The metrics of excellence: issues and paradoxes with measuring and enhancing academic productivity
What is it about?
As universities are increasingly trying to behave like corporate enterprises competing for the highest score within global academic ranking systems (such as Quacquarelli Symonds or QS, Times Higher Education or THE, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities or ARWU), the fast-paced churning out of research products that can be used in the new Global Knowledge Economy has become a top-priority. Products, however, should not just be produced but also rated. This article examines the distortions created by the proliferation of research products and of assessment exercises by focusing on how foreign protocols of assessment are being imported into the Italian academic system. In so doing, the author reflects on the hardening of disciplinary boundaries and the intellectual alienation that result from the import into the Italian scholarly world of the ‘quality revolution’ ongoing in the British higher education since the 1980s.
Why is it important?
This article offers a timely reflection on the parallel misrecognition of scale and context underlying neoliberal capitalism and describes the forms of reflexive alienation engendered by the contemporary knowledge economy—what post-workerist theorists call cognitive capitalism.