PERFORMANCE-BASED GOVERNANCE IN ACADEMIA: PROFESSIONAL PRACTISES and IDENTITIES in TRANSFORMATION
This research programme analyses fundamental mechanisms determining how core professional practices in academia are affected by the introduction of organisational level systems for performance-based allocation of funding. With academic staff employed at research-intensive Swedish higher education institutions in focus, we study the identity construction of academics in relation to "economistic" forms of organizational governance, and how these interdependent processes affect the behaviour of individuals. In particular, we analyse effects on individuals priorities and time allocation between different activities in their professional activities (within and between broad categories such as teaching, research, leadership and service) and career choices (attractiveness of different types of academic positions in the university sector, attractiveness of jobs in universities vs. in other sectors). In the final phase of the project, theoretical results and empirical findings produced within the context of Swedish academia are related to different institutional settings. That is, we address questions of how and why performance-based funding systems may play out differently in different national settings and identify differences and similarities between higher education institutions and other dedicated research organisations in this respect.
Final report
FINAL REPORT
Performance-based governance in academia / Prestationsbaserad styrning av akademin
Project leader: Associate Professor Anders Broström
Project particpiants: Professor Monica Lindgren, Professor Johann Packendorff, Professor Lars Geschwind, Professor Marianne Ekman
Project purpose and project development
This project has aimed to analyze the fundamental mechanisms that determine how academic activity is affected by the introduction of systems for so-called performance-based resource allocation, with empirical focus aimed at research and teaching staff at Swedish universities. The project has brought together researchers with complementary competencies to allow an integrative analysis of how identities are constructed in relation to "economic" forms of organizational governance, and how these processes affect the actions of individuals. In some of the studies that have been conducted, the focus has been on interpretive analysis of how individuals relate to and understand an environment where measurability of performance in research becomes part of everyday academic life. In other parts of the project, we have studied how priorities and outcomes in research and postgraduate education are affected - directly or indirectly - by performance-based governance. These priorities apply to focus shifts and time use (between and within broad categories such as education, research, leadership tasks, etc.) as well as career choices (the attractiveness of different types of academic employment, the attractiveness of working outside and in the higher education sector).
A certain shift away from the descriptions of the original project plan has been made, in that we during the work on the project came to notice how many of the most subtle and perhaps thereby most elusive effects of the design of governance occur in the form of "side effects" on academic activities and academic careers not explicitly related to the type of performance that was being targeted by existing systems. As a result, efforts were devoted to studying both postgraduate education and the merit service structure at Swedish higher education institutions, as well as links between governance and research commercialization and external involvement.
A second revision of plans concerns of the design of the analysis of how institutional conditions affect the outcome and consequences of governance that was planned for the second half of the project. During the project period, we identified the possibility of realising these ambitions by aligning the project’s work with that of an international consortium (APIKS) on academic working conditions - including experiences of governance and measurement. The consortium's work coordinated a harmonized survey conducted during 2018-2019. More than 20 countries, from all continents except Africa, completed their part of the study, which results in a unique global data source that enables international comparisons.
A final deviation from the original project plan is that the overall survey described there as “sub-study 1” had to be aborted, for reasons that were developed in the mid-term report.
Project work
Staffing: Associate Professor Anders Broström, Professor Monica Lindgren, Professor Johann Packendorff and Professor Lars Geschwind (the latter two were promoted to professors during the project) worked on the project throughout the period. Professor Marianne Ekman-Rising retired in 2020.
The project plan foresaw recruitment of a postdoc during the second half of the project period. This did not prove feasible, and the planning was changed with the foundation's approval so that work was transferred to existing project participants and until 2021. Two doctoral students were involved in the project work. A full-time doctoral student at KTH was funded with supplementary funding. A second doctoral student participated in the work for a year, of which six months as a guest doctoral student at KTH, with funding from the home university Nortwestern Polytechnical University in China. During the last year of the project, a postdoc was finally sucessfully recruited and funded with supplementary means.
Working methods: During the first half of the project, the project group had regular meetings for overall discussions. At these meetings, the project's overall issues and themes were discussed, often fueled from individual research articles or op-eds. During the second half of the project, the focus shifted to more concrete writing projects where different parts of the project's research were presented.
