In person icon The Role of Ideas and Indicators in Science Policies and Research Management

Abstract

Peer review has traditionally been the central mechanism for the functioning and governance of the academic system. The management of research policies has also been significantly affected by this professional group. However in the last 25 years some changes have occurred, in the environment in which knowledge is integrated into the policy domain and decision making process in the research policy sector and its institutions: Firstly, the emergence of the so called “new public management”. Secondly, the consolidation, in the last decade, of powerful quantitative performance indicators, in many cases associated to international rankings that have transformed the reputational market and opened new ways for evaluating research based on metrics. The new policy ideas around excellence , their institutional embeddedness and development into new models of funding and evaluation metrics offer us space, for a better understanding of the politics of the use of knowledge in policy and management, the changing the governance of academia and the role of scientists as a professional group in research policy. We expect papers focused on universities, research institutions and science policy: 1. What are the effects of new tools (metrics, indicators and rankings) of measurement, monitoring and evaluation? How do they affect evaluation and goal setting within funding agencies and governments? How do they influence policy making, the role of academic actors in the policy process, modes of governance or organisational strategies? How are these new tools diffused and adopted? 2. How and why do actors and organisations in the academic world utilise new available knowledge )? Who are the actors involved and what types of narratives, logics or rationales influence knowledge construction and utilisation? Is knowledge used instrumentally to adjust policy outputs, more symbolically or tactically to underpin claims to power or legitimacy or as a means to depoliticise contentious policy issues?

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