Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0958-2029 - ISSN (Online) 1471-5449 Published by Oxford University Press[425 journals]
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Pages: 423 - 428 Abstract: This introduction outlines the analytical potential of the concept of ‘device’ that is key to the special issue ‘Devices of evaluation’. Evaluation relies not only on the human capacity to value, classify, compare, or judge, but also on social operators that affect evaluations in different ways. The notion of ‘devices’ puts the focus not on human actors but on things, tools, and instruments, on (infra-)structures and procedures, on assemblages and constellations which human actors either draw on when they attribute value or worth, or which have their own agentic capacity and facilitate or enforce evaluations themselves. We propose three perspectives through which a focus on devices can have analytical potential and thus contribute to the study of evaluation in academia: Devices facilitate and accomplish evaluation as trans-situational relays, they connect different forms of evaluation, and they enable, guide, and shape comparisons among very different valuation constellations and contexts. Broadening the focus in this way, the concept can improve our understanding of the non-human side of evaluation. The contributions to this special convey the idea that devices of evaluation are crucial for understanding the production, diffusion, and institutionalization of value and worth in academic contexts. PubDate: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac047 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2023)
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Pages: 429 - 437 Abstract: Over the past decade, academic social networking sites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become a common tool in academia for accessing publications and displaying metrics for research evaluation and self-monitoring. In this conceptual article, we discuss how these academic social networking sites, as devices of evaluation that build on both traditional values, objects, and metrics in academic publishing and on social media logics and algorithmic metrics, come to fulfil a need in the current academic (publishing) ecosystem. We approach this issue by identifying key affordances that arise in the interaction between platform and user. We then position these affordances in relation to potential needs of academics in today’s publishing landscape by drawing on Hafermalz’s metaphor of the ‘fear of exile’, which provides an alternative way of understanding the importance of visibility in the networked world, as a combination of competitive exposure and existential recognition. We end by considering the grounds on which the platforms may be attributed some level of legitimacy. This is done in order to understand the inherent contradiction between the broad use of the platforms and the fact that their integrity has been questioned repeatedly. We seek an answer to a legitimacy for the platforms in the fact that a pragmatic, mutual benefit exists between them and the research community; a benefit that is enhanced by the audit society influencing current academia. PubDate: Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvab043 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 438 - 451 Abstract: Curricula vitae (CVs) are a crucial device for the evaluation of academic personae and biographies. They play a key role in the competitive assessments that underpin the reproduction of the academic workforce. Drawing on 80 CVs which have been part of candidates’ applications for vacant professorships, our article provides a longitudinal study of the development of CVs used by German scholars in professorial appointment procedures in the disciplines of German studies and history between 1950 and the late 2010s. The analysis reveals the evolution of CVs by tracing their various morphological shifts. We distinguish four formats throughout the period of study: CVs initially had a (1) narrative format that develops into an (2) intermediary segmented form before CVs take on a (3) list form in which biographical information congeals into distinct categories. In the 2010s, the list form develops into a (4) hyper-differentiated list form in which coherent biographical representations are finally dissolved into almost eclectic accumulations of finely grained performance categories. Against the backdrop of this finding, the contribution concludes with three general observations: First, the evolution of CVs reflects changes in the institutional environment, not least the increased competitive pressures in academic careers. Second, the evolution of biographical representations also conveys a transformation of the academic persona throughout which boundaries between personal and professional biographies are established. Third, we propose a reactivity of current list form CVs through which academics are disciplined to live up to the categories that wait to be realized in their CVs. PubDate: Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvab040 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 452 - 462 Abstract: The global diffusion of the graduate school organizational model has shifted the way future academic excellence is identified from a paternalistic master–disciple relationship to a collective organizational decision. ‘Eminent men’ used to recruit PhD students on the firm belief that they could identify excellence and integrate it in their own scientific endeavor. Graduate schools formalize such judgments and transform them into an organizational decision. They establish admission devices to assure criteria-based collective decisions. To understand this shift, the article draws on the example of two German graduate schools that proclaim to search for outstanding doctoral candidates. As a latecomer in the transformation to graduate schools, the German case allows to observe the shift in statu nascendi. The article highlights the distinct role multi-site admission devices play. In both cases, they redistribute agency and excellence through the construction of competitive social fields. Documents, grades, committee deliberations, interviews, and excel files mobilize a social space in which applicants are qualified as acting holistically and competitively against each other in order to identify those most likely of future excellence. Admission is not predefined but the result of a cascade of socio-material fielding practices that purify a comparative social space, qualify