Are evaluative cultures national or global? A cross-national study on evaluative cultures in academic recruitment processes in Europe

Abstract

Studies on academic recruitment processes have demonstrated that universities evaluate candidates for research positions using multiple criteria. However, most studies on preferences regarding evaluative criteria in recruitment processes focus on a single country, while cross-country studies are rare. Additionally, though studies have documented how fields evaluate candidates differently, those differences have not been deeply explored, thus creating a need for further inquiry. This paper aims to address this gap and investigates whether academics in two fields across five European countries prefer the same criteria to evaluate candidates for academic positions. The analysis is based on recent survey data drawn from academics in economics and physics in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. Our results show that the academic fields have different evaluative cultures and that researchers from different fields prefer specific criteria when assessing candidates. We also found that these field-specific preferences were to some extent mediated through national frameworks such as funding systems.

Do peers share the same criteria for assessing grant applications?

“…These field differences are generally consistent with the literature, which finds that evaluation criteria differ between disciplines (e.g. Guetzkow, Lamont and Mallard, 2004;Hamann and Beljean, 2017;Hammarfelt, 2020;Hug et al, 2013;Langfeldt, Reymert and Aksnes, 2020;Reymert, Jungblut and Borlaug, 2020). The field differences between the consensus-close classes would offer a convenient explanation for the difference between the core and broad consensus, as the rating patterns of the consensus-close classes are almost identical to those of the consensus classes.…”

Research on the Comprehensive Evaluation of the Higher Education System Based on FCE and ARMA Models

“…e core of its development is to improve quality as the fundamental goal, with fairness and diversification as the main goal. e starting point and ultimate goal of the high-quality development of higher education must always be positioned and answered in the basic propositions of "who to train, how to train, and for whom" [3]. Regarding what is the high-quality development of higher education, existing research mainly analyzes it from the following three perspectives.…”

National research evaluation systems and the social sciences

“…Similarly, some scholars will emphasise the relevance of publications in international databases and citations derived from these, while again others will argue that without national databases, no evaluation can seriously be accomplished. Despite international scholarship, researchers are influenced by the national evaluation procedures in how they evaluate others (see also Aagaard, 2015, Reymert et al, 2020. Therefore, it is not a big surprise that an international group of evaluation researchers needed several years to agree on what national research evaluation means.…”

“…The second forms "national research evaluation system" and comprises several types of evaluation procedures as displayed in Table 1. The two perspectives on evaluation, the disciplinary and the more institutional one, are rarely distinguished clearly (see also Reymert et al, 2020). On the one hand, the scholars themselves adhere to the first and, when acting as experts, try to stick to this logic of evaluation, while the institution conducting the evaluation sets limits according to the function that the evaluation has to fulfil, which sometimes leads to tensions.…”