China’s Research Evaluation Reform: What are the Consequences for Global Science?

Minerva - In the 1990s, China created a research evaluation system based on publications indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and on the Journal Impact Factor. Such system helped the country...     

Re-disciplining Academic Careers? Interdisciplinary Practice and Career Development in a Swedish Environmental Sciences Research Center

Minerva - Interdisciplinarity is often framed as crucial for addressing the complex problems of contemporary society and for achieving new levels of innovation. But while science policy and...     

Institutional Expansion and Scientific Development in the Periphery: The Structural Heterogeneity of Argentina’s Academic Field

The relationship between “marginal” and “mainstream” science has, in recent decades, become a matter of discussion. Traditional perspectives must be reexamined in the wake of transformations in the international circulation of knowledge and the subsequent diversification of scientific “peripherality”. Argentina represents an interesting case with which to explore the structure of “peripheral centres” and new forms of scientific development. While it has recently experienced an expansion in terms of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization, that process has been coupled with entrenchment of existing institutional asymmetries and persistent intra-national inequalities; academic prestige is distributed according to opposite principles of legitimation (local/international). Our main task is to explore the current state of research capacities pursuant to that expansion in order to analyze the diverse styles in which knowledge is produced. In our analysis, we make critical use of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the Latin American category of “structural heterogeneity,” while also focusing on the question of circulation. The paper outlines how professionalization has developed locally over time, and the historical tension between the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and the public universities. It describes the current structure of the scientific field in terms of researchers, institutes, publishing circuits, and institutional evaluative cultures. It focuses on geographical asymmetries in order to assess the distribution of new human and material resources throughout the country. Finally, it addresses the current situation under the new government, and raises concern over recent regressive actions.     

Journal Peer Review and Editorial Evaluation: Cautious Innovator or Sleepy Giant?

Minerva - Peer review of journal submissions has become one of the most important pillars of quality management in academic publishing. Because of growing concerns with the quality and...     

Academic Reform in Fractured Disciplines – On the Interaction of Bologna,New-Public-Management and the Dynamics of Disciplinary Development

Minerva - At the intersection of science studies and higher education research, this contribution looks at the way in which the requirements of universities as organizations release development...     

Do Interpersonal Networks Mediate the Relationship Between International Academic Mobility and Entrepreneurial Knowledge?

Temporary international mobility is an increasingly relevant practice amongst academics. However, current literature lacks understanding on whether such mobility influences the individual academics’ entrepreneurial knowledge. This paper hypothesizes that temporary international academic mobility is conducive to the academic’s entrepreneurial knowledge and that interpersonal social networks play a crucial role in the transfer of this knowledge through their strength and size properties. We perform a Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Model and build upon an original survey data set collected amongst 281 Chinese academics. We find that the size of one’s interpersonal social network fully mediates the relationship between international academic mobility and entrepreneurial knowledge. This result points to the importance of a structurally broad - rather than a relationally strong - international social network in the academic’s accumulation of entrepreneurial knowledge abroad.

     

Knowledge for the West,Production for the Rest?

This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.     

‘New Public Management’ and the Academic Profession: Reflections on the German Situation

This essay considers recent implications of ‘new public management’ (NPM) strategies for the universities of Germany. It argues that NPM poses a threat to the traditional values of the academic profession, and asks what the universities should do to restore public trust in their methods and management.     

Anxiety and Aporia: Or,What, for Lacan,Makes Deconstruction Reassuring?

While originally Lacan seconds Heidegger's contention that ‘anxiety has no object’, in the early 1960s, he dismisses his own earlier position as a childish reassurance and argues, to the contrary, that ‘anxiety is not without an object’. With particular attention to his use of the double negative, ‘not without’, this essay examines this turning point in Lacan's thinking in order to explain the opposition between his psychoanalytic critical theory and Derrida's deconstruction. The arguments that Lacan brings to bear on his work of the 1950s closely approximate those that Derrida levels against Heidegger in the formulation of his own concept of ‘the aporia of the impossible’. Indeed, as commentators often emphasise, the formal logic of Lacan's later thinking is strictly isomorphic with Derrida's philosophy; and their respective concepts of anxiety and aporia are frequently misconstrued, accordingly, as simply identical. However, insofar as Lacan discerns a content in this formal negativity, contesting the idealism of his earlier theory and reasserting the materialist objectivity of the Freudian ‘lost object,’ as intractably Real, the two do not coincide. On the contrary, Lacan's repudiation of Heidegger's concept of anxiety extends equally to Derrida's aporia, as if, for Derrida, Heidegger's existential phenomenology were not reassuring enough.     

Corporate Support for Artistic and Cultural Activities: What Determines the Distribution of Corporate Giving?

This paper examines the allocation of corporate donations among variouscategories of recipients and the reasons underlying that allocation. Ananalytical model is utilized to determine the importance of profitability,firm size, advertising expenditures and type of business in determining thelevel of support for each activity. The results demonstrate that corporategiving to artistic/cultural activities is correlated with advertisingexpenditures, while donations to educational, civic and health causes are not.Thus, support for culture and the arts is a means of directly promoting thefirm, while giving to other causes fulfills the firm's goals throughalternative means.     

中美智库比较:差距?差异?

正2 014年10月24日,中央全面深化改革领导小组第六次会议审议了《关于加强中国特色新型智库建设的意见》。习近平强调,需要"重点建设一批具有较大影响力和国际影响力的高端智库"。这是十八大以来中央最高层至少是第五次公开强调智库建设,也是第一次从"国际影响力"的角度阐述智库建设的重点性。在本专栏刊发的文章中,笔者曾论及国际传播与影响力对智库的重要性,本文拟从国际亲历的角度比较一下中美智库的差距与差异。     

“Land is Our Mother”: Alternative Meanings of Development in Subaltern Organizing

Abstract

Land grab has emerged as an increasingly key component of neoliberal frames of development, resulting in large-scale displacement of rural populations. The discourses of farming communities living on lands threatened by these neoliberal reforms reflect an alternative rationality around land, and critique the dominant understanding of development by foregrounding local cultural meanings. Based on a culture-centered engagement with a subaltern movement opposing land grab in Singur, India, this research informs participatory development communication and offers alternative meanings of development.     

‘Social Skills’: Following a Travelling Concept from American Academic Discourse to Contemporary Danish Welfare Institutions

The article traces the origin and development of the concept of social skills in first and foremost American academic discourse. As soon as the concept of social skills was coined, the concern for people lacking such skills started and has been on the increase ever since (now sharing public attention with related concepts such as self-control, emotional intelligence and empathy). After the analysis of the academic history of the concept follows an examination of the implementation of a range of assessment instruments and training programmes related to social skills (and lack hereof) in contemporary Danish welfare institutions (more specifically, day nurseries and schools, employment and penal services). The analysis forwarded in the article thus demonstrates how an intellectual idea may develop and travel - and on its journey connect to pre-existing cultural logics and societal concerns. The idea of social skills has through its development been made uncontroversial – everybody wants to be skilful. The concept does, however, convey an individualistic view on social life and imposes a reflexivity over own performance on the participants. Further, its normative character contributes to a problematization of those who are perceived to lack these skills.     

Xishuangbanna: a cherished paradise for Asian elephants

Wild elephants in China mainly inhabit jungles of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province. According to surveys in recent years, about 400 elephants roam Xishuangbanna. The Wild Elephant Valley in the Mengyang State Natural Reserve is where elephants congregate in Yunnan. Elephants love to wander in flocks in areas at sea level of no more than 1000 meters. The valley has ravines and rivers, thus an ideal home range with ample vegetation and adequate water for elephants.