Key results
On an aggregate level, the project's results point to the following conclusions:
• When control mechanisms are arranged in such a way that the goals and means used are compatible with norms and ideals in several fields, a change in control can lead to far-reaching change in terms of reinforced behaviors in a certain direction.
• On the other hand, when governance mechanisms are arranged so that the development that is governed by is in visible conflict with norms and ideals in one or more important fields, academic practice is rather resilient to change.
• It is above all low performance, not “excellence”, that can be addressed through performance-based control. This relationship is subject to misconception both among some proponents and among many critics of performance-based governance as a phenomenon.
Our results show how performance-based forms of governance affect academics' professional identities through certain (but not radical) shifts towards an internalization of the new governance systems. The Swedish higher education sector is in practice in a hybrid state, where classical academic values coexist with new NPM-inspired instrumental forms of governance. These forms of control have emerged gradually over time rather than being introduced overnight (creeping instrumentalization), they have often arisen in response to immediate concrete problems (nearsighted instrumentalization), and they place great focus on the individual as a performing subject (individualizing instrumentalization). The long-term consequence, however, is that new professional virtue patterns emerge regarding what is good and poorly performed academic work (moralizing instrumentalization).
The focus on the individual and the individual's career has entailed the formulation of the concept of “meritocratization”, ie a procedural approach to merit systems as something that is in constant negotiation and articulation within the higher education institutions.
NMeritocratization is not only about how the system of formal merit requirements and the weighting between them grows over time, but also about how these formal systems are handled informally in decision-making situations, employment procedures, etc. We have seen that higher education institutions can easily be characterized by "fragmented meritocratization" , ie that the merit system is defined and practiced differently in different contexts and organizational spaces.
New research questions
The project work has addressed a number of issues that are within the project's overall theme, but which were not specified in more detail in the project plan. Among these, the following can be mentioned in particular:
• How the university's work with equality issues interacts with performance-based governance and with traditional collegial merit assessments
• Differentiated effects of governance on different groups of academic staff (eg junior and senior researchers)
• How leaders within the university imagine performance-based governance
• Performance-based governance as a promoter of instrumentalist culture
Our work on the project has also revealed a broader set of changes and challenges in the research and education system that can be described as consequences of performance-based governance. This led the project work to partly new research opportunities, which were explored partly through work between the researchers who were part of the project group, partly also through collaborations with other researchers. Among such issues are links between governance and outreach work, including research commercialization and external collaboration, as well as links between governance and the design of postgraduate education.
Through the project work, new international contacts have been made, which has led to several ongoing projects and collaborations. Mention may be made in particular of the further work in the APIKS consortium, which has already generated a number of publications that are not otherwise included as part of the project results in this report. At the time of writing, three other constellations are continuing to work on issues that have their roots in the project:
• In collaboration with Chiara Franzoni and Raffaele Mancuso at Politechnico di Milano and Paula Stephan at Georgia Tech, questions about how the design of assessment processes affects what projects and which researchers that enjoy external research funding are being studied.
• In collaboration with Cornelia Lawson and Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo at the University of Manchester, we aim to examine how the general public percieves the intellectual authority of academic researchers. The insight behind this work is that today's governance of the academy reflects a changing view of experts and "policymakers" about the role research plays and should play in a modern society, but that we know very little about how these issues are perceived in the public eye.
• In collaboration with Charlotte Holgersson, Lotta Snickare, Annika Vänje and Anna Wahl, work is conducted on homosocial cultures in organizations, which is partly inspired by the project's work on gender-based patterns of promotions and career advancement in academia.
Research communication
The project has continuously published updates and results on a dedicated website (https://www.researchgate.net/project/Performance-based-governance-in-Academia-PERFA).
The project participants have participated in several international conferences. These include the broadly oriented Academy of Management (USA) EGOS (Estonia), and Gender Work and Organization (Australia) conferences, but also a large number of smaller, focused workshops in Seoul, Dresden, Kyoto, Munich, Gothenburg, Toronto, Kassel, etc.
Furthermore, results from the project and insights generated through the work have been discussed at a number of workshops and meetings. These include those arranged by the Riksbank's Jubilee Fund through the program coordinator Fredrik Person-Lahusen, but also events arranged by e.g. SULF, KTH's doctoral student association, and the project participants themselves.
