On the Moral Economy of Academic Appraisal
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ON THE MORAL ECONOMY OF ACADEMIC APPRAISAL alfrehn tisdag, 2009 maj 12
description
A presentation for the Research Policy Institute at Lund University (Sweden), on the problems of analyzing the economic logics of academic appraisals.
Transcript of On the Moral Economy of Academic Appraisal
ON THE MORAL ECONOMY OF ACADEMIC APPRAISAL
alfrehn
tisdag, 2009 maj 12
FEAR OF A RAE PLANET
tisdag, 2009 maj 12
“…when we, as academics, plead powerlessness in choosing what we research… because of incentive and reward systems…, we dehumanize our careers and our lives.”Sara L. Rynes, Editor-in-Chief, Academy of Management Journal (2007b: 747)
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INTERPRETING APPRAISALS, THE CRITIQUES
Reductionist
Cultural homogenization, towards the hard sciences
Cultural homogenization, the Americanization of everything
The financialization of academia, short-term thinking
Polarizing meritocracies, winner-takes-all
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THE ARGUMENTS FOR APPRAISAL
Enhancing transparency
Efficency concerns – “What gets measured gets done”
Building knowledge, not libraries
Concerns about fairness and justice
Reducing bias, leveling the playing field
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POINTS OF AGREEMENT
The discussion concerns the issue of justice, quality and diversity
Appraisals are increasingly a fact of academic life, and their quantitative form is becoming evermore accepted (if not liked), even by critics
Interestingly, most academics seem to see the current forms of quantifying research output as flawed or sub-optimal
In other words, academia seems to become evermore comfortable with a system that one still sees as flawed
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SO, TWO QUESTIONS:
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WHY THIS ACCEPTANCE?
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ARE APPRAISALS MERELY A MATTER OF MEASUREMENTS?
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TOWARDS AN ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF ACADEMIA
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SOMETHING OF AN IDEA
Appraisals need to be analyzed through the way they in fact mirror the moral economy of academia
Quantitative appraisals follow quite logically from aspects of the gift economy that is fundamental in academia
Critiques of quantitative appraisals may in fact hide a more fundamental trauma in academia
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THE ACADEMIC GIFT ECONOMY
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MISCONCEPTIONS REGARDING
GIFT ECONOMIES
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con•tri•bu•tionfrom the Latin contribuere“bringin together” or “paying tribute together”
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CON-TRIBUTING
Contributions are by necessity:
Social acts
Acts that gain meaning in a network of power
Signifiers of status
Gain different value in different economic contexts (and must be analyzed through them)
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THE HYBRID MORAL ECONOMY OF ACADEMIA
The gift relations
The status relations
The social relations
The market relations
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APPRAISALS
A dual moral panic:
Appraisals and quantifications seem to sully the pure forms of the academic economy (gift/social)
Flawed systems of the same might pervert the market and status logics of academia
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AN ACADEMIC TRAUMA?
Might the worry about appraisals tell us more about ourselves than we care to admit?
Towards a Lacanian analysis of academic trauma, by way of Slavoj Žižek
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an
alfrehnproduction
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