Managing the research imagination? Globalisation and research in higher education

Boden, Rebecca; Epstein, Debbie

doi:10.1080/14767720600752619

Cited by 108 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…They raise particular concerned over what is seen as the political 'misuse' of evidence, lamenting so called 'policy based evidence making' instead of 'evidence based policy making'; e.g. cases where evidence is strategically selected, manipulated, or misrepresented to pursue political goals (Marmot 2004;Boden and Epstein 2006;Guenther et al 2010). In contrast, 'hierarchies of evidence' are promoted that emphasize methodological approaches such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or systematic reviews to provide relevant evidence in supposedly unbiased ideal ways (Haynes et al 2012;Chalmers 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Parkhurst

2016

Policy Sci

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Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their 'intractability', whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for 'Evidence Based Policy' (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoliticizing political decisions. This paper aims to help resolve these conflicts and, in doing so, consider how to address this particular feature of problem wickedness. Specifically the paper delineates two forms of evidentiary bias that drive intractability, each of which is reflected by contrasting positions in the EBP debates: 'technical bias'-referring to invalid uses of evidence; and 'issue bias'-referring to how pieces of evidence direct policy agendas to particular concerns. Drawing on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology, the paper explores the ways in which competing interests and values manifest in these forms of bias, and shape evidence utilization through different mechanisms. The paper presents a conceptual framework reflecting on how the nature of policy problems in terms of their complexity, contestation, and polarization can help identify the potential origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias leading to intractability in some wicked policy debates. The discussion reflects on how a better understanding about such mechanisms could inform future work to mitigate or overcome such intractability.

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confidence: 99%

Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Parkhurst

2016

Policy Sci

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“…The Haldene principle of government not exerting undue influence over HEIs has given way to what some describe as the neoliberal ideology of those in government (Shore & Wright 2000;Boden & Epstein 2006). The situation began changing with the advent of the Thatcher government and the introduction of tighter regulations and controls (Morris 2015).…”

Section: Employability Higher Education and Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Focusing in on employability: using content analysis to explore the employability discourse in UK and USA universities

Chadha

Toner

2017

Int J Educ Technol High Educ

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In this paper, we have taken initial steps towards highlighting the employability discourse in higher education by using content analysis to explore website data at 40 higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and 40 HEIs in the USA by searching for 'employability' in respective web engines. The findings from our preliminary data analysis were inserted into a MIT SIMILE software package to create a bespoke, interactive webpage that could be disseminated for discussion by higher education managers. The initial findings suggest that, in the UK, the broad discourse is centred upon government policies and targeted preparation for employment while in the USA it is centred upon the institutional vision and social inclusion agenda. Recent graduates' views were sought on these initial findings to validate whether their experiences corroborated with our suggested employability discourse claims. These insights are a useful first step for HEIs to question and re-evaluate employability at an institutional level.

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“…Techno-preneurial academics' deepest loyalties are to 'their' university and they are expected to be ruthlessly competitive in advancing its, usually defensive, often absurd and sometimes paranoid agendas within the homogenised policies and benchmarks of nationstates and supra-national agencies such as the OECD. As we have argued (Kenway et al 2006;Boden and Epstein 2006), the present conditions of knowledge production, with their reductionist notions of the knowledge economy and national innovation, have contributed to a crisis not only of the research but also of the moral imagination.…”

Section: The Cold Embrace Of the Neoliberal Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The self-managing academic both opposes and accommodates the corporatisation of their everyday practice as they struggle between the dulling effects of compliance regimes and their desire to excel, being both competitive and collegial (Bansel and Davies 2010). At the same time, they are sidelined as decision-makers, experts and creative agents within their own institutions (Boden and Epstein 2006). Due to the normative pressures of science, particular fields of research are becoming redefined, offloaded or more difficult to do, in terms of who does research with whom and what research gets done.…”

Section: The Next Generation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University

Thornton¹

2014

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Managing the research imagination? Globalisation and research in higher education

Cited by 108 publications

References 5 publications

Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Focusing in on employability: using content analysis to explore the employability discourse in UK and USA universities

Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University

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