Performance Measurement and the Governance of American Academic Science

Neoliberal precepts of the governance of academic science-deregulation; reification of markets; emphasis on competitive allocation processes have been conflated with those of performance management—if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it—into a single analytical and consequent single programmatic worldview. As applied to the United States’ system of research universities, this conflation leads to two major divergences from relationships hypothesized in the governance of science literature. (1) The governance and financial structures supporting academic science in the United States’ system of higher education are sufficiently different from those found in many other OECD countries where these policies have been adopted to produce political pressures for an increase rather than a decrease in governmental control over university affairs. (2) The major impact upon academic science of performance measurement systems has come not externally from new government requirements but internally from the independent adoption of these techniques by universities, initially in the name of rational management and increasingly as devices to foster reputational enhancement. The overall thrust of the two trends in the U.S. has been less a shift as experienced elsewhere from bureaucratic to market modes of governance than the displacement of professional-collegial control by internal bureaucratic control.     

绿茶之源与茶文化工程

《影响中国茶文化史的瀑布仙茗》一书,系余姚市茶文化促进会编撰,前不久由中国文史出版社正式出版。有识之士推荐它为好书,堪称一项茶文化工程。深究绿茶之源茶源于中国,兴于亚洲,传播于世界,茶的故乡在中国。而茶的原产地在哪里？中华大地上关于茶的原产地有多种说     

Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education

‘Academic drift’ is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas.     

Changing Governance and Authority Relations in the Public Sciences

Major changes in the governance of higher education and the public sciences have taken place over the past 40 or so years in many OECD countries. These have affected the nature of authority relationships governing research priorities and the evaluation of results. In particular, the increasing exogeneity, formalisation and substantive nature of governance mechanisms, as well as the strength and extent of their enforcement, have altered the relative authority of different groups and organisations over research priorities and evaluations, as well as creating some new ones. These shifts in authority have occurred to different degrees in differently organised public science systems. As a result, the diversity and longevity of many research projects, the intensity of competition for disciplinary reputations and the coordination of research goals and outcomes across universities and national boundaries have changed to different degrees in different countries.     

The Ethics Ecosystem: Personal Ethics,Network Governance and Regulating Actors Governing the Use of Social Media Research Data

Minerva - This paper examines the consequences of a culture of “personal ethics” when using new methodologies, such as the use of social media (SM) sites as a source of data for...     

Factors of Board Governance and Fundraising Success

This article presents an empirical analysis of board governance and fundraising performance in a sample of 98 Swiss museums. Through multiple regression analysis, the inclusion of donors and business professionals on museums' boards is identified as a significant success factor for fundraising governance in Swiss museums. This study substantiates the central role board composition plays in arts management and nonprofit research. Through covariance analysis, the relevance of the variables ‘organization size’ and ‘legal form’ is further discussed.     

International Mobility and Social Capital in the Academic Field

Minerva - The relationship between the international mobility of academic researchers and social capital is complex. On the one hand, the literature suggests that social capital facilitates the...     

论历史研究的方法

任何一门学问、学科 ,都是研究一种特殊的对象的 ,因而也都有它自己的特殊研究方法。自然科学是如此 ,社会科学也是如此。历史学研究是将人类社会发展演变作为对象 ,当然有它自己独特的研究方法。除了这个最基本的研究方法之外 ,还有各种层次以及最高层次的研究方法。大体讲有以下几种 :1、最基本的方法 :搜集与考订材料的方法 ,即考据。 2、历史比较法。 3、统计方法。 4、计量方法。 5、马克思主义的研究方法。一、历史研究的基本方法是搜集史料和考订史料的方法古往今来的历史学著作 ,凡足以名家的 ,都有其共同点 ,即 :具有丰富的内容 ,…     

Transnational Mobility and International Academic Employment: Gatekeeping in an Academic Competition Arena

This article draws upon concepts developed in recent empirical and theoretical work on high skilled and academic mobility and migration including accidental mobility, forced mobility and negotiated mobility. These concepts inform a situated, qualitative study of mobility among international postdoctoral researchers in life sciences and engineering fields who were employed at US and UK universities in 2008 and 2009. Informed by epistemological methods in the Foucauldian tradition of discourse and governmentality, the study explores how policy discourse and technologies empower and limit scientists and engineers in negotiating employment arrangements across national boundaries.