The Research Assessment Exercise, the state and the dominance of mainstream economics in British universities

Lee, Frederic S.

doi:10.1093/cje/bel021

Cited by 113 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…However, for the 1989 RS E and the 1992 RAE up to two publications from each full-time member of the faculty were RAE and subsequent exercises (Harley and Lee, 1997;Lee and Harley, 1998;and Lee, 2007). It is not difficult to discern why Diamond's list of 27 journals obtained such an elevated status among UK economists: those journals appeared repeatedly as top quality journals in journal ranking studies and in articles that used 'professional judgment' journals to identify the top, blue ribbon, or 'everyone would agree are core, mainstream, highly respected, quality' journals prior to 1989 and since 1989 up to the present day (Lee, 2006;Schneider and Ursprung, 2008;Ritzberger, 2008;Da Silva 2009;Halkos and Nickolaos, 2011;Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas, and Stengos, 2011); and they appeared to be sanctioned by Economics and Social Research Council, the RES, and CHUDE since they represent ed 16 of the 22 high impact journals identified in their jointly sponsored study, International…”

Section: Journalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The negative impact of the 1992, 1996, and 2001 UK research assessment exercises on heterodox economics is well documented (Harley and Lee 1997;Lee and Harley 1998;Lee 2007); and as will be shown below, the 2008 RAE reinforced the efforts of the last two decades to free British economics of economists and their theories that exist beyond the pale, outside of the society of decent, respectable economists. The elimination of heterodox economics occurred at the same time that the concentration and homogenization of economic research and the dissemination of economic ideas of a elite group of economic departments took place.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Whitley based his claim on the work I carried out (with Sandra Harley) over the past two decades on economics and the 1992, 1996, 2001RAEs (Harley and Lee, 1997Lee and Harley, 1998;and Lee, 2007). I argued that the Royal Economics Society (RES) did capture the RAE panel appointment process, thereby ensuring that the economics and econometrics panel (hereafter economics panel) consisted of assessors that represented its research interests and disciplinary values.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

Lee¹,

Pham²,

Gu³

2013

Cambridge Journal of Economics

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Federated learning (FL) has enabled distributed learning of a model across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the main challenges of FL is to accommodate clients with varying hardware capacities; clients have differing compute and memory requirements. To tackle this challenge, recent state-of-the-art approaches leverage the use of early exits. Nonetheless, these approaches fall short of mitigating the challenges of joint learning multiple exit classifiers, often relying on hand-picked heuristic solutions for knowledge distillation among classifiers and/or utilizing additional layers for weaker classifiers. In this work, instead of utilizing multiple classifiers, we propose a recurrent early exit approach named ReeFL that fuses features from different sub-models into a single shared classifier. Specifically, we use a transformer-based earlyexit module shared among sub-models to i) better exploit multi-layer feature representations for task-specific prediction and ii) modulate the feature representation of the backbone model for subsequent predictions. We additionally present a per-client self-distillation approach where the best sub-model is automatically selected as the teacher of the other sub-models at each client. Our experiments on standard image and speech classification benchmarks across various emerging federated fine-tuning baselines demonstrate ReeFL's effectiveness over previous works.

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Section: Journalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

Lee¹,

Pham²,

Gu³

2013

Cambridge Journal of Economics

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“…48 As Giovanni Dosi recently remarked, this tendency seems to be most pronounced not among the older economists but those in their 30s and 40s -the 'Taleban tendency' of economics, as he provocatively described them (comments at the FINNOV Conference, London, 1-2 February 2012). 49 In the UK, this process has been intensified by successive Research Assessment Exercises (Lee, 2007). 50 This process began in the early part of the 20 th Century before the field of innovation studies began to emerge but has intensified since (Ed Steinmueller, private communication).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twenty Challenges for Innovation Studies

Martin

2015

SSRN Journal

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With the field of innovation studies now half a century old, the occasion has been marked by several studies looking back to identify the main advances made over its lifetime. Starting from a list of 20 advances over the field's history, this discussion paper sets out 20 challenges for coming decades. At a conference in 1900, David Hilbert put forward a list of 23 unsolved mathematical problems that were to have a profound influence on the work of mathematicians during the 20 th Century. The intention here is to prompt a debate within the innovation studies community on what are, or should be, the key challenges for us to take up, and more generally on what sort of field we aspire to be. It is argued that the empirical focus of our studies has not kept pace with the fast changing world and economy, especially the shift from manufacturing to services and the growing need for sustainability. Moreover, the very way we conceptualise, define, operationalise and analyse 'innovation' seems rooted in the past, leaving us less able to grapple with other less visible or 'dark' forms of innovation.Keywords: innovation studies; science policy; challenges; achievements; dark innovation Acknowledgements A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Lundvall symposium held at Aalborg University in February 2012. A short version (based on 15 challenges rather than 20) is being published, along with other contributions to that event, in a book on The Future of Innovation Studies (Fagerberg et al., 2013).

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“…The impact of not doing well in REEs can mean threats to whole subject areas when degree programmes are closed as a consequence of research funds being cut or completely withdrawn. Also, as reported by Lee (2007) and Earle (2017) with respect to economics research, it may lead to a narrowing of the subject as researchers focus on what is needed to meet the demands of the REF and possible intellectual stagnation as the unorthodox is eschewed in favour of mainstream contributions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An investigation into the role played by research assessment in the socio-geographic fragmentation of undergraduate economics education in the UK

Johnston

Reeves

2018

High Educ

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This study charts the socio-geographic fragmentation of the economics discipline in the UK. It is revealed that the marriage of economics teaching and research is now limited to elite institutions located mainly in the south of the UK. None of the UK's new (post-1992) universities submitted to the Economics and Econometrics (E&E) unit of assessment (UOA) in 2014, the UK's most recent research evaluation exercise (REE). Lower REE scores are shown to be associated with higher withdrawal rates from the next E&E UOA and subsequent undergraduate economics programme closure. Universities that exit the E&E UOA moving to the Business and Management (B&M) UOA appear to benefit in the form of higher REE scores. Though restricted to the experience of one academic discipline in one country, the lessons from this study yield important insights into how the results of REEs can be a principal driver of change in higher education.

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The Research Assessment Exercise, the state and the dominance of mainstream economics in British universities

Cited by 113 publications

References 15 publications

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

Twenty Challenges for Innovation Studies

An investigation into the role played by research assessment in the socio-geographic fragmentation of undergraduate economics education in the UK

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