Research as Cashflow. Governance Effects of the Monetary Valuation of Academic Work

• In Event: Relations and Troubles of Tools of Valuation – II

Abstract

Is the amount of money researchers acquire in competition with their peers an indicator of the quality of academic work? This remains controversial in both scientific communities and institutions. Nevertheless, in many contemporary national academic systems, the reforms of recent decades have made “third party income” an important indicator for assessing the performance of scientific institutions. In the spirit of neoliberal ideology, regulatory actors expect competition on the resulting quasi-markets to sharpen the profile of institutions and to increase the quality of the work of individual researcher.
This paper will analyse the governance effects of this regime of valuing academic work. It builds on an analysis of the governance of research funding at Austrian universities, including interviews with presidents, deans and administrative staff.
In terms of its main argument, the paper will trace how monetarization as an indicator for quality conflicts with other ways of valuing academic work within the institution. I will discuss how, at least in the Austrian context, seeing the performance of a university as constituted through its income in finite markets leads to institutional isomorphism rather than differentiation and profile building. And I will trace the deep ambivalences in how presidents and deans aim to manage the performance of scientists in this particular regime of valuing research.

Author

• Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna