Competing for research grants: institutional resource inequality and early-career academics’ research agenda setting

Within the highly competitive research funding ecosystem, early career academics (ECAs) in mainland China face unavoidable pressures to participate in grant competitions as a prerequisite for academic career entry and progression. Focusing on resource inequality within divergent universities, this study investigates the tactical approaches Chinese ECAs employ to navigate their research agendas tailored to funding demands, alongside comparative insights into how research agenda setting diverges between elite-forging and non-elite-focused universities. Drawing on resource-based view and mobilization strategies (optimization/bricolage), this narrative inquiry interviewed 30 ECAs across 24 elite-forging and non-elite-focused mainland Chinese research institutions. Findings reveal that grant acquisition is contingent on both institutional and individual resource capacities. To navigate this grant competition, ECAs adopt a hierarchical framework of four strategies aligning with incremental resource availability, ordered as follows: necessity-based bricolage, lean-condition optimization, ideational bricolage, and asset-rich optimization. Institutional disparities underpin this pattern: ECAs at non-elite-focused universities predominantly rely on the first two resource-constrained approaches, whereas their elite-forging university counterparts normally leverage the latter two resource-abundant strategies. These insights offer actionable frameworks for ECAs to thrive amid funding competition, while also calling attention to structural inequities in funding systems that universities and policymakers must address to better support ECAs.