Communication from the project of both kinds has unfortunately been hampered by the fact that its final stage coincided with the protracted pandemic which, from the spring of 2020, led to canceled and canceled meeting plans.
A special strategy for communication around this project has been to develop educational components for university teachers based on the project results and insights. All participants in the project have regularly participated in such training at KTH. This has served as a direct communication channel, but also enriched the project work with valuable insights.
Performance-based governance in academia / Prestationsbaserad styrning av akademin
Project leader: Associate Professor Anders Broström
Project particpiants: Professor Monica Lindgren, Professor Johann Packendorff, Professor Lars Geschwind, Professor Marianne Ekman
Project purpose and project development
This project has aimed to analyze the fundamental mechanisms that determine how academic activity is affected by the introduction of systems for so-called performance-based resource allocation, with empirical focus aimed at research and teaching staff at Swedish universities. The project has brought together researchers with complementary competencies to allow an integrative analysis of how identities are constructed in relation to "economic" forms of organizational governance, and how these processes affect the actions of individuals. In some of the studies that have been conducted, the focus has been on interpretive analysis of how individuals relate to and understand an environment where measurability of performance in research becomes part of everyday academic life. In other parts of the project, we have studied how priorities and outcomes in research and postgraduate education are affected - directly or indirectly - by performance-based governance. These priorities apply to focus shifts and time use (between and within broad categories such as education, research, leadership tasks, etc.) as well as career choices (the attractiveness of different types of academic employment, the attractiveness of working outside and in the higher education sector).
A certain shift away from the descriptions of the original project plan has been made, in that we during the work on the project came to notice how many of the most subtle and perhaps thereby most elusive effects of the design of governance occur in the form of "side effects" on academic activities and academic careers not explicitly related to the type of performance that was being targeted by existing systems. As a result, efforts were devoted to studying both postgraduate education and the merit service structure at Swedish higher education institutions, as well as links between governance and research commercialization and external involvement.
A second revision of plans concerns of the design of the analysis of how institutional conditions affect the outcome and consequences of governance that was planned for the second half of the project. During the project period, we identified the possibility of realising these ambitions by aligning the project’s work with that of an international consortium (APIKS) on academic working conditions - including experiences of governance and measurement. The consortium's work coordinated a harmonized survey conducted during 2018-2019. More than 20 countries, from all continents except Africa, completed their part of the study, which results in a unique global data source that enables international comparisons.
A final deviation from the original project plan is that the overall survey described there as “sub-study 1” had to be aborted, for reasons that were developed in the mid-term report.
Project work
Staffing: Associate Professor Anders Broström, Professor Monica Lindgren, Professor Johann Packendorff and Professor Lars Geschwind (the latter two were promoted to professors during the project) worked on the project throughout the period. Professor Marianne Ekman-Rising retired in 2020.
The project plan foresaw recruitment of a postdoc during the second half of the project period. This did not prove feasible, and the planning was changed with the foundation's approval so that work was transferred to existing project participants and until 2021. Two doctoral students were involved in the project work. A full-time doctoral student at KTH was funded with supplementary funding. A second doctoral student participated in the work for a year, of which six months as a guest doctoral student at KTH, with funding from the home university Nortwestern Polytechnical University in China. During the last year of the project, a postdoc was finally sucessfully recruited and funded with supplementary means.
Working methods: During the first half of the project, the project group had regular meetings for overall discussions. At these meetings, the project's overall issues and themes were discussed, often fueled from individual research articles or op-eds. During the second half of the project, the focus shifted to more concrete writing projects where different parts of the project's research were presented.
Key results
On an aggregate level, the project's results point to the following conclusions:
• When control mechanisms are arranged in such a way that the goals and means used are compatible with norms and ideals in several fields, a change in control can lead to far-reaching change in terms of reinforced behaviors in a certain direction.
• On the other hand, when governance mechanisms are arranged so that the development that is governed by is in visible conflict with norms and ideals in one or more important fields, academic practice is rather resilient to change.
