Jacob Christensen

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A brief slightly sarcastic¹ comment in a thread at Crooked Timber led to some questions which led to me writing a very long answer. So just in order for me not having to search desperately for my own inspired writings – or maybe I should follow Brad deLong’s example and post my own comments on delicious.com? – I’ve allowed myself to steal repost the second comment:

[...]

Now, I assume that you are vaguely familiar with the performance board evaluation exercises introduced in the UK by the Conservative governments (if not, Christopher Bertram can surely inform us). Basically, at regular intervals evaluation boards will descend on British academic departments and with the help of a lot of indicators – bibliometric and others – decide if they produce research of value or not.

The Scandinavian countries (Social Democratic governments or not) in general have enthusiastically adopted the gospel of New Public Management, including in the field of higher education. So Norway, Denmark and Sweden are in the process of removing basic research funding to universities and replacing it with a system building on productivity-based indicators. We don’t make our students any wiser (we produce STÅs or HSTs or whatever) and we don’t gain further academic insight – we produce publication marks which again will be used for the distribution of appropriations.

Our bureaucratic overlords have decided that basically there is only one legitimate form of academic publishing – the peer-reviewed journal article written in English. These are what will earn you – or rather: the department you are associated with – money. The number of marks or points you earn depend on the status of the journal, your work appears in, but basically a journal article (provided it is published in a proper academic language and not German, French, Hungarian or – heaven forbid – one of the Scandinavian languages) beats not only book chapters but also monographs. So if we assume the existence of Eszter² having a Scandinavian double (Esteri Hargittainen?), our Esteri would have to consider if she couldn’t have made more stuff by splitting the book into articles and hawking them at various prestigious academic journals. After all, the book would earn her department one, possibly two points, while three or four article would earn the department eight.

And yes, these rules also apply to the social sciences and humanities at Scandinavian universities. To our overlords, technology and natural sciences are the models for all academia.

But – a brief look at Eszter’s CV informs us that she is an associate professor at NWU (belated congratulations with your tenure, btw!) and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center and it may not be unreasonable to assume that the powers that be at Harvard are just a bit more flexible than Scandinavian bureaucrats. In which case, producing a book may indeed count as making more stuff.

[...]

And while we’re at it, I have a publication from 2008 that I need to report at SDU’s Purée PuRe reGiSTatIoN dATabaSE.

1. The sarcasm wasn’t directed at the author of the post [↩]
2. The Eszter in question is Eszter Hargittai. [↩]