Research metrics, labor markets, and epistemic change: evidence from Britain 1970-2018

Abstract

In this paper, I study the effects of quantifying knowledge on the organization of disciplinary fields. Using an original dataset of about 44,000 British social scientists and bibliographic information about their published, peer-reviewed articles, I show that the introduction of standardized research evaluations disrupted local academic labor markets in British higher education, leading to patterns of interinstitutional mobility that altered the epistemic diversity of social science disciplines and the organization of their academic fields. Much like market-based interventions, research evaluations lead to a form of epistemic matching that has distinct consequences on how knowledge is generated. In particular, when evaluations affect organizational units (such as academic departments) and stress disciplinary norms, they foster forms of isomorphism that lead to reductions in a discipline’s thematic diversity and a more homogeneous structure for the field. This paper thus advances the sociology of knowledge by showing how epistemic change occurs not only through the individual realignments of quantified scholars but, as importantly, through the mediation of interinstitutional mobility.

Munging the Ghosts in the Machine: Coded Bias and the Craft of Wrangling Archival Data

“…Pardo-Guerra (2020) demonstrates how the introduction of standardized organizational evaluation can lead to disruptions in the labor market. Specifically, Pardo-Guerra examines how the introduction of the Research Selectivity Exercise, which tied university research funding to organizational assessments of research quality, changed the job mobility and intellectual output of academic social scientists working in the United Kingdom.…”