Session Information
23 SES 03 A, Research/Evidence-based Approaches to Policy Making (Paper 2)
Paper Session continued from 23 SES 02 A
Contribution
In recent years many universities, including within Australia, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, have adopted metrics-based models of varying types to manage academic workloads (Burrows 2012; Teichler & Ava Hohle 2013; Vardi 2009). Within some universities it is common for the proportion of an academic’s workload that is allocated to research to be determined on the basis of their research output in preceding years, including threshold targets for publications (Kenny & Fluck 2014; Kwok 2013). Such workload models can be explicit in encouraging publications in high status international journals with high impact factors (Burgess, Lewis & Mobbs 2003; Lucas 2006).
The research output of academics or faculty is an important factor in determining university success (O'Loughlin, MacPhail & Msetfi 2015). Research excellence is the primary determinant of the status and standing of universities and their individual departments within the global higher education field (Blackmore 2009; Lucas 2006; Marginson 2006). The first national research assessment exercise commenced in the UK in the 1980s (Lewis 2014) and since then many governments have developed schemes to ‘assess and rank universities’ research performance’, drawing heavily from each other in the process (Wright et al. 2014, p. 2). Such schemes respond to a number of factors including knowledge economy discourses and the desire for increased innovation; new public management or the implementation of private sector management techniques within public sector organisations; and ‘a universal desire for research excellence on the part of governments’ (Hicks 2012, p. 260; see also Kwok 2013). Indeed, Hicks’ research shows that as of 2010, fourteen nation states had implemented or were implementing national research assessment exercises as a basis for distribution of research funding (or a proportion thereof) to universities (2012, p. 260). Despite some debate (see for example McNay 2015) empirical research suggests that academic staff can feel under intense pressure to publish (Hammarfelt & de Rijcke 2015, p. 73), including with regard to research that is assessable under the relevant national research assessment scheme (Wright et al. 2014, p. 14).
This presentation considers the complex relationship between national research assessment schemes and institutional processes for academic workload management, with a particular focus on publication output targets. It responds to questions about the extent to which academic workload models place pressure on academics to publish research that ‘counts’ for the purposes of national research assessment by considering the relationship between publication output targets and research practice.
In our analysis we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, where practice is understood as the product of internalised knowledge, expressed as aptitudes, capacities and proficiencies, enabling agents to understand not only what is taking place but what might take place so as to realise a particular aim or objective (Bourdieu 1977). Bourdieu describes practice as being generated and informed by habitus (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), where habitus is a stable but not unchanging system of dispositions or schemes that operate as pre-thought or intuition but which lead to thoughts and actions within specific fields (Bourdieu 1977). In turn, a field is a social space in which agents are defined by and compete for their share of valued resources or capital of varying types (Bourdieu 1985). We seek to extend understandings of the role of practice in re/forming the habitus, in particular in response to an agent’s own practices. Specifically, we consider the ways in which academic workload models can determine the proportion of time allocated to research, and the implications of this for research practice - what research is undertaken, by whom, and how the findings are disseminated or published.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bourdieu, P 1977, Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge University Prress, Cambridge. Bourdieu, P 1990, The Logic of Practice, Polity, Cambridge. Bourdieu, P & Wacquant, LJD 1992, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge. Burrows, R 2012, 'Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy', The Sociological Review, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 355-71. Butler, L 2010, 'Impacts of performance-based research funding systems: A review of the concerns and the evidence', in Performance-based Funding for Public Research in Tertiary Education Institutions: Workshop Proceedings, OECD Publishing. Hammarfelt, B & de Rijcke, S 2015, 'Accountability in context: effects of research evaluation systems on publication practices, disciplinary norms, and individual working routines in the faculty of Arts at Uppsala University', Research Evaluation, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 6377. Hicks, D 2012, 'Performance-based university research funding systems ', Research Policy, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 25161. Kenny, JDJ & Fluck, AE 2014, 'The effectiveness of academic workload models in an institution: a staff perspective', Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 585602. Lewis, JM 2014, 'Research productivity and research system attitudes', Public Money & Management, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 41724. Lucas, L 2006, The research game in academic life, The Society for Research in Higher Education and Open University Press, Maidenhead, England. McNay, I 2015, 'Does research quality assessment increase output and give value for money?,' Public Money & Management, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 678. Rowlands, J & Gale, T 2016, 'Shaping and being shaped: extending the relationship between habitus and practice', in J Lynch, J Rowlands, T Gale & A Skourdoumbis (eds), Practice theory: diffractive readings in professional practice and education, Routledge, Oxford. Teichler, U & Ava Hohle, E (eds) 2013, The work situation of the academic profession in Europe: findings of a survey in twelve countries, Springer, Dordrecht. Waitere, HJ, Wright, J, Tremaine, M, Brown, S & Pause, CJ 2011, 'Choosing whether to resist or reinforce the new managerialism: the impact of performance-based research funding on academic identity', Higher Education Research & Development, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 205–17. Wright, S, Curtis, B, Lucas, L & Robertson, SL 2014, Working paper 24: Research assessment systems and their impacts on academic work in New Zealand, the UK and Denmark, Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen.
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