Academic research is a complex process. It relates to the identity of academics but also to incentives and sense of belonging to different communities leading them to operate in overlapping institutional realities. The phenomena have been studied from several perspectives that account how the organizational/institutional side influences academic research processes, outputs and outcomes (e.g, Ryan, 2014; Stubb et al., 2014; Hajdarpasic et al., 2015; Latour & Woolgar, 2013). Only a scarce number of studies focus on how organizational dimensions can influence the research agendas of individual researchers. Therefore, the aim of this study is to answer to this question from focusing on the social sciences. Individual research agendas combine a strategic problem-solving mindset and the actions to pursue research objectives (Ertmer & Glazewski, 2014). They are associated with broad topics that represent challenges identified by a research community, researchers or by policymakers as critical to advancing knowledge, solving a societal problem, or both. Since research agendas in the social sciences are less influenced or dictated by a broad scientific community and its goals and rests more on the individual preferences (Middlehurst, 2014) they are chosen for the analysis. The higher education community is further chosen as a case for the field of social sciences. This field is suitable for this study because it receives contributions from a multitude of academics from different social science backgrounds (and identities) including education, sociology, political science, economics and anthropology making it both multidisciplinary and thematically focused (Tight, 2013), and a good representative of the social sciences. It is a dynamic field, contributed to by new and established researchers (Ashwin et al., 2016). Higher education research has been studied from several perspectives (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Teichler, 1996; Tight, 2012) but never from this angle which allows this study to contribute to a better understanding of research in the field of higher education.

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