This paper considers the role played by systematic measuring in academic conducts. The introduction of entrepreneurial culture into academia fosters competitive atmospheres through its emphasis on personal merit, which entails quantitative performance measurement. As knowledge production is one of scholars’ core missions, this study aims to articulate impacts on ways of knowledge production influenced by environmental factors, comprising measuring instruments, institutional management, funding bodies and state policy. By interviewing 41 scholars in Taiwan and exploring their accounts of academic practices, this paper empirically analyses how knowledge production has been shaped by policy environments. These modifying behaviour patterns include a selection of research topics, a design for research agenda, strategies for grant applications and publications, engendering delicate changes in the epistemic properties of research. From this, it characterizes power relations between researchers, scientific communities and the state in the neoliberal age.

Based on the higher education reform experience in Taiwan, this research elucidates the conditions for the marketization of universities. It draws on critical discourse analysis to explore power relations between higher education, society, and the government and suggests that the university has always been considered a valuable resource for state development. By analyzing the heterogeneity of discourses used in official documents and the academic literature, this research identifies the social contradictions that triggered the education reform movement in the 1990s, including humanistic resistance against economic utility, educational inequality, and demand for academic autonomy. Neoliberalization in higher education is shown as a contemporary model for mobilizing academic resources in indirect but effective ways, with the aim of mapping both neoliberal practices in Taiwan and their connections with the global trend of marketizing higher education.