditions that had developed, especially in the social sciences and humanities. But this turned out to be much easier than had been expected. Researchers are very susceptible to relatively small financial bonuses and stimuli. They can, therefore, easily be guided in particular directions, with respect to topics being studied and the way in which the research is conducted and organised. My impression, from discussions with academics from other European countries, is that the same is true elsewhere. The large number of applications for financial support for the relatively limited funds of the European Science Foundation and the European Community are another sign that academics are prepared to put a lot of effort into acquiring extra research funding, even if the rewards are small and the criteria only partly academic. In this commentary I will illustrate how geographic research in the Netherlands was influenced by Dutch science policy and the creation of small funds for particular types of research. The 1970s and 1980s will be compared to
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illustrate these changes. I will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these changes in funding policy. The 1970s were very pleasant years for Dutch geography in general and Dutch academic geographers in particular. The postwar baby boom generation started to enter the university system in large numbers. The number of students in geography tripled or quadrupled. At the same time the hyperbolic expansion of the Dutch welfare state system also benefitted the universities. On top of all this, the 1970s were also years of major wage increases for university personnel. All these circumstances led to a real jump in the number of geographers employed at the five Dutch universities offering degree courses in geography. For every ten to twenty extra students, departments would get an extra member of staff. The rule was that every academic could spend two days each week on research. Research capacity in geography expanded greatly as a result and there was almost no central check on what was being done with this research funding. To a large extent every academic could decide for himself or herself what research topic they wanted to pursue. The first shock to this very pleasant and 'free' system of research funding occurred in the early 1980s. Funding for research was separated from funding for teaching in order to curb the enormous expansion of research possibilities linked to the growing student population. It was fixed at the level of that time. My estimate is that for the five geography departments, this meant a research capacity of around a 100 full-time equivalents (fte) in personnel. From then on, however, extra funding for research could only be acquired from nonuniversity sources or from special funds created at the universities. The constant battle for extra research funding that characterised the 1980s had begun. An even more serious measure was taken at the same time. All research funding through the universities was, provisionally, taken away. It could be reacquired by submitting five-year research programmes to the university. The programmes needed to have a minimum of five ftes in staff. These programmes were submitted by the universities to the National Science Foundation for refereeing and ranking. With a positive report, one could earn back the university funding that had originally been taken away. In this way academics were forced to collaborate on research programmes, because individual research was considered to be inefficient and without direction. There was some resistance to participating in these programmes, but at the same time it was evident that without such participation one's time for research would be severely curtailed. So all academic geographers in the Netherlands now work in teams of often twenty or more persons, and the work of each individual has to fit the research programme. The establishment of this system of funding research was only the first step in a long series of changes that followed over the course of the 1980s. Additional changes were initiated by the Ministry of Education and two funds were created. One fund was for national research programmes to foster interuniversity and interdisciplinary cooperation and the other was for establishing interuniversity PhD schools. Geography and several related disciplines decided to compete for this extra money and had to do what they had never done before, cooperate with their competitors from other fields and universities. These efforts resulted in the formation of the Urban Networks National Research Programme and the Netherlands Graduate School of Housing and Urban Research (NETHUR), amongst others. The National Science Foundation went through a similar process of establishing grants for which only groups of researchers from various universities or disciplines could compete (Priority Research Programmes). And the universities themselves
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followed suit by developing ten to fifteen (at Utrecht University) designated research areas which could get extra funding and which were offered some protection from cuts in the overall university budgets. One has to meet all sorts of quality, size, and cooperation criteria to get onto this shortlist and its advantages are not, as yet, very clear. The Ministry of Education and the universities have also agreed to establish a limited number of national research schools (for all disciplines) which are screened by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences before they are allowed to operate as such. Again, in this process, new alliances of reseach groups are necessary to compete successfully under criteria which require a certain number of participants. This is especially the case in the social sciences and humanities where research funding is relatively scarce in comparison with the natural sciences. Looking back to the experiences of the 1980s there are sortie clear advantages and disadvantages in this new way of funding of academic research as far as the researchers themselves are concerned. I will first mention two positive influences on geographic research in the Netherlands and will conclude with two well-known syndromes that have developed and affect researchers who compete actively for these scarce funds. Advantages Many Dutch researchers have become used to working in research programmes and most find it stimulating for their work. The programmes form a direct forum for discussions on research topics, while at the same time they still offer enough leeway for personal preferences in research and individual initiative. The system has certainly led to a larger output of publications and more awareness of the necessity for all members of the team to address an international audience. The various national interuniversity programmes of research in the field of geography and related disciplines, have often resulted in a concentrated and interdisciplinary research effort that many academics have found stimulating. It has certainly opened up fruitful collaboration between researchers and without the presence of these programmes this would probably not have occurred. Syndromes The treadmill syndrome. Once a group of researchers has collaboratively succeeded in attracting extra funding and in establishing a good status in the pecking order of research programmes, it is very difficult to stop. The pressure is then very strong, both from within the group and from the faculties or universities, to continue competing for every new form of funding created. This puts continuous pressure on senior researchers to write new proposals, even if ample funding is already available and the senior researchers supervising projects have a heavy workload. Many geographers have been put into a position where much of their research time is spent on making proposals and supervising externally funded projects. In the long run, this is not conducive to the quality of their own research. The nonpeer review syndrome. Academics are used to being judged by their peers, for example in the form of refereeing of papers submitted to journals. Usually one can read the arguments for the acceptance or rejection of a paper. The decision about the proposals for larger funds under the new 1980s system (in the Netherlands) are often taken by committees whose status in an academic sense is unclear and sometimes dubious. The people on these committees are not always the most distinguished researchers and sometimes they are not researchers at all. It often remains vague whether the quality of a proposal has been judged by peer
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researchers or by bureaucrats and managers. It is hard to accept the rejection of a proposal without a clear peer review process and without convincing arguments. F M Dieleman Acknowledgement. The author acknowledges the support of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, where this commentary was written.
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