• It is above all low performance, not “excellence”, that can be addressed through performance-based control. This relationship is subject to misconception both among some proponents and among many critics of performance-based governance as a phenomenon.
Our results show how performance-based forms of governance affect academics' professional identities through certain (but not radical) shifts towards an internalization of the new governance systems. The Swedish higher education sector is in practice in a hybrid state, where classical academic values coexist with new NPM-inspired instrumental forms of governance. These forms of control have emerged gradually over time rather than being introduced overnight (creeping instrumentalization), they have often arisen in response to immediate concrete problems (nearsighted instrumentalization), and they place great focus on the individual as a performing subject (individualizing instrumentalization). The long-term consequence, however, is that new professional virtue patterns emerge regarding what is good and poorly performed academic work (moralizing instrumentalization).
The focus on the individual and the individual's career has entailed the formulation of the concept of “meritocratization”, ie a procedural approach to merit systems as something that is in constant negotiation and articulation within the higher education institutions.
NMeritocratization is not only about how the system of formal merit requirements and the weighting between them grows over time, but also about how these formal systems are handled informally in decision-making situations, employment procedures, etc. We have seen that higher education institutions can easily be characterized by "fragmented meritocratization" , ie that the merit system is defined and practiced differently in different contexts and organizational spaces.
New research questions
The project work has addressed a number of issues that are within the project's overall theme, but which were not specified in more detail in the project plan. Among these, the following can be mentioned in particular:
• How the university's work with equality issues interacts with performance-based governance and with traditional collegial merit assessments
• Differentiated effects of governance on different groups of academic staff (eg junior and senior researchers)
• How leaders within the university imagine performance-based governance
• Performance-based governance as a promoter of instrumentalist culture
Our work on the project has also revealed a broader set of changes and challenges in the research and education system that can be described as consequences of performance-based governance. This led the project work to partly new research opportunities, which were explored partly through work between the researchers who were part of the project group, partly also through collaborations with other researchers. Among such issues are links between governance and outreach work, including research commercialization and external collaboration, as well as links between governance and the design of postgraduate education.
Through the project work, new international contacts have been made, which has led to several ongoing projects and collaborations. Mention may be made in particular of the further work in the APIKS consortium, which has already generated a number of publications that are not otherwise included as part of the project results in this report. At the time of writing, three other constellations are continuing to work on issues that have their roots in the project:
• In collaboration with Chiara Franzoni and Raffaele Mancuso at Politechnico di Milano and Paula Stephan at Georgia Tech, questions about how the design of assessment processes affects what projects and which researchers that enjoy external research funding are being studied.
• In collaboration with Cornelia Lawson and Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo at the University of Manchester, we aim to examine how the general public percieves the intellectual authority of academic researchers. The insight behind this work is that today's governance of the academy reflects a changing view of experts and "policymakers" about the role research plays and should play in a modern society, but that we know very little about how these issues are perceived in the public eye.
• In collaboration with Charlotte Holgersson, Lotta Snickare, Annika Vänje and Anna Wahl, work is conducted on homosocial cultures in organizations, which is partly inspired by the project's work on gender-based patterns of promotions and career advancement in academia.
Research communication
The project has continuously published updates and results on a dedicated website (https://www.researchgate.net/project/Performance-based-governance-in-Academia-PERFA).
The project participants have participated in several international conferences. These include the broadly oriented Academy of Management (USA) EGOS (Estonia), and Gender Work and Organization (Australia) conferences, but also a large number of smaller, focused workshops in Seoul, Dresden, Kyoto, Munich, Gothenburg, Toronto, Kassel, etc.
Furthermore, results from the project and insights generated through the work have been discussed at a number of workshops and meetings. These include those arranged by the Riksbank's Jubilee Fund through the program coordinator Fredrik Person-Lahusen, but also events arranged by e.g. SULF, KTH's doctoral student association, and the project participants themselves.
Communication from the project of both kinds has unfortunately been hampered by the fact that its final stage coincided with the protracted pandemic which, from the spring of 2020, led to canceled and canceled meeting plans.
A special strategy for communication around this project has been to develop educational components for university teachers based on the project results and insights. All participants in the project have regularly participated in such training at KTH. This has served as a direct communication channel, but also enriched the project work with valuable insights.