Measuring the Value of Sociology? Some Notes on Performative Metricization in the Contemporary Academy

Abstract

The performative co‐construction of academic life through myriad metrics is now a global phenomenon as indicated by the plethora of university research or journal ranking systems and the publication of ‘league’ tables based on them. If these metrics are seen as actively constituting the social world, can an analysis of this ‘naturally occurring’ data reveal how these new technologies of value and measure are recursively defining the practices and subjects of university life? In the UK higher education sector, the otherwise mundane realities of academic life have come to be recursively lived through a succession of research assessment exercises (RAEs). Lived through not only in the RAEs themselves, but also through the managed incremental changes to the academic and organizational practices linked to the institutional imaginings of planning for, and anticipating the consequences of, the actual exercises. In the ‘planning for’ mode an increasing proportion of formerly sociology submissions have shifted into ‘social policy’. This is one instance of how institutional ‘game‐playing’ in relation to the RAE enacts the social in quite fundamental ways. Planning an RAE 2008 submission in Sociology required anticipation of how a panel of 16 peers would evaluate 39 institutions by weighted, relative worth of: aggregated data from 1,267 individuals who, between them cited a total of 3,729 ‘outputs’; the detailed narrative and statistical data on the research environment; and a narrative account of academic ‘esteem’. This data provided such institutional variables as postgraduate student numbers, sources of student funding, and research income from various sources. To evaluate the ‘quality’ of outputs various measures of the ‘impact’ and/or ‘influence’ of journals, as developed from the Thomson‐Reuters Journal Citation Reports, was linked to the data. An exploratory modelling exercise using these variables to predict RAE 2008 revealed that despite what we might like to think about the subtle nuances involved in peer review judgements, it turns out that a fairly astonishing 83 per cent of the variance in outcomes can be predicted by some fairly simple ‘shadow metrics’: quality of journals in the submission, research income per capita and scale of research activity. We conclude that measuring the value of sociology involves multiple mutual constructions of reality within which ever more nuanced data assemblages are increasingly implicated and that analysis of this data can make explicit some of the parameters of enactment within which we operate in the contemporary academy.

Social media, science communication and the academic super user in the United Kingdom

“…The audit and excellence discourses in higher education and the proliferation of performance, 'quality' and 'quantity' measures that assess the value as well as their number of academic outputs (Burrows 2012, Gill 2010, Kelly and Burrows 2011, Vostal 2014) have contributed to these pressures. As was evident from the survey responses, social media use both contributes to speed of communication and networking in academia and draws time away from other academic pursuits.…”

“…As several commentators have pointed out (and as some of the survey respondents observed), the managerial and neoliberal political environment in which academics are using (or not using) social media and other digital tools needs to be acknowledged (Burrows 2012, Gill 2010, Kelly and Burrows 2011, Lupton in press, Selwyn 2014, Smith and Jeffery 2013, Weller 2013, Vostal 2014. In a context of what Selwyn (2014: 3) refers to as 'hype, hope and fear' in relation to discourses on digital technologies in higher education, the withdrawal of government funding for teaching and research in many countries in favour of a market economy, difficulties that many junior academics face in securing stable employment and job losses among more established academics (Holmwood 2010, Marginson 2009, Peters 2013, Veletsianos 2013, Vostal 2014 are realities that require attention in discussions of digitising academia.…”

The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain

“…However, in part, this constitutes a consolidation of sociology within fewer institutions since, notwithstanding the decline in the number of units submitted, staff submitted to Sociology rose from 826.6 FTEs (full time equivalents) in 1992 to 927.37 FTEs in 2008, while that to Social Policy remained constant (see Kelly and Burrows, 2011). In part, however, the data are misleading because institutions need not have submitted all their staff in a particular subject area and the degree of selectivity varied by type of institution.…”

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

“…For example, there are economic, cultural, social (Duberley & Cohen, 2010), routine (e.g., periodic evaluation metrics; see Kelly & Burrows, 2011), and flow or play qua play (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) forms of capital. These reflect Bourdieu's (1998) -scholarly mode of knowledge‖ (p. 130) or -the ability to raise speculative problems for the sole pleasure of resolving them‖ (p. 128).…”