Measuring university-based research in Europe: competing indicators and underlying assumptions

Modern societies have a growing need for information and numbers for governing social life. Numbers have the ability to represent a complex reality in a simplified and linear form, easily communicated. Far from being the product of a mere technical process, numbers are the result of a process that “is fundamentally social – an artifact of human action, imagination, ambition, accomplishment” (Espeland, W.N., and Stevens, M.L., 2008. A sociology of quantification. European journal of sociology, 49 (3), 401–436, p. 431). In the modern policymaking climate, numbers become key mechanisms for simplifying, classifying, comparing and evaluating. Along with this, the fields of visibility of evaluative objects, meanings and understandings (Dean, M., 2010. Governmentality. Power and rule in modern societies. 2nd ed. London: Sage) are re-framed consistently with what Clarke, J. (2004. Changing welfare, changing states. New direction in social policy. London: Sage) terms a ‘performance/ evaluation nexus’ that links effort, values, purposes and self understanding to measures and comparisons of outputs (Ball, S.J., 2012. Performativity, commodification and commitment: an I-Spy guide to the neoliberal university. British journal of educational studies, 601, 17–28). In this paper, we focus on the field of higher education (HE), where numbers, in the form of performance indicators, benchmarks and headline targets, are frequently used to strategically orient the sector towards the objectives and goals of the Bologna Process and of the overall Europe 2020 agenda (Waldow, F., 2014. From Taylor to Tyler to no child left behind: legitimating educational standards. Prospects, 45 (1), 49–62). We aim to offer a comparative overview of the complex spectrum of metrics, provided at the supranational level, within the field of higher education by focusing on the European Research Area (ERA) in order to map and analyse some of the crucial issues in play. A second ambition of this paper is to move from a mapping and analytical perspective to a deconstruction of a specific subset of research metrics, with the aim of challenging the ‘self-evident truths’ and the dominant conventional wisdom that define current European metrics in order to bring into question whether they contribute to restructuring the universities’ research environments, affecting research policies and procedures. Performance indicators are posited to be ‘conceptual technologies’, encompassing theoretical and normative assumptions that shape the objects they aspire to measure.