applicants competitively, and infuse them with site-specific agency that increasingly authenticates them as field actors. Building on the work of Michel Callon and colleagues, we understand such formatting of future excellence as field agencements. PubDate: Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac018 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 463 - 474 Abstract: The dramatic salience of university rankings is usually attributed to a number of macro-level trends, such as neoliberal ideology, the spread of audit culture, and globalization in the broadest sense. We propose that the institutionalization of university rankings cannot be fully accounted for without a better understanding of the meso-level processes that enable it. To explore these, we zoom in on an organization called IREG Observatory (whereby IREG stands for ‘International Ranking Expert Group’). Since it first emerged, in 2002, IREG has acted as a carrier of a kind of rationalized ‘faith in rankings’—a faith it has laboured to justify, diffuse, and solidify through boundary work at the intersection of technocratic, managerial, academic, and commercial spheres. Drawing on the insights gained from this particular case, the article argues that the institutionalization of university rankings is not solely a matter of universities being impelled by them but also a matter of how actors in and around the university sector collectively partake in the legitimation of the practice of ranking universities. At a more general level, our analysis potentially provides a blueprint for understanding boundary work as a meso-level process that plays an important role in the institutionalization of rankings, and other devices of evaluation. PubDate: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac035 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 475 - 485 Abstract: The proliferation of quantitative research assessment has been accompanied by an increasing growth and diversification of digital infrastructure for evaluative bibliometrics. Since the beginning of the 2000s, insights into academic performance provided by a variety of new databases and devices significantly exceed the capacities of the former Science Citation Index and embedded metrics. Going beyond the research on the construction, uses, and consequences of bibliometric indicators, we therefore posit that a perspective on bibliometric infrastructure is crucial for understanding how evaluative bibliometrics is put into practice. Drawing on interviews with academic librarians on the increasing provision and implementation of bibliometric infrastructure in the years 2013 and 2014, we analyse how the entanglement of technology and its users shapes how evaluative bibliometrics is understood and practiced. PubDate: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac009 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 486 - 497 Abstract: The European Research Council (ERC) receives many high-quality applications, but funds only a few. We analyze how members of ERC review panels assess applications in the first, highly competitive step of evaluations for ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants. Drawing on interviews with ERC panel members in different fields, we show that they adopt a set of evaluation devices that offer pragmatic and standardized ways of evaluating in a time-constrained and highly competitive setting. Through the use of evaluation devices, panel reviewers enact and generate a distinct reviewing expertise that encompasses subject-specific knowledge and knowledge about how to accomplish evaluation within a situated setting. We find that ERC panel reviewers employ four evaluation devices during the first step of ERC reviews: first, reviewers base judgments on applicants’ prior achievements (delegation devices); second, they adjust their evaluations of individual applications to the quality of a given set of applications (calibration devices); third, they combine multiple elements to assess the feasibility of proposals (articulation devices); and finally, they consider the impact of the proposed research on science and society (contribution devices). We show that the current use of these devices generates what we have termed evaluative pragmatism: a mode of reviewing that is shaped by and accommodated to the need to review many high-quality proposals in a short time period with possibly limited expert knowledge. In conclusion, we discuss how the prevalence of evaluative pragmatism in the first step of ERC panel reviews shapes candidate selection, particularly regarding human and epistemic diversity in European research. PubDate: Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac040 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
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Pages: 498 - 506 Abstract: In aggressively neo-liberalized higher education systems and in ‘high-performing’ research units—typically academic schools in high-ranking research universities—research assessment has come to dominate the daily organization and enactment of research and research culture. So much so in fact that academics’ research praxis, their employability, career trajectories and very lexicon are in synthesis with the manufacture and mediation of performance values, often to the detriment of collegiality, critical citizenship, and self-efficacy. Research assessment as a technology of governance is thus also a ‘disruptive technology’ epidemic to the (re)making of academic lives. Notwithstanding, studies of the affective aspects of research assessment and its emotional manipulation of academic lives are at best thin. Further, less is known of what we call ‘affective auditing’ from the perspective of academic middle-managers with institutional responsibility for implementing assessment procedures and with direct experience of the disruptiveness of research assessment at meso and micro levels. By way of response, this article reports on findings from interviews with academic middle or quasi-managers responsible for overseeing research assessment in research elite universities in the high-performance and highly pressurized research context of the UK. These accounts elucidate the weight of ‘affective auditing’ on academic researchers and academic quasi-managers and the extent to which research assessment shapes the emotional contours of research lives. PubDate: Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac041 Issue No:Vol. 31, No. 4 (2022)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[425 journals]
