STEM colonization: Applying hard sciences' socio‐organisational patterns and evaluation procedures to the soft sciences in Croatia

Abstract

This article addresses the socio-organisational patterns and everyday functioning of disciplines in the Croatian academic system, as well as in the international context. In his influential work, Whitley (1985) observed that there was increasing convergence in the development of publishing practices and knowledge creation in all disciplines in a relatively short time span, which he interpreted as an intra-scientific development process of social and cognitive standardisation. Changes are heavily influenced by science policies. In the last two decades, there has been a growing concern about a culture of speed that produces growing heaps of publications, at the same time marginalising slow and creative thought and reflection (Müller, 2014). Central to all of the changes summarised

“It’s Dangerous to go Alone!“ Scientific Excellence of PhD Holders and Their Mentors – Network Analysis of Croatian Doctoral Students

“…As Brajdić Vuković et al [13] put it, examining collaboration practices among Croatian scientists, increases in the frequency of publishing and co-authorship practices can be traced to changes in academia, which, implementing market-oriented techniques became ever more focussed on efficiency and competition, leading to "increasing time pressures, the fragmentation of time into projects and work-packages and metric-oriented evaluation" [13; p.2].…”

Four images of projectification: an integrative review

“…Studies within this image have also studied projectification in a wide variety of contexts. Examples include the role of projectification when it comes to ways to combat epidemics (Glasdam et al, 2015;Meinert and Whyte, 2014), projectification of public policies (Bailey and Hodgson, 2019;Jensen et al, 2017;Mukhtar-Landgren and Fred, 2019; € Ojehag-Pettersson, 2017), the projectified method of distributing funds for research (Baur et al, 2018;Fowler et al, 2015;Brajdi c Vukovi c et al, 2020) and international aid (Baker, 2014;Hubmann, 2021). However, there are also new and emerging research areas in which the causes and effects of projectification processes are considered, such as ecology (Hodge and Adams, 2016), entrepreneurship (Auschra et al, 2019) and sustainable development (Cerne and Jansson, 2019;Cwikła et al, 2020).…”